Could This Space Oven Allow Astronauts to Finally Cook in Space?

Space travel is heating up, both by NASA and private enterprises, with bold adventurers and scientists looking to eventually send humans to Mars. One of the challenges of such a multiyear mission in zero gravity, however, is feeding the crew.

Without gravity, natural convection cooking cannot occur. Food served on the International Space Station is heat-treated to be shelf stable. Freeze-dried and dehydrated foods warmed with water are standard fare. Breakfast might look like cereal flakes with dried milk that can be rehydrated with water along with dried strawberries. For dinner, astronauts might warm a packet of chicken and veggies in a tortilla to create a fajita wrap. The availability of water and storage, as well as flammability concerns, seriously limit the length of space missions.

“It would change everything if they just had a way to cook,” says aerospace engineer Jim Sears.

Sears, of Boulder, Colorado, has developed a solution with his new space oven, SATED. An acronym for “safe appliance, tidy, efficient and delicious,” his invention can whip up a savory quiche in minutes or cook a perfectly crisp pizza in a low- to no-gravity environment. Just slightly larger than a toaster, the appliance uses a cylinder, spinning at several hundred rotations per minute, to create its own artificial gravity through centrifugal force. As ingredients are added, they’re pushed up against walls heated with ceramic heaters.

“Using heat-based processes to cook food in microgravity has long been considered an impractical goal relegated to being solved at some indistinct point in the future,” says Sears. “There was this perception that you’d have to use high heat to cook, and that would be very dangerous.”

However, SATED uses conductive heat transfer, rather than convective or radiative, to cook. The unit cannot produce fire or smoke because it can only reach a maximum temperature of 428 degrees Fahrenheit. “The heaters have what’s called a Curie point intrinsic temperature limit,” says Sears.

It all began in 2020, when Sears embarked on a pandemic project to invent an industrial heating technology that could operate in zero gravity. That research morphed into creating a space-galley unit that could cook in the same environment. Working out of his well-equipped garage laboratory, he started stocking dried food ingredients like flour, baking powder, freeze-dried cheeses and pancake mixes. On Christmas day, he whipped up a batch of hollow, cylinder-shaped pancakes with his space-inspired cooking machine. To his skeptical family, he served the odd-shaped but delicious pancakes, declaring, “This is the future!”

The engineer tweaked his oven, designing several prototypes before reaching SATED. Sears even patented a specialized workstation to capture crumbs, which otherwise become free-floating particles in space that pose an aspiration threat and can ruin sensitive equipment. “It’s similar to downdraft tables used in factories that pull sanding particles into the table,” says Sears. “But mine’s a little fancier than that. It pulls the air through a resistive filter layer to where it suctions anything that’s flat. Objects, as well as crumbs, get held to the surface.”

Sears’ next step was connecting with private aerospace companies and NASA. Coincidentally, in January 2021, NASA put a call out to citizen scientists to enter its Deep Space Food Challenge. NASA’s challenge aimed to reward innovative food technologies with cash prizes—specifically technologies that would feed astronauts for years on a deep space mission to Mars. More than 300 teams from 32 countries submitted designs; then, participants had to demonstrate a functional prototype. Next, they had to meet safety procedures and show repeated success. As part of NASA’s final challenge, SATED had to undergo rigorous testing at Ohio State University. In 2022, SATED was put to the test aboard a zero-gravity parabolic flight to prove it would work in outer space. University students worked as “simunauts” to determine how easy it was for potential crew members to use the oven. Each team produced a crew procedure manual. To choose the final three winners, a judging panel of NASA and industry subject matter experts looked at some basic criteria.

Sears improved his SATED model to be computer-controlled with a touch-screen surface. This “Generation 3” SATED precisely controlled gravity levels and cooking temperatures, monitored food pasteurization parameters, and automatically simmered water at programmable power levels.

Users start SATED’s cylinder spinning with a twist of a knob. To make pizza, they first add water via syringe to a plastic packet of freeze-dried cheese, and let it warm and hydrate. Then, chefs squirt the cheese packet into the spinning router. Another packet, filled with King Arthur flour, Clabber Girl baking soda, salt and water for the crust is poured in, then cooked for five minutes at 257 degrees Fahrenheit and 20 G’s (1 G is equivalent to the gravity level on Earth). The final step is to add the sauce and any toppings, including veggies and meats.

“Methods for injecting diverse ingredients into a spinning cylinder in zero gravity are continuously evolving,” Sears says. “Sticking to the simple method of hydrating plastic sleeves of dried ingredients and injecting them into concentric layers in the cooking makes SATED user-friendly.”

In August 2024, SATED was named one of the challenge’s top three finishers, earning a cash prize of $250,000. “When the Deep Space Food Challenge was developed, the idea was to focus on food production technologies. What we hadn’t considered at the time was the processing aspect of the food system,” says Ralph Fritsche, head judge for the Deep Space Food Challenge and retired NASA exploration food production project manager. “Jim’s technology expanded our thinking beyond production to consider all of the aspects that will make up a successful future food system. The SATED approach and technology has also spurred us into follow up on work in planning for the entire food system.”

To Sears’ delight, he also claimed a second award at the finals, the Tyler Florence Award for Culinary Innovation from Food Network celebrity chef Tyler Florence. When Florence presented Sears with a trophy, he said the SATED team “gave me that extra-mile solution, and that moment of hope that we may not have that much further to go.” He proclaimed Sears the winner, calling him “low Earth orbit’s favorite baker, pizza maker and all-around innovator.”

Sears quickly experimented beyond pancakes. Pizza, shepherd’s pie, pineapple inside-out cake, sauteed vegetables and fried potatoes were some of his earliest SATED creations. Currently, Sears is continuing to refine the downdraft table and is leaving the recipes up to the professionals.

Beginning in July, Sears teamed up with the José Andrés Group, based in Washington, D.C., to create craveable recipes for SATED. José Andrés is a Michelin-starred Spanish American chef and restaurateur with numerous awards for his cooking and humanitarian work. In 2022, the José Andrés Group worked to create a space paella for the first all-private crew mission on the International Space Station. Andrés along with Charisse Grey, a chef on the José Andrés Group’s research and development team, worked with Axiom Space to create a custom paella, with layered ingredients, reduced sauces and perfectly caramelized socarrat at the bottom, for the 2022 Ax-1 mission that took four people to the ISS.

Axiom’s space paella was the José Andrés Group’s first segue into feeding people in outer space. “Space food is the next frontier for cooking,” says Grey. “José is always interested in making a difference, and space food definitely needs a facelift.”

SATED and the José Andrés Group’s collaboration is already producing delicious results. Space paella is back on the menu for future space missions and better than ever, along with cornbread and pasta. “We’ve actually discovered a new technique for cooking pasta that has been really successful with SATED,” Grey says. “Pasta is not very efficient because of all the water that’s required and the heat that it takes to boil it. We’ve developed this new way of cooking pasta that requires basically soaking the raw pasta in water.” The new method produces less waste, with only a small amount of water needing to be strained.

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Space foods with Indian, Asian and other international flavors are now in the spotlight. Cooking trends on Earth mirror cooking trends in space, says Jennifer Levasseur, the space food curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, who is always on the lookout for new space food technologies. “Food and space, they reflect the cultural moment in which we live,” she says.

Fruitcake and powdered drinks may have ruled space food in the 1960s, but today’s space food narrative is more centered on tofu and tortillas, Levasseur says. Processed, pre-packaged foods are also taking a back seat to a burgeoning interest in fresh foods and cooking.

“We’ve been in a holding pattern for the last 40 years,” Levasseur says, referring to the common practice of warming foods in packets and rehydrating them. “But it looks like ovens and growing devices—anything that can grow vegetables and potentially even fruits and grains—is what’s next.”

Levasseur is particularly impressed with SATED. “Their lemon cake is fantastic,” she says, “[and] the process isn’t just warming something up and putting it in a microwave, it’s about combining ingredients and actually producing something.”

The first-ever food baked in space, a chocolate chip cookie, is on display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. It was made in 2019, when DoubleTree by Hilton and Zero G Kitchen teamed up to have astronauts bake a batch of five cookies in an experimental oven on the ISS. The treats took about 130 minutes to properly bake.

SATED takes baking and cooking in space to a whole new level. “It brings this story of eating full circle, potentially, where you could take things that you grew in your vegetable garden on the space station and then put them into something,” Levasseur says. “I’m always looking for these experiences that bring it to the closest you can to what you do on the ground.”

The curator hopes to obtain a SATED prototype for the Smithsonian in the near future. “I couldn’t help but just be completely overwhelmed and sort of fall in love with the idea of SATED,” she says. “It’s really creative, it’s interesting, it’s easy to describe and for people to understand. Astronauts would find it a useful, novel concept.”

Food is paramount to morale in space, Sears explains. “Pizza and cake might not be the most nutritious examples, but they give astronauts the comfort of familiarity and a way to celebrate special events,” he says.

Cooking also allows astronauts the means to make something new in an otherwise very controlled environment. “That’s the kind of creativity that nourishes the soul,” says Sears. “Being able to give that to our future in space—that’s my greatest joy.”

Sarah Miller | READ MORE

Sarah Miller is a freelance journalist who writes about travel, education and the environment.