In November 2025, a highly explosive scene was staged inside the Chinese space station “Tiangong”.
The crew of Shenzhou 21 brought a new equipment – a hot air baking machine. After meeting with the “comrades” of Shenzhou 20, they eagerly opened the marinated chicken wings, fixed them with special racks, and sent them into this machine.
The raw chicken wings are still shaking in a weightless state
28 minutes later, when the astronauts ate the sizzling and fragrant Orleans roasted wings, a historic moment was born.
This marks the first time that China’s space station has achieved a historic leap from “heating” to “cooking”, and also the first time that humans have truly cooked and eaten in space.
To understand why the aroma of grilled meat is so precious, we must first go back to the era when we could only “eat dry food”.
We walked for twenty years from cold meals to hot meals
The Chinese space dining table has been around since 2003. During the 21 hour flight, Yang Liwei ate packaged ready to eat food and beverages.
I also ate a mooncake in time 丨 Weibo @ Our Space
Two years later, Shenzhou VI has achieved a historic breakthrough: astronauts can now eat hot meals and drink hot drinks. In the future, the household dishes that Chinese people love, such as shredded pork with fish flavor and Kung Pao chicken, are also packed into vacuum bags and sent into space.
Entering the era of space stations, astronauts’ recipes are even more luxurious. More than 190 dishes are being prepared in rotation, and there is even a dedicated “space kitchen” with food heaters, water dispensers, and a refrigerator that can store fresh apples. It can be said that we have perfectly solved the problems of “eating enough” and “eating well”.
But there is a key difference here: “heating” and “cooking” are two completely different concepts.
Heating is a purely physical process. Previously, all space dishes were fully cooked on the ground and then specially processed and packaged. What astronauts do in space is only the final step of “reheating”, and the hot air heating device currently used in the Tiangong space station is for this purpose.
Chinese astronauts mainly eat pre made dishes that have been heated
Cooking involves not only physical reactions, but also chemical reactions. The high temperature of 190 ° C causes the Maillard reaction between proteins and sugars in food, resulting in a charred skin and a rich flavor. This is the transformation from raw materials to finished products, which is the true meaning of cooking.
The oily and fragrant grilled meat is completely different from pure heated food
This desire for freshly made meals is not just about the appetite.
Astronauts need to stay in a sealed space station for several months or even six months, facing the same cabin walls, instruments, and packaged food day after day. Baking a plate of sizzling and oily chicken wings by hand is not just icing on the cake, but a must-have. In the words of the China Astronaut Research and Training Center, this is a key factor in ensuring the long-term mental health of astronauts in orbit.
To trigger the fragrant Maillard reaction, a sufficiently high temperature and specific heating method are required, which is as difficult as reaching the sky in space (although it is already considered as reaching the sky).
The first hurdle:
In a weightless world, ‘heat’ cannot run on its own
Why is it so difficult to grill food in space? Firstly, the laws of physics played a joke on us.
On Earth, when you open an oven and heat the air below with a heating tube, the density of the hot air decreases and naturally rises gently; The colder air above has a higher density and will sink down. In this way, a cycle of air called “heat convection” is formed, like an invisible hand gently baking every corner of the food evenly.
The air convection in the oven is necessary for efficient cooking of food
But in the microgravity environment of the space station, without gravity, there is no distinction between “up” and “down”, let alone the concept of “light” and “heavy”: the heated air does not run up on its own, it only lazily stays near the heating tube, forming a stagnant hot air mass. In this way, the heat transfer efficiency in the oven becomes extremely low, mainly relying on the “isolated power generation” method of thermal radiation to slowly heat the food.
How exaggerated is this phenomenon? In 2019, astronauts on the International Space Station conducted a famous experiment: baking cookies.
They used a specially designed space oven to deliver chocolate cookie dough that had been tested countless times on the ground. On the ground, these cookies can be baked in just 18 minutes; In space, the first cookie was baked for 25 minutes and when I took it out, it was still raw. The astronauts didn’t believe in evil and extended the baking time repeatedly until the fourth cookie was baked for a full 120 minutes, or two hours, before barely being cooked.
Baking Biscuit Experiment in 2019
So you see, without heat convection, it’s a huge physics challenge to cook food evenly and efficiently in space.
The second hurdle:
Deadly fumes, the ‘invisible killer’ in confined spaces
Okay, even if we don’t consider the time cost, let’s slowly grill the whole house, right? No, a more dangerous problem has arisen: oil fumes.
Bake a dough containing only sugar and butter to produce at most some aroma. But when grilling chicken wings or steak, the oil will decompose and atomize at high temperatures, producing a large amount of oil fume particles. In the ground kitchen, we turn on the range hood and the oil fumes are sucked away. The space station is a closed ecosystem that is isolated from the world and has 100% internal circulation of air. Here, any trace of oil smoke is a disaster.
These tiny oil fume particles will never settle due to gravity, they will float to every corner of the space station, like ghosts everywhere. They will clog the air filters in the life support system that are more precious than gold, causing the entire system to collapse. What’s even more frightening is that oil fumes contain various harmful and even carcinogenic chemicals. Once the cabin air is polluted, it will pose a huge threat to the health of astronauts.
So, the biggest challenge in space cooking has never been how to generate heat, but how to control the exhaust gas and residue generated by cooking 100%.
Chinese wisdom:
Put the fan and range hood into the oven
Faced with these two major challenges, the “hot air baking machine” from China’s Tiangong has provided a genius solution.
Firstly, regarding the issue of the disappearance of thermal convection, its name provides the answer: “hot air”. The engineer installed a fan inside the oven, and since the air doesn’t move on its own, they used the fan to force it to move.
This heated air forms a forced circulation inside the sealed oven, actively and evenly blowing on every surface of the food. This uses engineering methods to violently simulate the thermal convection effect on Earth in microgravity. That’s why it only takes 28 minutes to grill a plate of chicken wings, not two hours.
And for the fatal oil fume problem, our engineers have come up with a brilliant solution: they have made the range hood directly into the oven.
When this oven is in operation, it has a completely enclosed circulation system inside. The oil fumes generated during baking have no chance to escape into the space station, but will be sucked into a precise purification device by the built-in fan.
Here, the oil fumes first undergo “high-temperature catalysis”, which is similar to a car exhaust purifier, which can decompose harmful organic matter into harmless carbon dioxide and water. Subsequently, the gas passes through multiple layers of filters to thoroughly remove solid particles such as PM2.5. Finally, only clean air will be allowed to return to the inside of the oven to participate in the heating cycle.
At the same time, in order to prevent food and meat juices from floating around in a weightless environment, there are special racks and residue collection devices inside the oven.
The final appearance of this baking machine is quite beautiful and simple
It can be said that this machine is no longer just an oven, it is a miniature space cooking workstation that integrates forced thermal circulation, air purification, and waste management.
Can we eat Mapo tofu in space?
Since ‘grilling’ has been achieved, is the soul of Chinese cuisine still far from steaming, boiling, frying, and stir frying? The answer may be a bit disappointing: very distant, even several orders of magnitude harder than grilling.
Take ‘stir frying’ as an example.
The essence of stir frying lies in a hot pot and boiling oil. But in a weightless environment, oil will not obediently stay at the bottom of the pot. It will “climb” the entire inner wall of the pot due to surface tension. When you put food in or try to stir a spoon, countless hot oil droplets will instantly explode, turning into thousands of “high-temperature bullets” suspended in the air, which is devastating for astronauts and precision instruments.
For example, “steaming” and “boiling”.
These two methods seem safe, only using water. What would happen if the lid of a steamer or soup pot is suddenly lifted in a closed space station? A huge amount of high-temperature water vapor will instantly flood into the cabin, which is equivalent to detonating a ‘water vapor bomb’. It will immediately overload the humidity and temperature of the entire space station, paralyze the precise air circulation system, and more likely condense into water droplets on the cold surfaces of electronic devices, causing widespread short circuits.
Therefore, in the foreseeable future, if astronauts want to eat a plate of Mapo tofu, they may need to wait for the birth of a fully closed and automatic intelligent cooking robot.
From toothpaste like foods that can only replenish energy, to today’s sizzling roasted chicken wings, it is the unremitting efforts of several generations of astronauts. The core of this journey has gone beyond simple engineering and entered a deeper level of humanistic care.
Because we know that no matter how far humanity steps into deep space, the thirst for freshly baked food, the wisp of fireworks from our home on Earth, will always be the warmest force supporting our exploration of the unknown.
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