How José Andrés’s Company Is Helping NASA Cook in Space
February 27, 2025
Most people’s idea of space food is freeze-dried ice cream, and that’s not too far off: As much as space travel has changed over the decades, astronauts still eat freeze-dried and commercially sterilized meals out of plastic pouches.
But an aerospace engineer has invented a zero-gravity appliance that could allow them to actually cook in space one day—and he’s teamed up with José Andrés Group to develop recipes and a space pantry.
Jim Sears of Ascent Technology created a small spinning “oven” that uses centrifugal force to pull the food toward its heated canister so the ingredients don’t float away as they would on a flat cooking surface.
He initially developed the technology as a method to heat lunar dirt for mining purposes. But while experimenting in his garage, he decided to try boiling water, then graduated to heating his wife’s split-pea soup and pancakes.
Sears met José Andrés Group R&D chef Charisse Grey at NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge, an international competition in which he was one of the top winners.
Grey had previously helped develop a pouched paella that was sent to the International Space Station in 2022.
On a recent afternoon at the José Andrés Group headquarters in DC, Grey and her team used the device to cook a Spanish omelet, balancing time, temperature, and g-force to make sure it wasn’t too dense and had just the right touch of runniness inside.
The potato-egg dish came out perfectly, set in a cylindrical shape. Next up was a mac and cheese with par-cooked noodles and freeze-dried chorizo.
Grey uses big-flavor cheeses like Idiazábal and sharp cheddar because olfactory glands get swollen in space, muting flavors.
“Learning and discovering what this device can do on the ground will be very different than the results you would get in space,” Grey says.
“Trying to apply g-forces to cooking is something a cook never ever, ever thinks about.”
Cooking in space presents other problems, too. For example, floating crumbs could be fatal because astronauts might aspirate them.
“If [a particle] gets stuck in your lungs, it’s hard to even cough it out, because there’s lack of gravity,” Sears says. T
o combat this problem, he has also invented a table with a suction fan that pulls loose food toward it.
Now Sears hopes to further test the cooking device at zero gravity on “parabolic” flights designed to mimic space weightlessness.
The aim is to get it aboard the International Space Station—and eventually beyond. “The official goal is Mars,” Sears says of the device’s potential.
“On Mars, you’re going to be away for 20 months or more. You can’t eat those little packets of food for 20 months and stay sane.”
https://www.washingtonian.com/2025/02/27/how-jose-andress-company-is-helping-nasa-cook-in-space/