Barchetta, Fringe, Audrey Jane’s, Pizzeria Alberico: Pizza joints are dishing out-of-this-world artisan pies near downtown Boulder. A mile or so away, Jim Sears is crafting a device which someday may bake the first real pizza in space.
It is the high-tech, AI-driven year of 2025, but the food that astronauts eat has remained miserably the same for 40 years, according to Sears.
“Basically, there are five space food groups: thermo-stabilized meals, freeze-dried food, sugary drinks, sweet snacks and very limited special foods each astronaut can take up for themselves,” he says.
There’s only so much that salt, pepper and hot sauce can do to save food that doesn’t undergo cooking and baking to produce flavor.
That’s where Sears’ particular brand of American genius came to the rescue in the form of SATED, an acronym meaning: “Safe Appliance, Tidy, Efficient & Delicious.”
20-minute lemon cake
Sears’ North Boulder garage gives off a definite Thomas Edison-meets-Bill Gates inventor vibe. This workshop wonderland is packed with power tools, half-assembled electronic components and ancient record players. On a work bench sits one of the precious blue SATED prototypes, about the size of a toaster. The only thing out of place are the packages of dried food on the shelves.
Sears offers a fast space-cooking demo: He measures cake mix and freeze-dried eggs with water in a special plastic bag. After setting the temperature and Gs on SATED, Sears pours the batter into a heated spinning cylinder and closes the top.
About 20 minutes later, we’re tasting moist and sweet lemon cake. The outside is light brown, lending that distinctive oven-baked flavor. SATED cooks faster than a conventional oven, to boot.
Ever the scientist and non-foodie, Sears notes that “baking” isn’t an accurate description.
“The food is cooked from the outside in, like a griddle,” he says. “This invention uses centrifugal force to create artificial gravity. A spinning aluminum cylinder pushes the food ingredients up against the walls. Ceramic heaters cook the food from the outside surface towards the center.”
The only limitation, Sears says, “is that you can’t really stir anything.”
Pandemic pizza
A Boulder resident since 1980, Sears founded SATED in 2020 after a distinguished career as an engineer, developing everything from diving equipment for the Navy to satellite technology at Ball Aerospace in Boulder.
Cooking food in zero Gs presents a host of truly unique problems.
“The space industry has always said that cooking in space is impossible,” Sears says. “If you put a pan on a stove and had food in the pan, the first thing that would happen is the pan would float off the stove. Even if you hold the pan down, heating would send the food floating.”
Spending hours tinkering with multiple prototypes — the first was a tuna can — he started answering the challenge using commonly available components.
“I get almost everything from Amazon, and incidentally, most of it is made in China,” Sears says.
The prime directive for any space equipment is to work safely in highly flammable environments. SATED “gets fairly hot,” Sears says: “around 400 degrees F.”
But so far, it’s hit the mark.
“We’ve toasted piñon nuts and sautéed vegetables. The only thing I can think of that didn’t work was popcorn.”
‘Bigger than a meal’
After a complex testing phase, the oven was named runner-up — and awarded $250,000 — in the final phase of NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge in 2024, which encouraged the invention of food technologies to feed folks during deep space exploration and extraplanetary habitation.
These will not be quickie jaunts like the recent Blue Origin flight starring Katy Perry, or the one where Scott Carpenter orbited the earth in 1962 on Aurora 7, the capsule named after the Boulder street where he lived.
“Already, astronauts are spending a year or more in space,” Sears says. Boring food makes it much harder for astronauts to consume their required number of calories.
“They have to exercise two hours a day just to maintain muscles and bone density in zero G, and that burns a lot of calories,” he says. “The food needs to offer more flavor, more variety. It needs to include familiar flavors from home. It’s bigger than just a meal.”
The final frontier
When Sears was getting ready to pitch his device at the competition, his children offered him some advice.
“My kids said: ‘You’ve got to have a professional cook be part of this.’ I said, ‘I would do anything to work with José Andrés.’ I’ve always totally admired what he does on the world stage with the World Central Kitchen,” he says.
The hugely popular celebrity chef had already helped send paella to a Spanish astronaut on the space station. The José Andrés Group responded enthusiastically, and chef Charisse Grey helped demonstrate the device by crafting a quick and tasty cylindrical pizza.
“We just told her how it works and gave her a recipe, and she used her skill as a chef to make an awesome pizza,” Sears says.
The group continues testing Sears’ Boulder-born device with other foods to create a potential menu of future dinners.
With a new book, new restaurants and a new cooking show with Martha Stewart to plug, Andrés still spent most of his recent visit on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon enthusing about SATED, even pulling the device out to share a slice of Spanish tortilla — a potato omelet — with the host.
It still has to undergo a lot of controlled testing, but Sears hopes SATED will finally get to work in space in the next couple of years. The Smithsonian is already interested in acquiring a prototype.
“I am so enthusiastic about this task,” he says. “It means taking the joy of cooking into the future. I hope this tech will help feed people for the next 100 years.”
John Lehndorff has been invited to develop a recipe for the first-ever space pie. Are you a former astronaut who has eaten in space? Share your memories of dining in orbit: [email protected]