China’s first orbital oven lets astronauts cook barbecue in space

China’s astronauts aboard the China Space Station have achieved a new milestone by using the station’s first orbital oven to cook freshly grilled foods like New Orleans–style chicken wings and black pepper steak. This smokeless, oil-free oven was specially designed to operate safely and efficiently in microgravity, incorporating advanced technologies such as temperature control, residue collection, high-temperature catalysis, and multi-layer filtration. It can reliably perform up to 500 cooking cycles and significantly outperforms previous space cooking experiments, such as NASA’s prototype that took over two hours to bake a single cookie, by grilling chicken wings in just 28 minutes. Beyond enhancing nutrition, the oven represents an important improvement in astronauts’ quality of life during long missions, providing psychological comfort by allowing them to enjoy familiar, freshly prepared meals. The Shenzhou-21 mission has expanded the onboard menu to over 190 dishes on a 10-day rotation, including nuts, cakes, and fresh vegetables grown in the station’s vegetable garden, which has