The Shenzhou 21 mission added a new piece of equipment to the space kitchen – a hot-air baking machine, making it possible to cook in space, as if the kitchen had been moved into the space station. There are many stories behind the birth of this world’s first “space furnace“.
The astronauts on the Shenzhou spacecraft mission can only eat special space food during their six-month journey in space. Although these foods already meet basic needs and recipes are constantly being updated, researchers believe there is still room for improvement. They hope to have a new way to provide a richer diet so that astronauts can eat freshly cooked hot meals even in space.
It’s not easy to cook Chinese food in space. Oil fumes will be produced during the preparation of Chinese food, and the space station is a closed environment with extremely high requirements for air quality and does not allow any pollution. To this end, the researchers decided to build the range hood into the stove and develop a hot air baking machine with built-in purification function. The equipment uses high-temperature catalysis and multiple filtration technologies to treat oil fumes to ensure that astronauts are not exposed to high-temperature risks.
In order to further improve the “space stove”, the researchers also equipped it with a residue collector, heating mesh, baking pan and mesh cage, which solved the problem of food floating in orbit and increased the heating temperature from the previous 100°C to 190°C. In this way, the “space furnace” was officially born. It can not only perform physical heating, but also brown or even crisp food through physical and chemical reactions, which greatly improves the taste of food.
