To Bisquick and Beyond

How Jim Sear’s vision may change the way astronauts eat

By McKenzie Watson-Fore

On a brisk evening in March 2023, I watched entrepreneur Jim Sears inject Bisquick batter into a small spinning oven. The device, called SATED, is Jim’s invention: a way to cook hot food in zero-gravity environments. SATED stands for Safe Appliance, Tidy, Efficient & Delicious. The cooking chamber is an insulated cylinder mounted atop a stainless steel electronic base. The appliance heats via conduction and the spinning motion creates centrifugal force that presses ingredients against the cylinder’s walls. Sears added bits of string cheese, sausage stick and red and green bell pepper into the cooking cavity, and ten minutes later he served me a slice of freshly baked “space pizza.” In August 2024, SATED was awarded second place in the multi-year NASA Deep Space Food Challenge. Sears also brought home to Boulder the Tyler Florence Award for Culinary Innovation.

Why space food? 

This is the future! A few weeks ago, I was at NASA Houston for an invitation-only space food symposium. An astronaut spoke and he said, “If we could just figure out a way to cook, that’s what we really need.” The demand is there. For the last fifty years, NASA has said it’s impossible to cook in space. They haven’t been treating it as a problem to be solved. That’s why we give astronauts nothing but backpacking food. But when I discovered that I could boil water in zero gravity, I asked, how can I cook? 

How did you come up with the idea for SATED? 

A couple years back, I was doing some consulting for a local aerospace company, and I learned that NASA was trying to extract minerals and oxygen from lunar regolith using high temperatures. A method I believed would work was spinning the regolith inside a conductive cylinder, then heating the cylinder to incandescent temperatures and even melting the regolith itself. I didn’t get very far down the road before I realized, this is getting all my lab equipment really dirty. And it’s a super hard problem. So, I thought, let me back up and just try to boil water. 

I hollowed out a tuna can and spun it with a drill, put water in it, hit it with a propane torch and pretty soon, the water was boiling toward the center of the spinning cylinder, just like I thought would happen. I got more and more into a detailed scientific exploration of boiling water. It’s fascinating! We’ve been boiling water for five to ten thousand years, and we’re still learning how it works. Then I realized, if I can boil water to this level of precision, I can cook food. And people care about food. 

What have historically been the barriers to cooking in space? How does SATED address those?

In weightlessness, nothing stays where it’s put. If you were to have a hot plate, and you put a pan on that hot plate, the pan would float away. If you put some food in that pan and hold the pan on the hot plate, as soon as the food sizzles, the heat would shoot it off. You can’t get things to stay in contact long enough to cook them. So that’s where I’m using artificial gravity: by spinning this, you’re spinning the stuff against a surface.

Furthermore, I’m cooking by heat conduction. In a traditional oven, you’re heating either by convection or by radiation. Convection doesn’t work in space because you just make hot bubbles of air. And radiation—you can’t have red-hot things in a spacecraft. It’s dangerous. But through conduction, I can use relatively low temperatures to cook food. 

I use heating technology that peaks out at 220 degrees Celsius, which is below the level at which anything can start on fire or smoke. That allows me to do this in a way that’s intrinsically safe to use inside a closed capsule in space. That’s the first thing: it has to be safe. I wanted the cooking to be a creative exercise, where you don’t have to worry about making mistakes. 

What are your hopes for SATED now that the contest has concluded? 

The goal from the very beginning has been to get it on the International Space Station. Once you’ve tasted pizza in space, there’s no going back. I could just quit then and the world would carry on this work and spread it through the universe, maybe even ending up at the restaurant at the end of the universe. 

I’ve been working on this one thing for the past four years, and every day is exciting in a new way. There’s never a morning when I don’t want to get up and start working on it. 

What advice would you give to other inventors and entrepreneurs? 

That classic ‘70s thing: “Question authority.” If someone says something is a certain way, inquire why it’s that way. Be curious. The magic lies in daring to ask a question that others think they already know the answer to. It’s a voyage of discovery. I just keep discovering new stuff.