For decades, if astronauts wanted to enjoy a nice Sunday roast, they’d have to make due with congealed meat paste from a tube.
Now that finally appears to be changing — at least according to video released by the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA), which is roughly China’s equivalent to NASA.
The footage shows astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station — the PRC’s low earth orbit research platform, first launched in 2021 — roasting half a dozen wings in a small oven onboard the craft.
Both drums and flats are loaded onto a tray, which locks the floating bits of meat up in a cage-like apparatus so they don’t drift off. The astronauts — or taikonauts, to be technical — then load the tray into an oven, which looks more like a front-loading clothes dryer than a typical kitchen appliance.
Regardless, the wings come out with a nice golden-brown color, which the flight commander — and orbital chef, seemingly — Chen Dong quickly shares with his crew.
After devouring the bone-in wings, the team quickly loads the tray up with another batch, this time hunks of what appears to be hydrated beef.
The clip went viral on Chinese-language social media, and soon spilled over into Western domains like Reddit and TikTok.
“Wow, the International Space Station next door is still eating diarrhea-like stuff, while we’ve already evolved to eating kebabs!” one Chinese netizen joked on RedNote.
This isn’t the first time CNSA has sparked a flame in the vacuum of space. Back in 2023, some brave taikonauts aboard the Tiangong lit a candle in a video demonstration, showing off fire’s strange properties in zero-gravity (not to mention their confidence in the station’s fire suppression systems.)
While details on the space oven are scarce, Chinese media reports the module came aboard the Shenzhou-21 mission, which recently brought three astronauts to the station and broke the nation’s speed record for a successful docking procedure.
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