The French space agency CNES has published a formal call for the design, development, and installation of a fully functional “Onboard Kitchen for Space Exploration”, as detailed in its official public consultation on the CNES procurement platform. The prototype will be built to rigorous specifications and installed at CNES’s Toulouse headquarters for five years of continuous testing – preparing Europe for the day when astronauts cook real meals during multi-year journeys to Mars and beyond.
The kitchen must fit within a compact envelope: no more than 2 metres wide, 2.3 metres high, and 2.3 metres deep, while still leaving enough room for crew members to move freely. It requires a 1-metre-wide entrance door and must be engineered for extreme resource efficiency. Wastewater from cooking must be filtered to remove fats and grease (full water recycling is outside the scope of this call), and the entire system must operate without degradation for five consecutive years in the harsh environment of a deep-space spacecraft.
Current long-duration missions rely almost exclusively on pre-packaged, reheated meals. For trips lasting up to three years – the kind required for a round-trip to Mars – this approach is becoming unsustainable. Physiological changes, psychological strain, and the sheer mass/volume penalties of shipping years’ worth of ready-to-eat rations make it impractical.
CNES’s solution: grow at least 50 % of the crew’s nutritional needs onboard using microgreens, root vegetables, and mushrooms. This approach builds on Europe-wide bioregenerative life-support research, including ESA’s MELiSSA project, which develops closed-loop systems to recycle waste into food, oxygen, and water for long-duration missions. The new kitchen will transform that fresh produce into varied, appetising meals – moving far beyond today’s ration packs and giving crews the psychological boost that comes from real cooking.
This kitchen initiative sits inside CNES’s Spaceship France programme, an ambitious effort to develop sovereign European technologies for crewed lunar and Martian missions. Previous calls under the same umbrella have already targeted a lunar power station prototype and a European intra-vehicular activity (IVA) spacesuit – being developed with Decathlon, Spartan Space, and MEDES – which will fly to the International Space Station for testing later this year with French astronaut Sophie Adenot.
The programme also covers habitats, energy systems, and in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU), positioning France – and by extension Europe – to reduce dependence on foreign partners for future crewed exploration. It complements ESA’s decades of work on space food systems and nutrition for exploration missions, including early studies targeting up to 40 % local food production through regenerative ecosystems.
While ESA continues to support NASA’s Artemis programme (including the troubled Gateway station and Orion service modules), funding questions and shifting priorities have created uncertainty. In response, Europe is quietly building fallback options: the Argonaut lunar lander, Moonlight navigation and comms constellation, and even studies for a European-led space station. A reliable space kitchen is another critical piece of that sovereign capability puzzle.
The call is open to European industry and research organisations. Successful bidders will help shape not only the hardware that flies to Mars but also the daily life of the crews who live there – turning a spacecraft into something that feels more like home. Prototypes will be rigorously tested at Toulouse, providing real-world data on long-term reliability, crew usability, and integration with onboard bioregenerative life-support systems such as those advanced through ESA’s MELiSSA programme.
For the New Space Economy, this is more than a kitchen tender. It’s a signal that Europe is investing in the human factors of deep-space travel – the very technologies that will make multi-year missions not just survivable, but liveable. The deadline for responses is imminent; the future of space cuisine may soon be on the table.
