Former SpaceX scientists turned restauranteurs crafting full-automated, mobile pizza maker
To former SpaceX engineer Benson Tsai, getting a spaceship into outer space and getting a fresh hot pizza delivered in Los Angeles are equally challenging and important.
"Ultimately for me, it's about solving problems wherever they are," he said. "Solving problems here on earth, affordable access to high quality, fresh food is not something that is readily available for everyone, right?"
For the last three years, Tsai, two co-founders and 23 other former SpaceX scientists have been focused on creating the Stellar Pizza, a fully automated, enclosed and mobile pizza maker.
From assembly to cooking, cameras help on every step to make minute adjustments in order to crank out a pie in less than five minutes. Tsai and his team have worked for years honing the system so the pizza will be made inside of a truck on the way to the customer's house. It uses an algorithm to consider traffic and other obstacles to help decide when to start cooking your order.
"Our electronics are designed with the reliability that is required to get humans to space," said Tsai. "It is a team of rocket scientists designing kitchen equipment from scratch."
The operation would require no human labor nor real estate driving the cost of most pizzas down to about $10.
"What we're trying to do is very hard, I needed to recruit the best and the brightest to develop a mobile pizza machine that is basically a spaceship on wheels."
Scientists by trade, the team tried to use the scientific method to develop a recipe before hiring an actual chef and other food experts to make craft their signature pizzas.
"I can't even count the number of pizzas I've eaten," said Tsai.
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