HOUSTON — Vickie Kloeris would like nothing more than to suffer the traditional anxieties of Thanksgiving: Will the turkey be moist? Will the in-laws get along? But it's hard to concentrate on such mundane matters when you've got things on your mind like giving your soup enough viscosity so that it sticks to a spoon without benefit of gravity.
As the manager of NASA's space food systems laboratory, Kloeris is in charge of the agency's cuisine, including the irradiated turkey and thermostabilized, candied yams that two astronauts will get to tear into today, 240 miles overhead aboard the international space station.
"They'll lay out a pretty good spread for Thanksgiving," said John McCullough, a NASA flight director.
Of the thousands of tasks performed at Houston's Johnson Space Center, few are as curious as those undertaken by Kloeris and her staff.
They are, first and foremost, chefs.
On a recent afternoon inside the laboratory-cum-kitchen, two of Kloeris' assistants were dicing water chestnuts and discussing the virtues of the cumin. NASA's gumbo and apricot cobbler are loosely based on the family recipes of food scientists Connie Oertli and Donna Nabors, respectively. Kloeris too is an expert cook at home; her husband, she reports, fancies her lasagna.