Rice University partners with astronaut foundation to offer new STEM scholarship

space scholars

Former NASA astronaut Charlie Duke spoke at Rice University last month to celebrate the new partnership between the university and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. Photo courtesy Rice University.

Rice University has partnered with The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF) to offer a new scholarship opportunity for junior or senior STEM majors, beginning this spring.

The prestigious Astronaut Scholarship includes up to $15,000, mentorship, networking and a paid trip to the ASF Innovators Symposium and Gala. The scholarship is funded by the James A. Lovell Jr. Family Endowment, in honor of the late American astronaut and founder of the ASF.

“This scholarship opportunity represents an exciting new avenue for Rice STEM students to synthesize their experiences in courses and research and their commitment to advancing the public good as leaders in their field,” Danika Brown, executive director for the Center for Civic Leadership at Rice, said in a news release. “We are so grateful to the Lovell family and to the foundation for investing in Rice students, and we are confident that the foundation will be impressed with our nominees and that selected students will have a life-changing experience as astronaut scholars.”

The Rice Space Institute and the Center for Civic Learning recently hosted the ASF at the Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science.

At the ASF event, Jeff Lovell—son of James Lovell, who commanded Apollo 13 and flew on Apollo 8—announced the scholarship aimed at Rice STEM students. Charlie Duke, who served as spacecraft communicator for the Apollo 11 Moon landing and as the lunar module pilot for Apollo 16, also spoke at the event.

The ASF awarded 74 scholarships to students from 51 universities across the U.S. last May.

The ASF awarded its first seven $1,000 scholarships in 1986 to pay tribute to the Mercury 7 astronauts. It has since awarded more than $10 million to more than 850 college students.

So far, only students from Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin have received the scholarship in Texas.

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Australia-based Moonshot has opened a Houston chapter. Miriam Espacio / Pexels

Global space startup and innovation connector opens Houston branch

Space city win

It's almost an understatement to say that Houston's space economy is taking off like a rocket.

On May 28, four companies in the Houston area — Axiom Space Inc., Boeing Co., KBRwyle, and NanoRacks LLC — were tasked with helping chart NASA's course in the space economy, whose global value is projected to climb as high as $3 trillion by 2040. Three days later, Houston-based Intuitive Machines LLC was awarded a $77.2 million contract to send as many as five NASA payloads to the moon.

And a month later, on June 26, officials broke ground on the first phase of Houston Spaceport, a 450-acre project at Ellington Airport that will serve as a sort of control center for aerospace research and manufacturing, and commercial space operations.

Then, on July 19 — a day ahead of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 man-on-the-moon mission — Australia-based startup Moonshot Space Co. launched a chapter in Houston to help foster the region's multibillion-dollar space economy. Through its programming, which will kick off this fall, Moonshot seeks to corral entrepreneurs, students, job seekers, business executives, investors, university researchers, government officials, and others in an effort to nurture and promote Houston's space economy.

Troy McCann, founder and CEO of Moonshot, believes Houston — home to NASA's Johnson Space Center — can emerge as the epicenter of the global space economy.

"You'd have to have been living under a rock for the past 50 years not to be aware of Houston's stellar aerospace ecosystem," McCann says. "It's got both the historical credibility and a suite of … successful commercial space ventures based there."

"We want to help fine-tune Houston's space economy by providing a proven framework to elevate people and their ideas into successful teams and scalable businesses," McCann adds, "and to create the industries of the future and solve humanity's greatest challenges."

The Houston chapter, a nonprofit venture, is Moonshot's first in the U.S. and second outside Australia. Nathan Johnson, a Houston attorney who specializes in space law and business development, has been tapped to direct it.

"We're in the process of starting chapters across the globe because we believe that the next Nikola Tesla or Marie Curie is out there somewhere, but they don't have access to the resources they need to change the world for the better," McCann says. "Today, the average person has the ability to start a commercial space program for less than the cost of a fast-food franchise."

Johnson says Houston's prominence as NASA's hub for human spaceflight, its status as the "Energy Capital of the World," and the presence of the Texas Medical Center combine to make Space City a potent force in the space economy.

"My hope is to see Houston continue to lead in space and become a hub for the next wave of space commercialization," Johnson says. "We have a wide breadth of industries, and I would like to see that terrestrial expertise extend to new market applications in space."

If Houston does evolve into a nucleus for the global space economy, it stands to reap sky-high financial rewards. Various analysts forecast the global space economy will soar to between $1 trillion and $3 trillion by 2040, up from an estimated $415 billion in 2018.

"Space is and will be a global endeavor, depending on a strong economy, smart industries, and a talented workforce," Johnson says. "Houston already has all of those things, continues to actively develop them at all levels of the community, and does so in a way that reflects the world's population."

Mario Diaz, CEO of the Houston Airport System addresses the crowd gathered to celebrate the Apollo 11 anniversary this weekend. Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

Overheard: Aerospace and airport VIPs commemorate Space City Month at IAH

Out of this world

Houston, we have liftoff of a space-filled weekend. Saturday, July 20, marks the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 touching down on the moon, and that calls for a celebration, as well as a commemoration.

Houston First, Space Center Houston, NASA, and United Airlines teamed up to host an international delegation at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Terminal C on July 17. Various space or Space City VIPs took the stage to discuss their memories of the lunar landing and the role Houston played in the monumental event.

“Our hope is to be an airport system that reflects Houston’s role as a leader on the global stage and to have our city standing as truly international business and cultural center. With both Bush and Hobby airports having earned four-star ratings, we are built to meet those expectations.”

— Mario Diaz, executive director at Houston Airport System. Bush Intercontinental Airport is also celebrating its 50th anniversary since opening in 1969.

“It is the innovative spirit of the people of this city that help give the world our new perspective. We are all neighbors, and we must all face the future as one. How wonderful that understanding is now with Houston having become the nation’s most diverse city in the country with one in four Houstonians being foreign born.”

— Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, referencing a ranking released earlier this year.

“This week, we are celebrating this anniversary and time when we did so much more than we thought we could. … [the Apollo mission] was an inspiration to us then, and I think continues to be an inspiration to all of us even now.”

— Peggy Whitson, former NASA astronaut who holds the record for the United States for her 665 days in space.

“Houston is the Space City, because the Johnson Space Center is the home of human space flight. As you know, ‘Houston’ was the very first word spoken from the surface of the moon. And, it wasn’t a fluke. They knew who they needed to talk to, and it was Houston.”

— Mark Geyer, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center.

“In roughly three years, we will have astronauts back in the region of the moon — this time women and men. And soon after that, back onto the surface of the moon again in our mission called Artemis.”

— Geyer continues to say of NASA's lunar exploration plans.

“Just a few weeks ago, [Space Center Houston] inaugurated the completely restored mission control operations room from the Apollo era. We’ve done a restoration and taken it back to the 1960s, and it appears as if the flight controllers just got up to take a break.”

— William Harris, CEO of Space Center Houston. The organization is NASA's official tourism arm and houses 250,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor exhibition space.

David Alexander of the Rice University Space Institute says Houston's past accomplishments in space aren't all the Space City has to offer. Photo courtesy of Rice University

Rice University's Space Institute director on the future of exploration, development, and the role Houston will play in space

Featured Innovator

While the city is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo mission that got man to the moon, this month should also be about looking forward to the Space City's future.

From commercial space travel momentum to upcoming governmental projects, there's a lot in the works for space, and Houston will play a big role in both sides of the equation, says David Alexander, director of the Rice University Space Institute.

"In Houston, we tend to think of space as a destination, but it really is a resource," he says. "And we need to be thinking about it as a resource."

New, and increasingly more accessible technologies are changing the landscape — especially for universities. Smaller satellite devices, called CubeSacs, are so easy to build and launch into space that students are able to it themselves, Alexander says, and they are. These projects across the country are collecting new data on a massive level.

"Students these days really want to solve meaningful problems rather than just academic problems, and space is way of giving them access to what information and data that can help them with that," Alexander says.

Alexander shared his thoughts and professional opinion on some of the exciting advancements the space industry has on its radar — and where Houston comes into play for these initiatives.

InnovationMap: What got you really interested in space exploration?

David Alexander: I was always interested in science, but one of the things got really interested in the human aspect of space was an event at the Rice Baker Institute a few years ago, shortly after the cancellation of the shuttle program. It was just a great discussion about the space in general, but what kind of hit me hard was the fact that a lot of history — we're talking about 50 years in space since the Apollo mission — has influenced the whole world. Modern human history has been hugely impacted by the presence of space, and a lot of that happened in Houston. And, some of the people who've made it happen are still around, and that day at the Baker Institute, some of them were there. So, that hit home for me.

IM: What are some of the focuses of the Rice Space Institute?

DA: We've got the outreach part, then we have the the science, the research, and then student activities and the connection to NASA that we have.

We have a professional master's program for students who are not particularly interested in research, but what they want to do is combine management and business training with technical training in science and engineering related to space. We've been building that program all for over the last six years or so. We also have this fairly popular public lectures series that we've been running since January of 2011.

One of the prime reasons for institutes at Rice, which are small entities, is to bring faculty from different disciplines together. And so that's been our primary effort when it comes to research. We'll try and get some of the bioengineers, for instance, working with NASA on the human side, and get some of the engineers working with NASA on things like sensor wireless technologies.

IM: What does the future of space exploration look like to you?

DA: I think one of the things that we're seen this helping drive that difference between now and then is the growth in the private and commercial enterprises in space. I think that what we're finding is that space is becoming more accessible. The actual cost of getting to space is radically coming down, and the kind of resources that we can put in space and the capability of these resources is changing.

IM: Do you think there's been a resurgence of interest in space lately?

DA: NASA made space kind of look routine, which is good because you want astronauts to be safe and you want your hardware to survive. So, it became less exciting. However, within the government side of things, that has been a huge steady progress. You can follow the path from the technology development all the way through to today. But I think from the general public's perception, people like Elon Musk, even though he has some ambitious ideas, has seen successes with reusable rockets with these landings. And people like Jeff Bezos, who are also developing their own rockets and their own plans for space, have kind of opened people's eyes again a little bit. I think they have added a bit of star power, and they have shown an excitement for space that's infectious.

IM: What does the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission mean to the city of Houston?

DA: There's a balance that we have to find between looking too much in the past — you don't want to see your successes in the rearview. I think we should rightly be proud of the Apollo history and what it did for the region. The history part is really important, and, in my opinion, the biggest thing that came out of Apollo is the fact that so many young people got interested in science, technology, engineering, and math. I firmly believe that created the means by which the U.S. economy drove the world.

IM: What's Houston's role in the future of space exploration?

DA: On the space exploration side, NASA has announced that we're going to go back to the moon by 2024. Now, that's a huge challenge. The NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, who's a Rice graduate, is aware of those challenges. Whether it's 2024 or if we have to wait until 2028, a lot of that work is going to be driven by what's being done in Houston, particularly the Johnson Space Center. There's a big rocket that they're developing, as well as the Orion capsule, Houston has a big role in those.

On the commercial side, there's the Houston Spaceport, which was the 10th licensed commercially licensed spaceport in the United States. There's now 12 within the United States, but Houston's spaceport is the only one located in a large city. There's a great company out there called Intuitive Machines, and they just got one of the lunar landing contracts. So, sometime between now and 2021, there may actually be a piece of hardware land on the moon that was built here in Houston.

IM: What should the Houston innovation ecosystem be focused on?

DA: The pieces are all there. We just need to work together to get them working coherently. If you get someone who understands space data talking to one of these companies who are trying to monitor flooding, for example, then both of those groups will grow together. We need to start bringing them together.

------

Portions of this interview have been edited.

Houston is celebrating 50 years since the Apollo moon landing. Here are somethings you can expect to see in Houston during Space City Month. Photo via NASA.gov

Here's what you should look out for in Houston during Space City Month

The eagle has landed

Fifty years ago, NASA sent a crew of astronauts to the moon and back while a team controlled the mission from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

In honor of this history-making experience, the Space City is playing host to Space City Month this July, and it's a time to recognize the science and sacrifice it took to put man on the moon, as well as look forward to the future of NASA and space exploration.

Restored Apollo 11 mission control center

Photo via NASA.gov

Ever wonder what it was like to be in the room where it happened — where Neil Armstrong radioed in to give his famous, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" statement? Now you can.

Space Center Houston has restored the mission control center where dozens of professionals kept watch and records over the astronauts making their harrowing journey. The exhibit just opened, and visitors can sign up for free tickets.

The restoration has been years in the making. Retired mission control experts contributed to the exhibit and the efforts were even funded by a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $500,000.

Special NASA programming

The video and audio coverage were an incredible component for the Apollo missions to deliver to an earthly audience. Now, celebrating 50 years, NASA's bringing back the special programming.

From noon to 2 pm on July 19, the organization will broadcast live from NASA's newly-restored Apollo mission control room at Johnson Space Center in Houston, along with a couple other historic locations like the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the Smithsonian National Air, and the Space Museum in Washington.

Watch the show on something that wasn't available in 1969: The internet. More specifically, find the stream on the NASA Live page.

InnovationMap interviews with space innovators

Tim Kopra

Tim Kopra spent over 244 days in space, and now he's using his tech background to invest in emerging energy companies. Courtesy of Tim Kopra

Much like we did for Pride Month, our Featured Innovator section — where we run weekly innovator interviews — will be taken over by a special series. Four different interviews with four different space innovators will be published on Wednesdays for the rest of the month.

Can't wait until Wednesday? Check out this interview we did with an astronaut turned venture capital investor, Tim Kopra. He spent a career total of 244 days in space before re-entering earth's orbit and civilian life. As different as his career is now compared to life in space, he actually sees a similarity.

"On face value, it may sound like an odd match, taking someone with a tech and operational background and putting them in venture, but quite frankly it feels very familiar to me because my career has really been focused on working on complex technology and operations with very small teams," Kopra tells InnovationMap in the article. "It's not just a theoretical understanding of the technology, but understanding how to use the technology and how it works."

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Houston VC funding surged nearly 50% in Q1 2026, report says

VC victories

First-quarter venture capital funding for Houston-area startups climbed nearly 50 percent compared to the same time last year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

In Q1 2026, Houston-area startups raised $532.3 million, a 49 percent jump from $320.2 million in Q1 2025, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

However, the Q1 total fell 23 percent from the $671.05 million raised in Q4 2025.

Among the first-quarter funding highlights in Houston were:

  • Utility Global, which focuses on industrial decarbonization, announced a first close of $100 million for its Series D round.
  • Sage Geosystems raised a $97 million Series B round to support its geothermal energy storage technology.

Those funding rounds underscore Houston’s evolution as a magnet for VC in the energy sector.

“Today, the energy sector is increasingly extending into the startup economy as venture capital flows into companies developing the technologies that will shape the future of global energy,” the Greater Houston Partnership says.

The energy industry accounted for nearly 40 percent of Houston-area VC funding last year, according to market research and lead generation service Growth List.

Adding to Houston’s stature in VC for energy startups are investors like Chevron Technology Ventures, the investment arm of Houston-based oil and gas giant Chevron; Goose Capital; Mercury Fund; and Quantum Energy Partners.

How Houston innovators played a role in the historic Artemis II splashdown

safe landing

Research from Rice University played a critical role in the safe return of U.S. astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission this month.

Rice mechanical engineer Tayfun E. Tezduyar and longtime collaborator Kenji Takizawa developed a key computational parachute fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis system that proved vital in NASA’s Orion capsule’s descent into the Pacific Ocean. The FSI system, originally developed in 2013 alongside NASA Johnson Space Center, was critical in Orion’s three-parachute design, which slowed the capsule as it returned to Earth, according to Rice.

The model helped ensure that the parachute design was large enough to slow the capsule for a safe landing while also being stable enough to prevent the capsule from oscillating as it descended.

“You cannot separate the aerodynamics from the structural dynamics,” Tezduyar said in a news release. “They influence each other continuously and even more so for large spacecraft parachutes, so the analysis must capture that interaction in a robustly coupled way.”

The end result was a final parachute system, refined through NASA drop tests and Rice’s computational FSI analysis, that eliminated fluctuations and produced a stable descent profile.

Apart from the dynamic challenges in design, modeling Orion’s parachutes also required solving complex equations that considered airflow and fabric deformation and accounted for features like ringsail canopy construction and aerodynamic interactions among multiple parachutes in a cluster.

“Essentially, my entire group was dedicated to that work, because I considered it a national priority,” Tezduyar added in the release. “Kenji and I were personally involved in every computer simulation. Some of the best graduate students and research associates I met in my career worked on the project, creating unique, first-of-its-kind parachute computer simulations, one after the other.”

Current Intuitive Machines engineer Mario Romero also worked on Orion during his time at NASA. From 2018 to 2021, Romero was a member of the Orion Crew Capsule Recovery Team, which focused on creating likely scenarios that crewmembers could encounter in Orion.

The team trained in NASA’s 6.2-million-gallon pool, using wave machines to replicate a range of sea conditions. They also simulated worst-case scenarios by cutting the lights, blasting high-powered fans and tipping a mock capsule to mimic distress situations. In some drills, mock crew members were treated as “injured,” requiring the team to practice safe, controlled egress procedures.

“It’s hard to find the appropriate descriptors that can fully encapsulate the feeling of getting to witness all the work we, and everyone else, did being put into action,” Romero tells InnovationMap. “I loved seeing the reactions of everyone, but especially of the Houston communities—that brought me a real sense of gratitude and joy.”

Intuitive Machines was also selected to support the Artemis II mission using its Space Data Network and ground station infrastructure. The company monitored radio signals sent from the Orion spacecraft and used Doppler measurements to help determine the spacecraft's precise position and speed.

Tim Crain, Chief Technology Officer at Intuitive Machines, wrote about the experience last week.

"I specialized in orbital mechanics and deep space navigation in graduate school,” Crain shared. “But seeing the theory behind tracking spacecraft come to life as they thread through planetary gravity fields on ultra-precise trajectories still seems like magic."

Rice Alliance names first head of platform & more innovation headlines

Trending News

Editor's note: The top April innovation headlines to know include Rice Alliance's newly minted head of platform and FDA approval for a local medtech startup. Below are the five most-read InnovationMap stories from April 1-15, 2026:

1. Rice Alliance names Houston healthtech exec as first head of platform

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship has named its first head of platform. Houston entrepreneur Laura Neder stepped into the newly created role last month, according to an email from Rice Alliance. Neder will focus on building and growing Houston’s Venture Advantage Platform. The emerging platform, which is being promoted by Rice Alliance and the Ion, aims to connect founders with the "people, capital and expertise they need to scale." Continue reading.

2. Houston medtech startup clears FDA approval for new surgical tool

Prana Surgical has developed a minimally invasive, image-guided, single-use tissue extraction tool. Photo via LinkedIn

Houston-based Prana Surgical will soon bring a new electrosurgical tool to operating rooms around the country. The Prana System officially cleared U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval earlier this month. Prana Surgical began as Prana Thoracic in 2022. Back then, the company primarily focused on developing screening tools for lung cancer diagnosis. It raised $6 million in series A funding rounds in 2023 and 2024 before transitioning to broader surgical needs in 2025. Continue reading.

3. Houston leads U.S. in population growth for 2025, Census says

The 10-county Houston metro added 126,720 residents from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025. Photo via Getty Images

Imagine that the Houston metro area swallowed a city the size of Pearland in just one year. That’s essentially what happened from 2024 to 2025, with the Houston metro ranking first in the U.S. for population growth based on the number of people. New estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show the 10-county Houston metro added 126,720 residents from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025. That’s just shy of Pearland’s roughly 133,000-resident tally. Continue reading.

4. 8+ can't-miss Houston business and innovation events in April


From the Rice Business Plan Competition to the Veterans Business Battle, here's what not to miss in April and how to register. Photo courtesy the Ion

Houston's weeklong innovation festival kicked off April, followed by Rice University's globally recognized pitch competition returning for its 26th year. Plus, find coworking pop-ups, industry meetups, pitch battles and even a crawfish boil on the calendar. Continue reading.

5. Houston unicorn closes $421M to fuel first phase of flagship energy project

Tim Latimer, CEO and co-founder of Fervo Energy. Photo courtesy of Fervo Energy

Houston geothermal unicorn Fervo Energy has closed $421 million in non-recourse debt financing for the first phase of its flagship Cape Station project in Beaver County, Utah. Fervo believes Cape Station can meet the needs of surging power demand from data centers, domestic manufacturing and an energy market aiming to use clean and reliable power. According to the company, Cape Station will begin delivering its first power to the grid this year and is expected to reach approximately 100 megwatts of operating capacity by early 2027. Fervo added that it plans to scale to 500 megawatts. Continue reading.

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