NASA Tech Talks: Rice University’s Space Humanities Initiative

Name: NASA Tech Talks: Rice University’s Space Humanities Initiative
Start: 2026-08-27T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-08-27T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Ion

The event has passed

Category: Aerospace, Founders & Startups, General Community

Free

Past Event

WHEN

Thursday

August 27, 2026

6:00 pm - 7:00 pm CDT

WHERE

Ion

4201 Main Street
Houston, TX 77002 + Google Map

what

We want HOU! Join us to discover NASA’s toughest tech challenges—and apply your skills and expertise to solve them.

This month, NASA Tech Talks will feature Rice’s new Space Humanities Initiative, co-led by Alexander Regier, the William Faulkner Professor of English and chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing, and David Alexander, director of the Rice Space Institute and professor of physics and astronomy.

Long before rockets, satellites or space stations, humans were already in a relationship with outer space. People looked up and named constellations. They told stories about the moon. They wrote poems, mapped stars and built myths around lights in the sky they could not touch. Across cultures and centuries, outer space functioned as more than a scientific mystery; it was a mirror for human longing, fear, imagination and hope.

The Rice Space Initiative brings scholars across disciplines together to examine how culture, language, ethics and imagination shape space exploration, and how space exploration shapes them in return. Please join us for a discussion of how the Initiative came to be, and how it might provide a sustained space where questions about ownership, settlement, commercial use and planetary responsibility can be addressed in an interdisciplinary manner.

Please join us after the talk for drinks and networking at Second Draught!

About the Speakers

Dr. David Alexander is an astrophysics professor at Rice University and a faculty scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy. He also serves as the Director of the Rice Space Institute. Alexander was awarded an OBE by her majesty Queen Elizabeth in 2018 for services to the space industry and was named a Chevalier of the National Order of Merit by the French Republic in 2026. He received a Presidential Early Career Award in 2004 and was appointed a Kavli Frontiers Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. Alexander has served on many professional committees including the NASA Advisory Council’s Heliophysics Subcommittee, and the NASA Solar Heliospheric Management and Operations Working Group. He was named a GlobalScot by the Scottish government and served as an elected member of the Board of Directors of the American Astronautical Society from 2018-2022. He served as Chair of the Aerospace Industry Committee of the Greater Houston Partnership, been on the Board of the Houston Spaceport Development Corporation since 2021 and was recently appointed to the Texas Aerospace Research and Space Economy Consortium Executive Committee. Alexander received his Bachelor’s degree and doctorate from the University of Glasgow.

Alexander Regier is the William Faulkner Professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing. He also holds a full appointment in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Regier is the author and editor of multiple books and articles on literature, art, and culture. His publications cover a range of subjects, from eighteenth-century philosophy and Romantic literature to outer space, awkwardness, fragmentation, ruins, and sports. In recent years, Regier has received an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, as well as Fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Exeter. He has also won multiple awards, amongst others, from the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2023 to 2026, he was chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Rice and is now co-director of the Space Humanities Initiative.

Dario Robleto is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in Houston, Texas. His work has been exhibited widely and is held in prominent collections, including the Harvard Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He has held research fellowships and residencies at institutions including the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the SETI Institute, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. From 2018 to 2023, he served as Artist-at-Large at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art. In 2020, he served as a research consultant for the popular science television series Cosmos: Possible Worlds. In 2016, Robleto was appointed Texas State 3-D Visual Artist, and in 2025, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Middlebury College. He is currently working on his first book, The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: Science, Emotion, and the Golden Record, co-authored with Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts. It will be published by Scribner in 2027.

Ryn Delpapa is a change-maker who believes in impact. A neuroarts tech founder, interdisciplinary artist, and speaker on a mission, they honor life’s biodiversity, from plants to people. Ryn is a recent 2026 TEDxHouston Countdown speaker, 2025 4.0 Tiny Fellow, and CXC Changemakers for the Planet Fellow, bridging creativity, health, and environmental stewardship within their venture, AR+E COMETS, a global health studio. As a 2024 City of Houston City Initiative grant awardee, their Art for Climate Resilience community arts-in-health program shaped community health in Houston’s Third and Fifth Wards. With a B.S. in International Nutrition from the University of Texas at Austin and a kaleidoscope career from Houston to Chengdu, China, their global health background, 8 years in B2B SaaS tech, and arts-in-health research enable them to bridge creativity and planetary health. Work they share through their venture, consultancy, and Earthly Bonds podcast, where they explore health, from brain to biosphere, for creative, resilient living.

Montgomery B. Goforth has more than 40 years of experience as both Engineer and Manager in a variety of highly technical space and defense-related efforts. After working for a small defense contractor specializing in anti-submarine warfare, he joined NASA’s Johnson Space Center in 1990. He has held leadership positions in multiple JSC Directorates and Program Offices. In his previous role as Assistant Director of the JSC Engineering Directorate, he established a framework to better focus Engineering’s efforts towards Human Spaceflight technology and systems development consistent with JSC and Agency goals for exploration. Mr. Goforth is now serving as Acting Director of the Business Development & Technology Integration Office at JSC, and as the JSC Chief Technologist. In these capacities he will be helping to expand the Houston Aerospace Community through the identification of opportunities to develop space/terrestrial technologies of interest to JSC and Human Space Exploration. Mr. Goforth was born in East Texas, raised in Southern California and Arizona, and graduated from Rice University (BSME 1982, MSME 1987).

About NASA Tech Talks

In these presentations, occurring the fourth Thursdays of the month, Mr. Montgomery Goforth and other aerospace subject matter experts will discuss the technology development challenges faced by NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the surrounding Aerospace community in our ongoing efforts as the hub of human spaceflight. Presentations will focus on the ways in which these challenges, and the associated opportunities, can be leveraged by Houston’s innovation community. We will continue to identify potential space/terrestrial technologies of interest to Human Spaceflight. Past NASA Tech Talks have included topics such as:

From Space to Startup: Leveraging NASA Technology and Innovation to Propel Your Growing Enterprise
Disruptive Filter Technology for Spacecraft Water Treatment: The New Promise of Graphene
Lunar dust capture using novel multiplexed inertial filter
Lunar Passive Fuel Cell Technologies:
Microbes in Space

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NASA Tech Talks: Rice University’s Space Humanities Initiative

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Thursday

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Event Calendar

NASA Tech Talks: Rice University’s Space Humanities Initiative

Free

WHEN

Thursday

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CONTACT

Organizer

Organizer Website

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