Among his initiatives are the Discovery Program, which created a new class of planetary probes, and the redesign of the Space Station program. Goldin also put in place the teams that exhaustively prepared the Space Shuttle mission in its highly successful effort to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Soon after, the telescope began producing remarkable images from the most distant regions of the knowable universe, allowing new insights into the evolution of the universe. Rice and NASA share a long history beginning in 1962 when, from Rice Stadium, President Kennedy announced plans to put a man on the moon. Rice responded to the announcement by creating the country's first Department of Space Physics and Astronomy.
Rice is the only university with a sticker shaped like a pennant on the moon.
His 'smaller, faster, cheaper' goal, although difficult to attain, has dramatically increased the frequency of space flights while reducing their costs. By encouraging increased risk and fostering new technologies, the microsats and nanosats being built today have a much higher fraction of payload than we ever conceived before. Rice is pleased to be a part of NASA's new vision. The lecture is free and open to the public. Seating will begin at 7 p.m.