A few months after Texas’ governor challenged universities to boost their space research output, NASA has selected a Houston school for a new space research center.
The University of Houston will receive a grant worth nearly $5 million to open the NASA MIRO Inflatable Deployable Environments and Adaptive Space Systems Center, or IDEAS2 Center.
“The vision of the IDEAS2 Center is to become a premier national innovation hub that propels NASA-centric, state-of-the-art research and promotes 21st-century aerospace education,” said Karolos Grigoriadis, the Moores professor of mechanical engineering and director of the aerospace engineering graduate program at UH, who spearheaded the effort and will lead the center.
The name MIRO comes from the NASA Office of STEM Engagement Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Institutional Research Opportunity (MIRO) program, which provided the grant. The agency is awarding approximately $45 million to 21 higher-education institutions.
Other local universities that will collaborate with the new center include Texas A&M University, Houston Community College and San Jacinto College. Industry partners include Houston-based Axiom Space and Virginia-based The Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA). In addition to Grigoriadis, Dimitri Lagoudas, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University, and Olga Bannova, UH’s research professor of mechanical engineering and director of the university’s space architecture graduate program, will serve as associate directors of the IDEAS2 Center.
UH’s grant victory follows a significant funding push from the state. Last year, the Legislature approved a $350 million funding package to develop Texas' aerospace economy following similar efforts in other states like Florida. The Texas Space Commission was also created, with several Houston space business leaders and researchers named to the initial selection of the commission in March.
Texas State Rep. Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood, who spearheaded much of the legislation for the Space Commission and the new funding, said that universities looking to focus on space programs could do more beyond engineering.
“Within even the category of space engineering, there will be subsets,” Bonnen said. “With the life sciences element, the human factor is one of the biggest challenges, so people can help us understand how things work in low-Earth orbit or microgravity.”
Texas A&M University also recently signed a lease for its $200 million Space Institute, which was funded using the legislative spending package approved last year. The institute will occupy about 30 acres of NASA’s new Exploration Park in Houston, which will be built on more than 200 acres of land outside the controlled access area of Johnson Space Center and is intended to bring industry, government and academia closer together.
