G. SCOTT HUBBARD

Develops bold space missions, won NASA’s highest award

Now a professor at Stanford University, G. Scott Hubbard has accumulated more than 40 years of experience in developing, planning, and executing space missions.

Coming from Lexington, Kentucky, Hubbard studied at Vanderbilt University before getting his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Immediately after graduation, he dedicated his life to space exploration and research. Before he founded NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, which has focused on developing measurable progress toward sustaining life in space, he helped NASA in a variety of capacities as they developed far-reaching programs, eventually restructuring the entire Mars program and becoming the the first director for it.

For the Mars Pathfinder Mission, he helped strategize and then implement the airbag system that would be necessary for the spacecraft’s landing on the red planet. Additionally, he converted this same airbag system to another spacefaring mission: the Lunar Prospector. Because of these necessary features, both missions were successful in relaying new information and data about the Moon and Mars to physicists and scientists back on Earth.

For his lifetime of work to furthering the advancement of space travel and sustaining off of Earth, he received NASA’s highest award: the Distinguished Service Medal. He lives in Palo Alto, California and continues to work on faculty at Stanford University’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.