NASA Tech Talks

About

We want HOU! Join us to discover NASA's toughest tech challenges—and apply your skills and expertise to solve them. For our last NASA Tech Talk of 2026, we're going to delve into how we do prizes and challenges at NASA, and provide an example of an exciting upcoming challenge. Through NASA's Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation and Centennial Challenges, NASA has brought problems, big and small, to the public to advance NASA's mission for 20 years. With these two programs now combined, NASA continues to provide open innovation as a service to NASA personnel and much of the US federal government, with opportunity for you to help solve NASA's pressing needs. A new challenge is coming to NASA's Moon and Mars exploration efforts. The NASA Deep Space Autonomous Robotics Challenge (NASA DSpARC) will challenge participants to create groundbreaking autonomous robotics software designed to advance NASA's exploration capabilities. There will be RFIs coming out with partnerships opportunities to the community, in addition to competing. Please join us after the talk for drinks and networking at Second Draught! About the Speakers: 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; and Microbes in Space.