Space City or the Silicon Bayou: Tuesday’s Show (May 5, 2015)

Seeing as how Houston is Space City, we thought it might be appropriate, from time to time, to catch up on developments in outer space exploration. On this edition of Houston Matters, we discuss a number of space-related topics with Dr. Carolyn Sumners, the VP of Astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s George Observatory, and Douglas Terrier, Chief Technologist at Johnson Space Center.

We welcome your questions about everything from manned space flight to the condition and life span of the Hubble telescope, and beyond.

Also this hour: the San Jacinto Waste Pits are an area on the eastern edge of Houston near the San Jacinto River where chemical waste was deposited decades ago. The Environmental Protection Agency has deemed the waste pits a Superfund site, a federally designated hazardous waste site. Some residents of neighboring communities believe chemicals from the site are the cause of a number of illnesses. They, along with Harris County, have sued several companies connected to the pits. While those cases wend their way through the courts, we learn more about the debate over what to do with the sites, from Susan Carroll of the Houston Chronicle.

Then: California has Silicon Valley. Could Houston become the Silicon Bayou? We discuss efforts to attract tech entrepreneurs here, with Sanjay Parikh of marketing and ad agency Gateway Design, and Hesam Panahi, founder of RED Labs, the University of Houston’s Start-up Accelerator laboratory.

And: Houston poet Cedric Ary is known primarily for spoken-word poetry and poetry slams, but he tells Houston Public Media’s Catherine Lu about his first love, poetically: the sonnet.