cosmic coogs

University of Houston chips in with upcoming moon mission with special Coog-crafted cargo

NASA Artemis I moon mission Orion rocket SLS

Artemis I will carry special chips from UH.

Photo by Ben Smegelsky/NASA via NASA Flickr

The University of Houston is are playing a role in the latest mission to the moon. The Artemis I mission Orion spacecraft will carry dozens of tiny microchips made at UH on Saturday, September 3.

The Coog-crafted microchips were created to honor the thousands of people who made the Artemis mission possible, according to the school and NASA. Artemis I is set to launch Saturday, after a failed August 29 attempt due to an engine problem.

Long Chang, a research associate professor in the Cullen College of Engineering and expert at the UH nanofabrication facility, answered the call when NASA was looking for a way to honor the thousands of people contributing to the Artemis I mission.

"NASA wanted microchips with everyone's name on them. But I had some creative liberties in the design because they didn't really know what we were capable of," Chang said. "I figured out how to do this so quickly that I decided to position the names so when you see it, it looks like the NASA logo, the Artemis logo, and the European Space Agency logo. Each logo is made of those 30,000 names."

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Continue reading this story, with accompanying video, on our news partner ABC13.

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start me up

Texas ranks near the top of best states for startups, study finds

Texas ranks third on a new list of the best states for investors and startups.

Investment platform BrokerChooser weighed five factors to come up with its ranking:

2024 Google search volume for terms related to investing
Number of investors
Number of businesses receiving investments in 2024
Total amount of capital invested in businesses in 2024
Percentage change in amount of investment from 2019 to 2024

Based on those figures, provided mostly by Crunchbase, Texas sits at No. 3 on the list, behind No. 1 California and No. 2 New York.

Especially noteworthy for Texas is its investment total for 2024: more than $164.5 billion. From 2019 to 2024, the state saw a 440 percent jump in business investments, according to BrokerChooser. The same percentages are 204 percent for California and 396 percent for New York.

“There is definitely development and diversification in the American investment landscape, with impressive growth in areas that used to fly under the radar,” says Adam Nasli, head analyst at BrokerChooser.

According to Crunchbase, funding for Texas startups is off to a strong start in 2025. In the first three months of this year, venture capital investors poured nearly $2.9 billion into Lone Star State companies, Crunchbase data shows. Crunchbase attributes that healthy dollar amount to “enthusiasm around cybersecurity, defense tech, robotics, and de-extincting mammoths.”

During the first quarter of this year, roughly two-thirds of VC funding in Texas went to just five companies, says Crunchbase. Those companies are Austin-based Apptronik, Austin-based Colossal Biosciences, Dallas-based Island, Austin-based NinjaOne, and Austin-based Saronic.

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This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

Houston Downtown modern business city with skyscraper city scape with park view from Buffalo Bayou center of Houston city, Texas, United States of America, US at sunset time

Getty Images

Texas remains a leading destination for startups.

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start me up

Texas ranks near the top of best states for startups, study finds