G. Scott Hubbard

G. Scott Hubbard (born December 27, 1948) is a physicist who has been engaged in space-related research as well as program, project and executive management for more than 45 years including 20 years with NASA, culminating as director of NASA's Ames Research Center. As of 2012, Hubbard chairs SpaceX Safety Advisory Panel, he previously served as the NASA representative on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, was NASA's first Mars program director and restructured the Mars program in the wake of mission failures.

alt=G. Scott Hubbard official Ames Research Center portrait by Robert Seman. (2008)

Personal life Hubbard was born December 27, 1948, in Lexington, Kentucky. His father, Robert Nicholas Hubbard (1920 -1997), was an attorney and later served as a State Court Judge. Hubbard's mother, Nancy Clay Hubbard (née Brown; 1922–2011), was a homemaker and served as executive director of the Elizabethtown, Kentucky Visitor Commission. Hubbard has one younger sister, Nancy Kelly Huber and half-sister Nicole Hubbard by his father's second marriage. Hubbard is currently married to Pat Power, a retired Federal Human Resources Manager. (Hubbard's first Marriage to Susan A. Ruggeri-Hubbard ended with Susan's death in 2014. )

Hubbard is known personally and professionally by his middle name, Scott, because of the long-time connection to a family friend, Nannie F. Scott.

Early life Hubbard spent the majority of his childhood in Elizabethtown, Kentucky about west of Lexington. Hubbard's fascination with space exploration began at around nine years old, when Sputnik first orbited the Earth. His dad then brought home a refracting telescope for the backyard which the two used to study the night skies, with a particular interest in Mars. Hubbard was an avid reader of both science fiction and science books by people such as George Gamow, Isaac Asimov, and Fred Hoyle, and semiconductor physics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, he received the prestigious Doctor of Science (Sc.D) degree from the Technical University of Madrid. The degree was awarded honoris causa after a thorough review of Hubbard's professional accomplishments and a vote by the Academic Council.

Career Prior to joining NASA, Hubbard was a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was a founder, VP, and general manager for Canberra Semiconductor (a high-tech start up in the San Francisco Bay Area), and held the position of senior research physicist at SRI International.

At NASA, Hubbard served as the first Mars Exploration Program Director (aka the "Mars Czar") where he restructured the Mars program in the wake of mission failures. Hubbard founded the NASA Astrobiology Institute, conceived the Mars Pathfinder mission with its airbag landing, was the manager for NASA's Lunar Prospector Mission, and, ultimately, served as the Center Director of NASA's Ames Research Center from 2002 to 2006. During his tenure, two significant public-private relationships defined Hubbard’s legacy.

In October 2004, in an effort to reestablish Ames’ role as NASA’s principal center for supercomputing, NASA unveiled the “Columbia,” one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing systems of the time. Named to honor the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia lost February 1, 2003, Columbia was built and installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames, in partnership with Silicon Graphics, Inc. and Intel, in less than 120 days. Utilization of the Columbia provided scientists and researchers an improved global circulation model, allowing for hurricane prediction 3 days earlier than ever before and presumably saving lives and property.

Hubbard’s second major effort brought together Ames Research Center and Google to conduct cutting-edge research and development. The September 2005 memorandum of understanding between the two entities outlined plans for cooperation in areas such as large-scale data management, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. “Google and NASA share a common desire –to bring a universe of information to people around the world,” said Eric Schmidt, then Google’s CEO. “Imagine having a wide selection of images from the Apollo space mission at your fingertips whenever you want it. That’s just one small example of how this collaboration could help broaden technology’s role in making the world a better place.”

Hubbard is the recipient of multiple NASA honors, including NASA's highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal. where he created Stanford's Center of Excellence for Commercial Space Transportation and served as founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal New Space.

As of 2012, Hubbard chairs the SpaceX Safety Advisory Panel, Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote "It's high time somebody revealed the underbelly of why and how we travel to the Red Planet. Leave it to NASA’s ‘Mars Czar’ Scott Hubbard to tell this story. Yes, we're all explorers, but every mission to space is enabled by financial, political, and cultural forces that you never hear about—without which there'd be no enterprise of discovery at all."

Between graduation and moving to California in 1973, Hubbard was a full-time musician in Nashville, playing with the band Pale Fire at various bars and restaurants, including the Exit/In. Ultimately, with a passion for music but not the music business, he decided rocket science would be a more effective way to make his contribution to the world professionally.