Last week Rice broke ground on the new, badly needed, and long awaited Social Science building, to be named in honor of the lead donors Patricia Lipoma Kraft ’87 and Jonathan A. Kraft. It made me think of an earlier groundbreaking, one of the coolest ever held here:

Note the last line above. There weren’t any shovels involved, but instead a signal from a satellite set off a small explosive buried under the lawn. It was a cold day but a crowd will always turn out for an explosion:

Alex Dessler, in the middle, wearing a big overcoat, was the founding chairman of the Space Science Department and got to push the button.

Bonus: They’re replacing a bunch of light posts over on the north side of campus. The new ones are just generic looking, but inoffensive may be the best we can hope for.

More to come: