No one would have believed that quiet, pink-haired Tina Hammock, back when she was a ripped-jeans-wearing NC State freshman in 1997, would one day stand boldly and emotionally in front of 800 registered VIPs and thousands of students, faculty and staff in the sunshine of the Oval to hear her name memorialized in brick.

Monday morning, however, NC State’s most celebrated alum — now known globally as NASA astronaut and three-time graduate Christina Koch — watched with tears in her eyes as a banner announcing the renaming of a building in her honor digitally unfurled to a cheering crowd.

NC State Chancellor Kevin Howell announced that Engineering Building II was renamed as Christina Hammock Koch Hall as part of NC State’s two-day Around the Moon and Pack Again celebration on both Centennial and main campuses.

“Today, students are hard at work in these buildings all around us. Each of them, chasing their dream,” Chancellor Howell said as the 2026 fall semester began its second week of classes. “We may not know them all by name just yet. However, they will know the name of Christina Koch.

“Her light will shine for them, like a beacon.”

It was an odd feeling for Koch, whose 10-day Artemis II lunar mission sparked waves of emotion for her and ignited a global resurgence of interest in space exploration. Sometimes, the emotion can be overwhelming.

Tears don’t fall in space; they well on the eyelids and stay, too hard to sweep away without the assistance of gravity.

That wasn’t a problem Monday, as Koch participated in a full slate of activities on Centennial Campus, including early-morning coffee, the formal announcements of the new building name and a special edition of Howling Cow ice cream in her honor, a midday press conference, late lunch and a round of interviews focused specifically on her NC State experiences. She finished the day by visiting a moon tree named Christina, planted outside Partners III.

She has an additional slate of activities scheduled for Tuesday, including a registration-only panel discussion at Talley Student Union’s Stewart Theatre and a rock-climbing experience at Carmichael Gymnasium.

Koch knew well in advance about Monday’s building renaming but was surprised by the limited-edition ice cream. She flashed her biggest smile and brightest joy of the day with her first spoonful of the blueberry, raspberry and graham cracker recipe—right up until someone removed it from the stage before she finished.

“I was very excited about the ice cream,” said Koch, who had a second helping at lunch. “It was a surprise.

“I can’t decide which of the two [the renamed building or the ice cream] is better.”

A Journey With Responsibility

For Koch, the day’s ceremony and festivity was a far cry from what it was like to be a freshman from Jacksonville, surrounded by the enormity of the first day of class, being lost along Engineering Row and unsure if she would ever reach her destination in time for class. The thought of a lost student being told to “turn right at Koch Hall and head down the Oval” seemed like a metaphor for what every student sometimes feels in a big environment.

“I've thought a lot about that,” she said. “I've definitely been lost before on campus. … A building becomes so much more than just a name. It can define everyone's experiences. It almost becomes a landmark, its own entity.

“I questioned whether my name could do all of that. I hope that I can live by example so that if people do think of the name, the person that's behind that name, that if they're walking by it, there is a little moment of maybe inspiration or a moment if you're lost.”

During her address to the dense crowd on the Oval, Koch tipped her hat to several pioneers who have done that for students for more than a century. She paid respect to Mary Yarbrough, who was one of the first three women to enroll in graduate school at NC State College 100 years ago and is remembered at Mary Yarbrough Court, one of NC State’s 10 Hallowed Places, and Yarbrough Drive; to Augustus Witherspoon, namesake of one of the school’s student unions and the second African American to earn a Ph.D. at NC State; and to Katharine Stinson, the little kid who followed Amelia Earhart’s advice to become an engineer rather than a pilot and then became the first woman to earn an NC State engineering degree.

Koch joins more than a dozen women who have been honored by campus landmarks named for them.

“I won't pretend that I took the time to fully learn about the namesakes of Yarbrough, Witherspoon or Stinson when I was a student,” she told the crowd. “I do know that what an institution names things is a commitment to values. We named our spacecraft Integrity — and then we had to go fly it like we meant it.

“Buildings are communities for collaboration. Their names carry the inspiration of a namesake and then take on lives of their own. They start as a person’s story and become the stories they hold.”

Koch had exactly one class and one research assistantship on Centennial Campus as a student, so putting her name on a building there is a little unnatural to her. But the Oval may well supplant the Court of North Carolina as her favorite Hallowed Place.

The events of the day overtook Koch’s well-hidden emotions as she tried as much as possible to bask in both the August sunlight and the dignitary-shadowed spotlight, wearing an Artemis-logoed dress and a mission-patched flight jacket.

“I really don’t like having the attention on me,” said the currently most photographed and promoted federal superstar this side of the Statue of Liberty.

Koch knows she is an inspiration to the latest generation of students, whether it was the junior journalists who asked her questions prior to the official press conference, those who were released from class to attend or the ones who participated in the event.

College of Design student Ashtyn Thomas of Lumberton opened the ceremonies by singing the national anthem, while rising senior Raina Gandhi of Albany, New York — a double major in mechanical engineering and psychology, and a recipient of the North Carolina Space Grant Scholarship — sat down with Koch at the end of the day to have a student-led conversation about space travels for the university’s social media channels.

Few people were prouder during the day than a half-dozen Wolfpack alumni sitting on the third row of seats in the elaborate tent erected on the Koch Hall side of the Oval. They were Koch’s three siblings—all of whom followed in their big sister’s footsteps from Jacksonville to Raleigh—and their spouses, beaming not just with the pride of family but as alumni of the university that gave them all their educational foundation.

Standing among the rows of seats, Denise Hammock Clayton and husband Matthew Clayton of Durham beamed about Koch’s achievements, both as family and fellow alumni.

“This seems like a full-circle moment, when everything that has happened comes back together,” Denise Clayton said.

Koch Hall History

Engineering Building II opened Aug. 17, 2005, seven months after the opening of EB I, the first pieces in forming the elongated ring of the Centennial Campus’s envisioned Oval. From the outset, it has housed classes in electrical and computer engineering.

Fast Facts

• Groundbreaking: Oct. 24, 2003
• Opened: Aug. 17, 2005, as home for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in time for the fall semester
• Dedication: April 28, 2006
• Designer: Perkins&Will Architects
• Original size: 202,376 square feet
• Current size (expanded in 2020): 228,296 square feet
• Building cost: $34,635,120
• Total project cost: $48,458,139
• Current occupants: Offices for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, classrooms, class laboratories, two named MakerSpaces and a Port City Java coffee shop
• Renamed: Aug. 24, 2026, in honor of three-time NC State graduate and NASA astronaut Christina Hammock Koch

Though slightly delayed, the classrooms in EB II were ready for use for the 2005 fall semester. NC State Facilities completed all of the classrooms in time for classes and delayed the completion of faculty offices, with the idea that students were the priority. The most notable features in the classrooms included an outlet at every seat and large Wi-Fi routers hanging from the ceiling that allowed students internet access during class.

Both EB I and EB II were directly funded by North Carolina’s $3.1 billion 2000 Higher Education Improvement Bonds Referendum. At the time, it was the largest higher bond education bond authorization in U.S. history.

In addition to those two buildings, other buildings and projects that resulted from the bonds are Centennial Middle School, the Friday Institute, the expansion of Jordan Hall and the modernization of South Garner Hall, Schaub Hall, Williams Hall, Withers Hall and Polk Hall.

The 2000 bond consisted primarily of improvements to classrooms and laboratories, positioning the university to grow to its current size. When the bond passed, NC State’s enrollment was 26,343 in undergraduate and graduate students, which was about 4,000 over capacity. The bond not only allowed NC State to reach its goal of having 31,000 students by 2008 but also created the infrastructure for expansion to the current total of 40,000 students and the space for those students to learn.

In all, NC State received $449 million from the $3.1 billion bond.

Only a few months after EB II opened, students in a freshman E101 mechanical engineering class participated in a class project at the Miller Fields intramural fields on main campus. The objective was to build a rocket that could safely launch and return a raw egg to Earth.

Christina Hammock Koch Hall now represents humanity’s ability to do that — and much more.