Peter Homer, an unemployed engineer, read on NASA’s website about a challenge in which participants were invited to design a glove for astronauts. Gloves are the hardest part of a space suit to design. Like the rest of the suit, they’re pressurised, but that means that each finger of the glove wants to stay straight, inflated like a balloon.
NASA established the Centennial Challenges in the wake of the Wright brothers’ centennial of flight in 2003, drawing upon the examples of the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight and the $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous ground vehicles.
Building a better space glove was first suggested as a potential challenge by engineer-blogger Rand Simberg, and NASA picked up the gauntlet in hopes of stimulating the development of sturdier and more flexible gloves for future spacewalkers.
Homer won the $200,000 top prize.
To win this week’s contest, Homer’s glove design had to perform better than NASA’s baseline astronaut glove as well as the other two competitors. The gloves were tested by measuring how much torque it took to move the fingers, performing a series of real-world dexterity tasks inside a glovebox, and inflating the pressurized glove bladders until they burst.
“I wanted to do this to show my kids that they can do anything they set their minds on,” Homer said. “When I started, I didn’t know anything about making a glove. I had to learn that, and also design and make my own test equipment, metal parts and do my own fabrication. It was a great learning experience along the way.”
Another $250,000 NASA Centennial Challenge is due to be run on May 12, when teams will bring robotic systems to Santa Maria, Calif., for a competition that involves excavating simulated moon dirt.
Photo by NASA.
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