NASA’s multimillion-dollar Centennial Challenges program, aimed at furthering space exploration, has produced its first winner for the Astronaut Glove Challenge with a prize of $200,000 going to a Maine man for his spacesuit glove design.

Peter Homer of Southwest Harbor won the contest after his design fared best on the basis of how much torque it took to mobilize the fingers, perform dexterity tasks inside a glovebox, and inflate pressurized glove bladders.

The competition was one of NASA’s seven Centennial Challenges and took place May 2-3 at the New England Air Museum at Bradley International Airport, Windsor Locks, Conn.

“It feels good,” said Homer, whose two home-built spacesuit gloves beat entries from two other teams to take home the top prize. “It took a lot of sitting at the sewing machine.”

“The finger mobility is the thing that I thought was most critical,” Homer added.

Peter Homer’s winning design uses off-the-shelf flexible gloves for the inner bladder, says Alan Hayes, chairman and CEO of Volanz Aerospace in Owings, Maryland, US, which administered the competition. The outside is “a cloth material he got off eBay”, he says

Homer’s careful work stitching the cloth together paid off in the strength test. “His sewing job held very well,” Hayes says. “We were very impressed.” Hayes tried on the glove, which he says was “very comfortable”.

NASA’s current glove has had its problems.

The gloves currently in use, take much more effort to flex than your garden-variety work gloves. In fact, Ken Davidian, program manager for NASA’s Centennial Challenges, said astronauts’ hands get tired and blistered inside the pressurized glove as they push against multiple layers of cloth to operate in an external vacuum.

Although Homer’s glove design outscored the NASA glove in the tests, the comparison is not perfect. His entry did not have features like the ability to withstand micrometeorite impacts, which the NASA gloves have. However, his innovations in finger dexterity may one day find their way into NASA gloves.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 11:52 pm under Science and technology, Uncategorized.

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