Teams Compete to Build a Better Astronaut Glove

If it fits like a glove, it may just win the prize.

NASA offered a total of $400,000 to inventors who can make stronger and more dexterous spacesuit gloves Thursday in the second Astronaut Glove Challenge.

The competition, part of NASA's Centennial Challenges Competition to spur private spaceflight engineering, was held at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Titusville, Fla., close to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Two teams are competing, including a previous winner.

"[Gloves are] probably the most difficult part of the spacesuit to make," said Andy Petro, Centennial Challenges program manager. "The original intent of the challenge was to see if opening this up to a wide-open field of innovators, they might come up with some new ideas that would be an improvement over what exists now."

If any competitor's glove can beat NASA's current design, the agency will award part of the prize pot. Astronaut gloves are tricky to engineer because they must be strong enough to protect hands from the harshness of space, and also flexible enough to allow complex movements without tiring out hands.

The top prize purse is $250,000, with $100,000 to be given to the runner up. Contestants' gloves will be subjected to a box that simulates the vacuum of space, and will also be filled with water until they burst to measure their strength.

"[Contestants] bring several copies of the glove, and one of them gets destroyed in the testing," Petro said.

And this year, gloves must include not only an inner pressurizing layer, but an outer thermal protection layer to shield against extreme temperatures and micrometeoroids, or small space junk.

This is the latest of numerous Centennial Challenges events this year, including a space elevator contest and a lunar lander competition in which NASA awarded $3.3 million in prizes. In October competitors vied to use robots to dig fake moon dirt; the winners received a total $750,000 in prize money.

"We have six ongoing multiyear competitions and several ended this year with all the prize money being won," Petro told SPACE.com. "We hope to announce at least one new one this year, and if we get additional funding we'd like to announce several new ones."

The first-ever Astronaut Glove Challenge was held at Connecticut's New England Air Museum in May 2007.? That year, Peter Homer, an engineer from Southwest Harbor, Maine, took home the top prize. Homer is back this year with a new-and-improved design aiming to snag a win again. He is competing against Ted Southern, of Brooklyn, New York, who also participated in the 2007 challenge.

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