WINDSOR
LOCKS, Conn. -- An astronaut glove stitched together on a Maine engineer's
dining room table won a cool $200,000 Thursday in a NASA competition.
Peter
Homer, an engineer from Southwest Harbor, Maine, won NASA's first-ever Astronaut
Glove Challenge after a two-day competition here at the New England Air Museum near Bradley International Airport.
"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."
A total of
$250,000, split into two separate prizes, was up for grabs during NASA's
Astronaut Glove Challenge, one of several Centennial Challenges offered by the
space agency to spur interest and innovation in spaceflight technology. Entrants
were charged with constructing spacesuit gloves capable of meeting, or
exceeding, the specifications of NASA's current Phase VI glove. Of six possible
contenders, three teams presented their gloves for the competition.
"If you're
looking for innovative ideas, evolutionary steps and better gloves, you can't
beat it," Bill Spenny, shuttle spacesuit subsystems manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center, said of the Astronaut Glove Challenge told SPACE.com between
tests.
The smaller
$50,000 award, reserved for any team to successfully demonstrate a Mechanical
Counter Pressure glove that protects its wearer without using a pressurized
bladder akin to those found in current spacesuits, went unclaimed and will
rollover to next year, event organizers said.
We have
a winner
Homer's
prize marks the first time NASA has doled out a cash prize under its Centennial
Challenges program despite five previous meets over the last two years. The
space agency's separate Power Beam and
Tether challenges, held annually in 2005 and 2006, have twice ended without
winners. The Northrop
Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge also went unclaimed last year.
"The finger
mobility is the thing that I thought was most critical," Homer said of his
Dacron-covered glove, which featured blue, off-the-shelf kitchen cleaning
gloves for internal bladders. He attended the glove contest with his 14-year-old son Matthew.
To win the space
glove challenge, teams submitted two prototypes -- one for demonstration and
the other for destruction -- for a barrage of endurance challenges. Those tests
included dexterity measurements, flexibility checks and a burst test that
pumped one glove from each team full of water until it reached its breaking
point.
Homer's
glove won out over an entry by the three-person team MDLH, which included
spacesuit mobility expert Gary Harris, aerospace engineer Pablo de Leon and Nik Moiseev, who until
2005 served as engineer with the Russian firm Zvezda that designed that
country's current and Soviet-era spacesuits.
"We're
interested to know what the differences were between the gloves," de Leon told SPACE.com
after Homer's victory, adding that his team may compete in next year's contest.
"We came to this competition knowing what the chances were."
Artist
Theodore Southern, of Brooklyn, New York, also entered a seamless glove made of
polyurethane with internal fabric layers, though the design failed to pass a
mandatory burst test early in the two-day competition.
"Each of
the entries was very different, very unique," said Alan Hayes, CEO of the Owings,
Maryland-based Volanz Aerospace that oversaw the competition for NASA. "And you
want something out of the box."
The contest marked the first of a three-year series of NASA Astronaut Glove Challenges. A $350,000 purse is slated for awards in 2008, with $400,000 available in 2009, NASA said.
Phase VI
and beyond
NASA's
current spacesuit glove, the Phase
VI unit built by Hamilton Sundstrand and ILC Dover, sports adjustable
fingers with their own heaters and is designed to attach to the agency's
Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuit via wrist joints.
David
Graziosi, a spacesuit design engineering manager at ILC Dover, said new gloves
are custom tailored to their specific astronauts.
Despite
pains taken to ensure performance and comfort, working long hours in what
fundamentally is a pressurized balloon can be grueling on the hands and body,
astronauts said.
"It's more
important to have a good fit that's not going to hurt you," astronaut Mike
Massimino, who performed two spacewalks during NASA's STS-109 mission to
service the Hubble Space Telescope, told SPACE.com. "If you get them too
tight, you can do damage to your hands."
Massimino
is training for NASA's next, and final, Hubble servicing mission to fly in
2008. Working with the Phase VI glove, like toiling in a spacesuit in general,
can be tiring due to the physical demands of fighting a stiff spacesuit filled
with air to perform tasks in Earth orbit. Tight grips on handrails, for
example, can tire an astronaut's hands out unnecessarily since only light
touches are need during spacewalks.
"You only
need a fingertip touch," Massimino said. "The glove could tire out your hands
if you let it."
Meanwhile,
NASA officials and space hardware competitors are gearing up for another
Centennial Challenge on May 12 -- this time in Santa Maria, California -- where
entrants are expected to showcase robotic digging machines.
That
competition, the 2007 Regolith Excavation Challenge, calls for competitors to
demonstrate machines capable of autonomously digging through mock lunar surface
material during a preset time limit.
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