If it fits like a glove, it may just win the prize.
NASA is offering 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, is being 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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