$350,000 Awarded To Winning Astronaut Glove Designers
NASA's Centennial Challenges program awarded $350,000 last
week to a pair of designers who developed concepts for more
flexible space gloves that could make it easier for astronauts to
perform tasks.
The 2009 Astronaut Glove Challenge awarded a first place prize
of $250,000 to Peter Homer of Southwest Harbor, Maine, and a second
place prize of $100,000 to Ted Southern of Brooklyn, N.Y. The
competition seeks innovative spacesuit glove design concepts to
reduce the effort needed to do work during spacewalks. In this
challenge, competitors demonstrated their glove design by
performing a range of tasks with the glove in a pressurized
chamber.
"It is remarkable that two designers working on their own could
create gloves that meet the requirements for spaceflight -- a task
that normally requires a large team of experts," said Kate
Mitchell, an engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in
Houston.
The competition was held at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in
Titusville, Florida, on November 19. It was managed for NASA by
Volanz Aerospace, a non-profit space education organization based
in Owings, Maryland. Secor Strategies LLC of Titusville was a
commercial sponsor of the event.
In order to qualify for a prize, the gloves had to meet all of
the basic requirements of NASA's current spacesuit gloves and
exceed their flexibility. The gloves also were tested to ensure
they would not leak.
For the 2009 challenge, teams had to develop a complete glove,
including the outer, thermal-micrometeoroid-protection layer and
the inner, pressure-restraining layer. In a previous 2007
competition, only the pressure-restraining layer was required.
The two competitors were tied in several categories, but Peter
Homer, who won $200,000 in the first Astronaut Glove Challenge in
2007, claimed first prize again this time by outscoring his rival
in the joint-flexibility and pressure tests. Ted Southern, who
captured second place, also competed in 2007. The designs presented
in the competition were measured and evaluated by engineers from
Johnson, NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and NASA's
spacesuit manufacturer, ILC Dover of Dover, Delaware.
The Astronaut Glove Challenge is one of six Centennial
Challenges prize competitions managed by NASA's Innovative
Partnerships Program, which provides the prize funds. This was the
fourth consecutive Centennial Challenge event with prize winners.
The program has awarded $3.65 million in 2009.
"Our challenges have been difficult, multi-year efforts and in
many cases it has taken several years for competitors to perfect
their designs," said Andrew Petro, the Centennial Challenges
Program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We are now
seeing the results of their perseverance."