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Lending a hand in space exploration
A Maine school bus driver won $200,000 in a NASA-sponsored contest to design a new glove for astronauts.
from the June 25, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration instituted its Centennial Challenges program in 2005 in hopes of finding new talent to work through nagging problems in space exploration. Past competitions have involved the manufacture of tether material for structural applications and the development of a lunar lander. There were no winners in those competitions.
Entrants in an upcoming contest will seek to extract oxygen from simulated lunar soil. The first team to do so will receive $1 million. "Prizes have a long history of being able to accelerate technology development," says Ken Davidian, NASA Centennial Challenges program manager. "It's a formal on-ramp for nontraditional sources of innovation."
Many of the competitions are supported by aerospace corporations and foundations. Volanz Aerospace Inc. backed the glove challenge, and Hamilton Sundstrand, a creator of spacesuits, sponsored the kickoff conference at the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Conn.
Homer stumbled across the contest while surfing the Web. In April 2006 the whole Homer family drove to Windsor Locks so he could be briefed on the contest's particulars.
The competition was limited in numbers, but stiff. Prospective contestants included independent inventors, college professors, and an international three-person team with substantial experience in spacesuit design. Homer made the seven-hour return trip to Southwest Harbor knowing he had plenty of work ahead of him.
First came the seemingly straightforward question of how to fashion a glove. Even that took time. "There was no pattern, and NASA wasn't talking," Homer recalls.
He began with the fingers, on the premise that he'd move from there up the hand and then to the wrist. The results of early finger failures litter the dining table – too hard, too soft, not strong enough, inflexible. "It was an iterative process," Homers says, in understatement. The tools he used cover the table: screwdrivers, pliers, thread, punches, a bulb pump, fabric, scissors. A notebook is filled with sketches.
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