NASA has awarded $200,000 to the creator of a new spacesuit glove that beat out its competitors and NASA’s own current glove in tests of strength, flexibility and comfort. Aspects of the design could be used in future NASA spacesuits.
The Astronaut Glove Challenge was part of a series of NASA-funded contests called Centennial Challenges. NASA promised $200,000 in prize money for anyone who could design a glove capable of outperforming the existing gloves used by NASA astronauts, as well as beating those of other entrants in the competition.
On Thursday, NASA announced that Peter Homer of Southwest Harbor, Maine, US, had bagged the $200,000 award, using off-the-shelf materials.
Gloves are possibly the most important part of the spacesuit from an astronaut’s perspective. In addition to cranking levers and handling power drills, astronauts use their hands – rather than their feet – as their primary mode of “walking” around the International Space Station (ISS).
Current gloves use two inner layers – a rubbery balloon-like layer surrounded by cloth to help keep the glove’s shape – and an outer shield that protects against micrometeoroids and orbital debris and insulates the hands against the extreme temperatures of space.
The gloves are pressurised, making it difficult for the astronauts to move their fingers. As a result, they often do hand-strengthening exercises to prepare for spacewalks, which can last six hours or more. The labour-intensive spacewalks often leave astronauts’ hands bruised and pinched and their fingernails bent backwards.
On Wednesday and Thursday, competitors each submitted two identical gloves to the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, US. Organisers had expected five entrants, but two dropped out before the competition began.
Each competitor submitted a glove to a “burst challenge”, wherein the glove was pumped full of water until it sprung a leak. Organisers measured the water pressure at the glove’s breaking point, making this part of the competition basically a strength test for the gloves.
One of the three entries failed to meet the minimum strength required, so was disqualified.
The remaining two competitors each submitted the surviving half of their glove pair to a comfort test. The team members had to do hand exercises with the glove on inside a box designed to mimic the pressure difference experienced in the vacuum of space, while the organisers periodically checked team members’ hands for blisters and other injuries.
Both of the remaining gloves did well on this, says Alan Hayes, chairman and CEO of Volanz Aerospace in Owings, Maryland, US, which administered the competition.
A third test, where the contest organisers measured how well the glove flexed under pressure was the real discriminator between the two designs.
“Most of the score was on the dexterity of the glove,” Hayes told New Scientist. “How much pressure did it take to move the fingers? That really became the delineator between the two.”
Peter Homer’s winning design uses humble materials. Off-the-shelf flexible gloves – the kind a doctor might use – were used for the inner bladder, says Hayes. The outside is “a cloth material he got off eBay”, he says.
Homer’s careful work stitching the cloth together paid off in the strength test. “His sewing job held very well,” Hayes says. “We were very impressed.” Hayes tried on the glove, which he says was “very comfortable”.
Although Homer’s glove design outscored the NASA glove in the tests, the comparison is not perfect. That is because gloves in the competition did not have to have features like the ability to withstand micrometeorite impacts, which the NASA gloves have.
The competition was for gloves of the ‘bladder restraint’ type, which are similar to existing gloves in that they are made of a rubbery layer surrounded by cloth. There were no entrants in a second contest for ‘mechanical counterpressure’ gloves, for which NASA put up $50,000 in prize money. Mechanical counterpressure gloves would be elastically fitted to the body like a second skin.
On 11 and 12 May, NASA will hold another Centennial Challenge – the Regolith Excavation Challenge. That will pit robotic scoops and diggers against each other to see which can move the most lunar dirt out of a sandbox and into a bin. The contest is designed to spur the technological innovation needed to send humans back to the Moon (see NASA challenges inventors to design Moon diggers).