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Astronaut Glove Challenge

Astronaut Glove Challenge: spurring development of improved spacesuit gloves.

Topics:
Aerospace Government Materials

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:01 [Music] when most people think of Southwest Harbor main they think of summer vacations the nearby mountains and boards but NASA knows this small coastal town for something else it's home to Peter Homer the first winner of a NASA Centennial challenges competition the Centennial challenges program is part of a larger effort of NASA's Innovative

    00:00:31 Partnerships program it's designed to tap into Innovative thinking from small teams and individuals the agency might not attract through traditional procurement methods in early 2006 Mr Homer saw a press release about the astronaut glove Challenge online there was a challenge to design and build an airplane you know to fly um there was a challenge to build a rocket to fly and I

    00:00:56 thought well that'd be fun but I don't know if I can quite fit that into my Gage but I saw the glove Challenge and um it it fit the parameters of scale that something that I thought I could do on my own space suit gloves have to be strong enough to protect astronauts while withstanding the internal pressure of an earthlike atmosphere like car tires they stiffen when inflated the

    00:01:18 lack of flexibility can rapidly lead to fatigue in astronauts hands and arms using the gloves during long space walks can also lead to Bruises blisters and cuts even ripped off fingernails a little discomfort you know they're going to overcome that but um the same astr has to put the gloves on the next day and go back to work as as I like to say and that's where it gets hard Peter

    00:01:43 Homer knew that he had his work cut out for him but as a date for the competition Drew near he was still struggling I spent about 9 months doing that sort of paper design and thinking about it come here with ideas and um that's the design that didn't work and so I learned that I needed to you know if if I follow that approach I wasn't going to have anything um 3

    00:02:06 months later which is about all the time I had that's when he decided to take a radically different approach I started putting little strips of tape on my hand and and uh tried a few different things that didn't work and I came up with this one design where I could with all this tape wrapped around my hand I could close my hand into a fist and open it and I couldn't even feel the tape it

    00:02:26 just moved with me yet it was in a configuration that I needed and that was sort of a breakthrough for me and that I realized that I found a way to to achieve that flexibility and still restrain the pressure sitting at his antique sewing machine Mr Homer focused his attention on how to make the fingers most attempts didn't work but every failure taught him

    00:02:51 a little bit more after each success he moved to the next section of the glove testing each new version in a homemade vacuum test stand just hours before the competition Mr Homer turned off his sewing machine and drove to Windsor Connecticut it was time for hand-to-hand competition with some of the foremost space glove experts in the country but he knew that even if no one bested

    00:03:13 NASA's Phase 6 glove the space agency would still be a winner all these competitors are competing for a prize each is putting their own money or or their Investor's money into the work and when you add it all up you generally see you know some multiple of the prize amount spent in R&D is in essence you know free work or highly leveraged so for a $100,000 prize

    00:03:38 you might see a million dollars worth of total investment Mr Homer's glove survived preliminary leate checks then it passed the pressure burst test finally his homemade space glove vested NASA's own glove and the rest of the competition with its flexibility and Mobility for his winning entry Mr Homer was awarded a $200,000 prize after after the

    00:04:00 competition he returned to Southwest Harbor to start his own company which is focused on developing more flexible space suit elements based on his glove and streamlining the production of made to fit spaces but he returned to that small coastal town but more than that he returned with the satisfaction of creating and sharing a real Hands-On solution to one of human space

    00:04:22 exploration toughest challenges [Music]