Homemade Space Glove Wins NASA Contest

WINDSOR LOCKS, Conn. -- An astronaut glove stitched together on a Maine engineer's dining room table won a cool $200,000 Thursday in a NASA competition.

Peter Homer, an engineer from Southwest Harbor, Maine, won NASA's first-ever Astronaut Glove Challenge after a two-day competition here at the New England Air Museum near Bradley International Airport.

"It feels good," said Homer, whose two home-built spacesuit gloves beat entries from two other teams to take home the top prize. "It took a lot of sitting at the sewing machine."

Wouldn’t age discrimination, reverse discrimination and pork barreling diminish considerably if there were more competitive prizes offered like that?

For interesting information about other prizes initiatives from other agencies, as well as NASA:

http://www.spaceprojects.com/prizes

Now then...are any presidential candidates (or potential ones) besides Newt advocating an increased role of such prizes in U.S. government procurement? Should I NOT be baffled that John McCain is apparently silent on this issue even as he says he’s against pork-barrel spending? Incidentally the H Prize for hydrogen-powered vehicles remains without his sponsorship in the Senate, where its lack of passage last year killed that bill even as the House had overwhelmingly passed it. Same goes for Hillary & Obama, the supposed opponents of global warming.

For more information on the H Prize’s progress, or that of DARPA’s Urban Challenge or NASA’s (vastly underfunded) Centennial Challenges:

http://www.spaceprojects.com/prizes

Several dozen media outlets worldwide have covered this breakthrough story:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1116001939&filter=0

so hopefully the competitive prizes movement will be allowed to spread and people will increasingly stand up to pork barrelers across the globe...

According to this Houston Chronicle article:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/science/4776947.html

the current NASA glove is designed by Hamilton Sustrand. Any idea how much it costs, relative to that of this prize-contestant?

Anyhow, in less than a week NASA’s lunar regolith challenge gets underway out in California. Will it have a winner or will it be administered peculiarly in ways that yield numerous complaints from contestants like what we saw happen last October?

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