Winner of NASA Glove Contest Named

eZtaR writes "The winner of NASA's $200k spacesuit glove contest has been found. He's an unemployed aerospace engineer, named Peter Homer, and claims to have bought most of the materials in local shops and on eBay."

Internal Nasa flamewar

The baseline Phase VI glove needs replacing.
This guy should have called his the emacs glove, it would have 7 hands a kitchen sink and be able to host multiple lifeforms.

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Funny you should mention "kitchen sink". There's a bit of additional detail (and a photo of the glove!) on engadget [engadget.com]. It mentions that he used off-the-shelf kitchen cleaning gloves as the base.

And come to think of it, the average kitchen gloves *do* host

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Sorry to self-reply, but I wanted to point out that the glove in the Discovery article photo is NOT the glove Peter Homer made -- it's the old NASA glove. That's why I was searching for a photo of the new glove.

Caption:

Astronaut David A. Wolf practices techniques to eliminate or trim protruding gap fillers July 31, 2005 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

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The image links to a SPACE.com article [space.com] with more images and info.

Does any one else ...

... share my concerns about anyone named Homer being involved in the space program?

In all seriousness, I'm sure he'll end up with a good job out of this, which should be worth more to him and his family in the long run then the $200k prize.

Re:Does any one else ...

There seems to be no mention of an inanimate carbon rod here, though.

Re:Does any one else ...

Why? When there are so many out of work engineers in your field that you can just hold a contest, what's the point in hiring somebody?

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You can't just slap that glove as is on a suit. Apparently, there were some novel design features, but those features now need to be incorporated into the suits.

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Ok, So you hold another contest for somebody to do that. Saying "I'll give $X0,000 to anybody that solve this difficult and expensive problem" is a heck of a lot cheaper than having to pay one, or multiple employees. Welcome to the future, where your job

Age Discrimination?

He has been supporting his family by working in other fields. His son is 14 years old. Do the 'rithemtic and read the 'riting on the wall: he's middle-aged, talented, so he earns more than a new-grad junior engineer. Thus he now is unemployed, despite being demonstrably skilled: he developed the winning solution to a problem he'd never worked on before. Why is he not still an aerospace engineer? The bean counting MBA parasite that "downsized" him is the one who should be collecting unemployment!

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Why is he not still an aerospace engineer?

Is he actually looking for employment in aerospace? From reading the article, it appears he left aerospace engineering after bouncing around to go into computer sales. It doesn't say he was forced out of aerospac

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Why is he not still an aerospace engineer? The bean counting MBA parasite that "downsized" him is the one who should be collecting unemployment!

And of course the massive (and steady) shrinkage of the aerospace industry over the past 10-15 years has nothin

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Because the best solution to a problem is expensive. Capitalism doesn't give you "best" it give you cheapest. This guy is experienced and talented, has a family to support, and is therefore expensive. Therefore he is out of work. That fact that one of

Radio Shack

Back in the day, you could have bought all this stuff at your local Radio Shack. Now, if you're lucky, they'll actually have an RJ-45 cable. Otherwise, they're a place of pre-packaged largely useless gizmos - radio controlled cars, over priced cell phones, and electronic doorbells. It's been a cold in hell since I've seen a transistor, resistor, servo, circuit board, etc. for sale in one. And this is really sad, because they were the only place around here that stocked that sort of thing. Because of this, it's been ages since I've been to a Radio Shack willingly.

I think it stifles innovation not to have places like that around. We went in there as kids and bought all kinds of stuff to build all kinds of stuff. I recall at one point we tried to attach a guidance system to our toy rockets. Now, this had immense practical ramifications since our ultimate purpose was to terrify Old Lady Mortinson's giant hound. Yes, I know, this wasn't horribly well thought out, but what I can say - we were nine. She had this huge beast that lounged about on her front porch until it spotted children. This thing's back was nearly as tall as we were. He had, in our opinion, the largest teeth ever seen on a dog, complete with world-class doggy breath and strings of drool. This wouldn't have been so bad except she lived across the street from the school.

We'd get out of school and have to wait for someone to pick us up. The hound would see all of us gathering and bestir himself. His first act was always to start baying. All this did was drive us to huddle together like a human bait ball. Well, the huge beast would gallop across the street and plow in to us. He'd have a lovely time chasing everyone around, tongue out, and huge paws throwing mud. We'd get in trouble for getting our school clothes dirty and we were convinced that the beast was out to eat one of us.

Anyway, we starting trying to come up with ways to defeat the beast. Since we knew we'd get in trouble for hurting it, that pretty much ruled out BB guns, pellet guns, and 22's that most of us already had (hey, we were country kids). That meant we had to be more creative. We'd go to the Radio Shack and spend hours pouring through the catalog and the shelves trying to come up with something to chase the beast off. We learned more about design from that ridiculous dog. Now, with no where to go, how are kids supposed to do that? Don't tell me that they can do it on line. It's not the same as holding the part in your hand to see how much it weighs or being able to really get a sense of it's size. These are abstract concepts that come hard to a nine year old kid.

2 cents,

Queen B.

Frys Electronics

n/t

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Now, with no where to go, how are kids supposed to do that? They don't. Instead, they use their free time getting hold of guns and shooting out their high schools... That sounds overly morbid, but think about it. If a kid isn't involved in after school a

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'Sure he can mess with programming and hacking, but that doesn't get him outside like a model rocket does, and has a poor social stigma attached to it.'

Not anymore. Being a geek is cool now.

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There are still Radio Shack stores with good suppliest of chips, components, cabling, boards, chemicals, etc. But they are rare. RS corporate is slowly killing them all. Here in Nashville, *ONE* store out of about 12 in the county is a 'parts store'. A

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It doesn't really matter... NASA will find some way of having this glove cost $365M per glove to manufacture, and utilize subcontractors from the district of every Congressman in any committee that approves their budget.

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I generally have the same opinion of Radio Shack now that you do. However, for some odd reason, the one in the town where I currently am actually has all of the fun stuff along a couple of walls.

I was amazed. Then again, it was also the only place in thi

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Not really. Homer has extra-terrestrial experience [wikipedia.org].

That's not funny.

... my concerns about anyone named Homer being involved in the space program?

How can you be so crass and shallow? This is a heartbreaking story.

My concern is how this award winning design engineer with 10 years of experience is unemployed. It is obvi

What is funny, according to you?

So a throwaway 'Homer' reference isn't funny, but blatant racism [slashdot.org] is?

What a sense of humour you have.

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So a throwaway 'Homer' reference isn't funny, but blatant racism is?

Hmmm, I would not go so far as to call people who work for M$ a "race" so I don't know what you are talking about. M$ people are strange, but in theory they can still produce viable of

But will NASA's new spacecraft....

...even have a glovebox?

This might be bad...

NASA might start overbidding on eBay for weird crap...

Think they'll buy my old pokemon cards?

Re:This might be bad...

NASA actually does buy some parts on eBay (although I wouldn't say it's a lot of them). When systems get old, you have a choice between paying to design a replacement board with modern components for a legacy system or digging up older parts. Often times the older parts are going to be the cheaper solution, and the advent of eBay has made them a lot easier to find.

The NY Times had an article on this a few years ago: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0 CE2DF1739F931A25756C0A9649C8B63 [nytimes.com]

Spacewalk is hard on the... hands?

Spacewalks are hard on astronauts' hands

I know there is more to the sentence, but this clause made me chuckle. "Heh - they're doing it wrong."

I need more coffee...

PS Here is the link to the printer-friendly version, i.e. the article on one page [discovery.com].

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You should read the ALSJ [nasa.gov]. Astronauts who walked on the moon absolutely wrecked their fingers, mainly because the gloves had to be short and tight for better sensitivity which meant pressing their fingers hard into the end of the glove while doing heavy wor

I gotta call this guy

ever since I won that old space suit writing soap slogans, I have had a tough time getting it back into good shape. i bet he could give me some good pointers.

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so you think my plan to build a nuclear powered rocket and go to the moon with some friends might run into regulatory problems as well?

Upon viewing

NASA astronauts were overheard to have said, "It's so bad!"

I thnik the contests need to be

more widely advertised as well as celebrated when a winner is selected.

We need to recognize that individual accomplishment is still something to crow about. When schools turn to removing achievment rewards for fear of offending those who don't achieve to removing grades for the same reason we teach kids the wrong lesson. The winner of this competition was not only trying to help NASA but provide his child a valuable lesson. This is the type of stuff that needs to taught to kids in school today. Show them that one person can do what many cannot do, then explain to them the need for both individual and groups for accomplishing goals.

Many great advancements are the work of a single person, someone who thinks "outside the box". We have to remember that the village is made up of individuals and they are as important as the village.

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"When schools turn to removing achievment rewards for fear of offending those who don't achieve to removing grades for the same reason we teach kids the wrong lesson."

To quote "The Simpsons":

Lisa: But my parents are counting on seeing me dance! And I've w

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Agreed. But how on earth can we conspire to get kids interested in techie stuff when the media tends to drag it down at every chance?

Here in the UK, the Royal Society of Chemistry ran a maths challenge to highlight the fact that Chinese teenagers were re

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Not this again. Let me give you the rebuttal [jstor.org] in short:

There are good reasons to think that Deci & Ryan have an axe to grind and that the research that they use is somewhat flawed. Gary Latham (now President-Elect of SIOP, and HIGHLY respected psyhoch

well, obviously!

With parts bought on eBay, he was sure to win hands down!

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He'll be selling them hand over fist!

wait!

Wait untill the next round of tests the Nasa will do; then the gloves really will come off!

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Hopefully they won't be testing in space then.

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His eBay feedback reads. Buyer Out Of This World!!!! A+++++

Link With Pictures

Here's another [space.com] article about the glove that actually features pictures of the gloves and contestants.

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That's the wrong link. The correct one is found here [wikimedia.org]. Purchased from e-bay indeed...

Smell the Glove!

It smells like victory!

Both happy and sad...

I am happy for the guy that won, and am happy that the guy had a never say die attitude. BUT, and here is the big but you have to ask yourself what the heck happened here.

I think this guy might quite literally be a rocket scientist who ended up selling computers, then a community services manager, and then became unemployed. If America wants to be the forefront of technology, America needs to ask why does a guy have to buy something at EBay to build the next generation of technology?

Maybe America needs a few more role model "Homers".... instead of some Paris Hilton's who happens to be going to jail for 45 days or ended up shaving their head out of whim!

Simple Truth

You make your own luck. This is the exact reason why social support systems fail. Without a real challenge you seldom have the motivation to innovate or take risks. This guy had to fall to the bottom rung to finally wake up. I see far to many kids graduati

Re:Both happy and sad...

Buying things on eBay isn't bad... it's the sign of a good engineer who's being budget-minded. I work at a small aerospace company, and we routinely buy things on eBay. Usually things like valves, fittings, battery chargers and the like for general stock around the shop, but also flowmeters, high pressure compressors, dewars, etc etc. It's much cheaper to buy a flowmeter on eBay and send it out for a calibration than it is to buy it new, and the same is true for many other tools and instruments. I would fully expect significant parts in any of these sorts of contest winners to come from eBay or other used / surplus sources.

Heh

He's an unemployed aerospace engineer

Is there any other kind?

*ducks*

(I get to say that, a good friend of mine is an unemployed aerospace engineer :p)

Re:You know all those Sci-Fi books you've been rea

With most engineering specialties, the demand is pretty steady, but the aerospace business is cyclic with about a 20 year cycle. The bottom of the money spent on aerospace stuff dropped out the bottom in the late 60's/early 70's after a peak in the mid-60's, and the pattern repeated itself in the late 80's/early 90's (when I was trying to find a job with my engineering degree, just out of grad school) and it appears to be holding true now. At least this programming gig turned out to be something I could do in the long term.

However, one of these days I have a dream of someday actually doing some of the engineering that I spent six years learning about.

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Aerospace is more cyclic than twenty years. 20 years represent the BIG projects, such as the F-22. Which is currently winding down. Pretty funny that a "brand new" fighter is almost 20 years old.

Getting off the subject, most projects last from 6 month