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NASA Space Science

Winner of NASA Glove Contest Named 92

Posted by CowboyNeal from the fits-like-one dept.
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."
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Winner of NASA Glove Contest Named More

Winner of NASA Glove Contest Named

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  • Internal Nasa flamewar (Score:5, Funny)

    by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:16AM (#19001329) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JavaRob ( 28971 )
      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 multiple lifeforms.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JavaRob ( 28971 )
        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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lars T. ( 470328 )
        The image links to a SPACE.com article [space.com] with more images and info.
    • Yes, and every time you wanted to point with your index finger you would have to re-read the manual to find that ever so obscure escape sequence !

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wordplay ( 54438 )
      On the plus side, it would have special attachments so you could hold down five bucky-bits at once and still hit your command key.

  • Does any one else ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:17AM (#19001333)
    ... 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 ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Clazzy ( 958719 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:19AM (#19001359)
      There seems to be no mention of an inanimate carbon rod here, though.

    • Re:Does any one else ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Cadallin ( 863437 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:20AM (#19001361)
      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?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by khallow ( 566160 )
        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.
        • 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 can be replaced by a cash prize contest posted on the internet.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by khallow ( 566160 )
            Someone will beat you to market unless you're the only (as in the case of NASA) doing it. OTOH, if your job can be replaced by a prize, then it probably ought to. There's a lot of appeal to these sorts of things from the employee angle too. After all, you don't have to work on it, if you're so inclined.

      • Age Discrimination? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 05, 2007 @12:15PM (#19002113)
        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!
        • 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 aerospace or laid off - he's currently unemployed after being forced to resign as the director of a community service organization. More info here. [mainecoastnow.com]

          I'm quite sure he could find a position if he wanted one (although he's going to need to get out of Maine). I spent

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by DerekLyons ( 302214 )

          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 nothing to do with it? TFA implies that he hasn't been an aerospace engineer in quite a while - in fact the job he's currently unemployed from is 'director of a community service organization', not 'aerospace engineer'. This cached page [72.14.253.104] from Google suggests he

        • 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 his units of "work" is worth much, much more than some other schmuck doesn't matter. The same reason generally applies to why American manufacturing is dead. The USA had some of the best and most capable manufacturing industries in the world. That gives
        • Why is he not still an aerospace engineer?

          Because he's living in a place where the opportunities for aerospace engineers are virtually zero. I've been there -- it's beautiful, great place to raise children, wonderful place to live, but tough place to try to work if you're in a high-tech profession. He might be able to get more work down around Portland (IIRC National Semi has a big prototype fab right outside Portland, they might have something for him), but that's not exactly commuting distance.

          Now, it mi

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by cbacba ( 944071 )
        Actually, that seems to be the beginnings of being done for particular projects. Offer a contest prize not worth the cost of hiring something done, then give the "prestigeous" award to the winner and claim the work product done along with that of the runners up. Heck, the odds are all of the efforts are better than one would have with a hired hand as well as cheaper.

        As for NASA and the bureaucrats, outdoing them usually isn't that big a deal. Fortunately for the space pen (pump up ball point) it made for

    • Radio Shack (Score:5, Interesting)

      by queenb**ch ( 446380 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @11:18AM (#19001705) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • 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 activities (and many of them are), what does he have to tinker with in his spare time? 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. They still have mod
        • '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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sparr0 ( 451780 )
        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'. Ask the counter-folk at your local 'retail store' RS where the nearest 'parts store' is, you might be pleasantly surprised. Then again, you might not :(

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by samkass ( 174571 )
        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.
      • 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 this town that I could find a Cold Heat soldering iron.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Homer Hickam.

      You shouldn't make fun of things that people don't choose.
    • Not really. Homer has extra-terrestrial experience [wikipedia.org].

    • ... 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 obvious that he did better than the industry and teams of competitors. There is something very wrong with the US aerospace industry.

      This is bad for everyone. It's especially bad for those in the profession. They face the frustration of not getting things d

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

        What a sense of humour you have.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by twitter ( 104583 )

          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 offspring when mated with other human beings.

          • Yes, of course, using terms like "Ali Baba", "jihad" and "terrorism" all in one neat little package isn't racist at all.

            You actually have no clue at all, do you?
    • Homer Hickam [wikipedia.org], aerospace engineer at NASA from '81 to '98. You might remember him as the protagonist in the film "October Sky".

  • But will NASA's new spacecraft.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tinrobot ( 314936 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:20AM (#19001365)
    ...even have a glovebox?

  • This might be bad... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gcnaddict ( 841664 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:21AM (#19001369)
    NASA might start overbidding on eBay for weird crap...

    Think they'll buy my old pokemon cards?

  • Spacewalk is hard on the... hands? (Score:5, Informative)

    by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:23AM (#19001387)

    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].

    • 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 work.

      The other factor is the difficulty of working against gas pressure to perform simple tasks like holding a tool.

  • I gotta call this guy (Score:5, Funny)

    by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) * <bittercode@gmail> on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:24AM (#19001389) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • 0x4583AFE6 0xDD452E98 0xAC381B47 Here, have some of mine, I'm not using them anymore.

    • 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.

      Keep listening on that two way radio. Interesting that Heinleins personal life suppport system was almost exactly the same as the backup system on the Apollo suit. At one point the protagonist dismisses the idea of suits with the ability to absorb CO2 as being too advanced, but that is what actually flew, and the apollo suits had almost twice the time

  • Do not hold a laser pistol [slashdot.org] in this glove!

  • Upon viewing (Score:4, Funny)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:27AM (#19001413) Homepage Journal
    NASA astronauts were overheard to have said, "It's so bad!"

  • I thnik the contests need to be (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Shivetya ( 243324 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:30AM (#19001439) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • While individual accomplishments are important, I don't think schools remove achievement rewards with the sole reason of avoiding offense. In many cases, rewards undermine motivation. On the other hand, I agree that removing grades can be a bad move. Positive feedback, when done right (giving relevant information to the student about their work), has the potential to improve motivation. So does co-operative learning. A quick search on google scholar search turned up this... http://content2.apa.org/journals [apa.org]
      • 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 psyhochologist) writes about it in his 2007 book "Work Motivation". Essentially (and I am heavily condensing here), there are good reasons to believe that rewarding people does not undermine motivation the way Deci argues. One of the reasons is that this conclu
    • "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 worked ever so hard.
      Vicki: I'm sorry, Lisa, but giving everyone an equal part when they're clearly not equal is called what, again, class?
      Class: Communism!
      Vicki: That's right. And I didn't tap all those Morse-code messages to the Allies till my shoes fil

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by laughing_badger ( 628416 )
      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 required to solve a university entrance paper containing harder questions than those used to bring the maths skills of first-year British undergraduates up to scratch. I won the competition, and tried to get the message across to the press that we needed to

      • Fair play to you sir, and those are some lucid and intelligent points you made. A shame they weren't more widely reported.

        Was quite disappointed that none of the reports I saw showed the working for the number questions. I'd have expected no marks and to be failed on the test for just putting down the correct number, but I think there's a sorry disconnect between people who appreciate maths and people who report in the media.
        • I don't honestly know how the RSoC did the marking, nor how many correct answers they obtained.

          For my part, I put together a geometric proof for the first part (I suck at proofs!), and then did the second and third parts using three-dimensional vector maths (dot and cross product). That was mainly because I had a limited amount of time, and after you do enough computer graphics work that kind of maths gets hardwired into your brain. I showed my working though.

          You should indeed get few (if any) marks for

  • well, obviously! (Score:5, Funny)

    by N3wsByt3 ( 758224 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @10:32AM (#19001449) Journal
    With parts bought on eBay, he was sure to win hands down!

  • "The winner of NASA's $200k spacesuit glove contest has been found. He's an unemployed aerospace engineer, named Peter Homer..."

    D`oh!

  • Link With Pictures (Score:5, Informative)

    by FreeRadicalX ( 899322 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @11:06AM (#19001651)
    Here's another [space.com] article about the glove that actually features pictures of the gloves and contestants.
  • It smells like victory!

  • Both happy and sad... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SerpentMage ( 13390 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @12:26PM (#19002179)
    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 (Score:2, Insightful)

      by N8F8 ( 4562 )
      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 graduating from college thinking the hard work is done. At that point ,at most, they have bought a ticket to a tougher game.
      • Yes social systems have their failings. BUT and this is a big but there also has to be incentive. What is the incentive to invent? Anybody who invents and tries to patent will get their butts sued by lawyers. It seems to me that the purpose of the invention was to benefit the small guy who could not afford lawyers. Yet now the system has been turned on its head and benefits the developer with the most lawyers. This is simply not right!

    • Re:Both happy and sad... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by evanbd ( 210358 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @02:02PM (#19002971)
      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.
      • Ok, maybe I should not have thrown in the comment from EBay. I was trying to point out that here we have a guy who is probably a rocket scientist building the next great invention from parts on EBay. It is great how innovative he was, but at the same time it is sad how he had to go to these means to show how great American inventors can be.

        It seems to me that the American inventors are not appreciated, whereas Paris Hilton her jail term is appreciated. Sad...

  • Heh (Score:4, Funny)

    by Z0mb1eman ( 629653 ) on Saturday May 05, 2007 @02:09PM (#19003043) Homepage
    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)

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