The glove challenge has been won.

This has been a problem for my entire career, and was one of the first issues that I worked on out of college. But I think we made more progress on it in the last three years than we have in the three decades prior, because we finally put the right incentives in place. I hope that this will be a big boost for the prize concept in general. Congratulations to the winner, and to Ken Davidian and Brant Sponberg.

Excellent suggestion for a challenge Rand. Well done sir.

BZ and I hope to see more prizes soon. It is surprising that no one fulfilled the sub-prize.

I hear the winner's glove topped at 21.2 lbs in the burst test. Anyone know what the house glove pulled?

Ouch, I agree with Brian. ;)

Is there somewhere with the statistics of the entrants? Burst pressure, or time-to-tighten, and the other test results?

I see the author of that article gave you a shout-out, too, Rand. Congrats for whatever part you may have played in this.

Can you tell the story Rand? I'd love to hear the original frustrations and problems, and how the new glove performed. It's these little improvements that I think will really help improve NASA. Maybe I'll do an article on it.

Can you tell the story Rand? I'd love to hear the original frustrations and problems, and how the new glove performed.

??

I don't know anything about it. I didn't even attend the competition. You need to talk to the winner, Mr. Homer.

Didn't Mitch Burnside-Clapp do a glove design a few years ago? (pre DCX I think) Whatever happened to that?

We need this kind of competition to find a room-temperature superconductor. A few million up front for a few trillion down the road.

Rand's involvement in this is that he originally came up with the glove challenge idea
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/005525.html

Congrats! I hope we all get to wear them in situ, eventually

"It may take a long time for the innovations to be incorporated into spaceworthy gloves, but Davidian said the experts do want to follow up nevertheless.
"

Must feel good to have had an impact. Hopefully it will find it's way to being used?

We need this kind of competition to find a room-temperature superconductor.

We do, it's called a patent.

Hi all,

Just wanted to chime in and let you know I did see Rand's original suggestion for a glove prize competition (after I had signed up for the competition). Looking at it now, I'm reminded that Rand predicted it nearly 100% correct, except that I built the gloves mostly on my dining room table (the garage is too full of junk to work in right now...).

The highest burst pressure at the competition was actually 29.4 psi (two atmospheres) by another team. NASA has never actually burst their current flight glove (and never will intentionally) but it does get tested to a proof pressure of over 13 psi.

It's worth noting that the glove I brought to the competition is not nearly as strong or durable as the ones that go into space. Mine was designed to last for 30 minutes. I'm just hoping that some of my ideas might be incorporated in some way into NASA's next generation design.

At any rate it was a fun competition to enter and fun for my son as well.

-PK Homer

Why didn't anyone go for the Mechanical Counter-pressure challenge? If the technology were really that difficult, it's hard to imagine why it would have been approved as a Centennial Challenge.