Big Space Prize News: Astronaut Glove Challenge Won!

From RLV News comes the news that the first NASA Centennial Challenge win happened! There is also more information on the glove challenge win at another RLV News post that also discusses the next Centennial Challenge (in just a few days) - the Regolith Excavation Challenge. More on that soon ... I have a bit of work and end of semester activity going on ...

Out of the 6 registrants for the competition, 3 made it to the actual event. The winner was Peter Homer, who has a background in engineering and sales. An artist Theodore Southern was also one of the competitors. Pablo de Leon, a spacesuit expert, was on a team called MDLH that also had spacesuit professionals Garry Harris and Nik Moiseev.

I have more information about Pablo De Leon, who is well-known for working on space suits. In fact one of his test suits was the top story on Internet sites with news articles like yahoo.com at one point last summer. Here some background from the University of North Dakota. You can find more about his Ansari X PRIZE and X PRIZE Cup work here.

You can see some cool pictures of the competition at the space.com article on the competition.

Here's a local Connecticut article from the Hartford Courant on the challenge, which was held in Windsor Locks, CT. This is a particularly nice article because it gives you some insights into the 3 competitors (and a 4th that may be back next time) and their different designs.

Here are some comments by Rand, who had the original idea.