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."

Comments

Radio Shack

[queenb**ch]

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.

Re:Internal Nasa flamewar

[JavaRob]

Funny you should mention "kitchen sink". There's a bit of additional detail (and a photo of the glove!) on engadget. 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:You know all those Sci-Fi books you've been rea

[jguthrie]

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.

Re:This might be bad...

[cyclone96]

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

Re:I thnik the contests need to be

[laughing_badger]

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 improve our teaching and require more of university entrants, otherwise we would lose our position as one of the leaders in science and engineering. The press reported it as either 'British man beats the Chinese' or 'RSoC says British crap at maths - Shoreham man proves them wrong'.

I get the feeling that people in general take a pride in not caring about science/maths because they found it hard at school and want nothing more to do with it. If anyone wants me, I'll be crying into my beer on my blog and learning how to chip flint arrowheads for when society implodes back to the stone age.

Ok, one ray of hope: the BBC education report wasn't too bad.