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

Internal Nasa flamewar

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

Does any one else ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

... 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 ...

[Cadallin]

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?

Spacewalk is hard on the... hands?

[sczimme]

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.

I thnik the contests need to be

[Shivetya]

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.

Link With Pictures

[FreeRadicalX]

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

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.

Age Discrimination?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Both happy and sad...

[SerpentMage]

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!