SOUTHWEST HARBOR, Maine — Two years ago, a local engineer got the attention of the aerospace world, and $200,000, when his glove design won the top prize at NASA’s Astronaut Glove Challenge.
Last week, Peter Homer again showed he had the right stuff when he won the second phase of the same NASA design challenge. This time around, Homer is bringing home $250,000 as his prize.
In 2007, Homer founded his company Flagsuit LLC to develop and market his designs.
He said Monday that, in the past two years, he has put himself into debt while improving his glove design and finding other commercial applications for his work, which focuses on pressurized suit technology.
“It will be nice to right the ship a little bit,” Homer said of the prize money. “It will allow me to pay myself a salary for the first time.”
Homer is an aerospace engineer who used to design communications satellites for General Electric. In 2007, working for months at a sewing machine on the dining room table of his Clark Point Road home, Homer designed a glove that, because it has to be worn in the vacuum of space, has to withstand air pressure from within.
For this year’s competition, contestants had to design and submit both a pressure-resistant inner glove and a temperature- and particle-resistant outer glove. Miniscule objects called micrometeoroids move at 17,000 mph in orbital speed, Homer said, and could puncture a spacesuit if the suit is not strong enough.
In a prepared statement about last week’s competition, NASA indicated that Homer beat out a team headed by Ted Southern of Brooklyn, N.Y., by “outscoring his rival in joint-flexibility and in the pressure test.” Southern’s team placed second, winning $100,000.
According to Homer, both he and Southern won cash prizes last week because each of their prototypes outperformed NASA’s existing design.
“There has been some significant improvement over what they currently use,” Homer said.
The competition was held Nov. 19 at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Titusville, Fla., near the Kennedy Space Center. The entries were judged by engineers with NASA and with ILC Dover, which manufactures spacesuits for the space agency.
The glove competition is one of six Centennial Challenges managed by NASA’s Innovative Partnership Program, which has awarded $3.65 million in challenge prize money this year, according to the agency.
Homer said he expects NASA to hold another glove competition in the next year or so at which glove prototypes will have to undergo more thorough simulated testing. The first two stages of the competition focused mostly on the physical qualities of the gloves, such as their weight and their ability to withstand pressure and temperature, he said. In the third round, judges will test how well the gloves handle typical astronaut tasks, such as manually operating tools or machinery.
“Testing was fairly limited in the first two rounds,” Homer said.
For the next competition stage, Homer hopes to show NASA how his glove design might fit with a full pressurized body suit prototype. Such a suit would fit inside an astronaut’s outer spacesuit shell, he said. Through his company, Homer already is developing full-body pressurized suits for use as wearable, mobile hyperbaric chambers, he said.
Homer has become something of a regular at NASA design competitions. Last month, he was on a team with fellow Mount Desert Island residents Ben Baxter and Mason Ham that took part in the agency’s lunar soil excavation challenge in San Jose, Calif. The trio built a remote-controlled soil excavator that was designed to op-erate on the moon.
Homer said digging lunar soil poses challenges different from operating a backhoe on Earth. There is no atmosphere on the moon, so soil cannot be sucked up with the aid of a vacuum hose. And the physical properties of lunar soil make it much more compact than any soil most people would be familiar with, he said.
“You can’t stick a shovel into it,” Homer said.
The excavator submitted by the MDI team met NASA’s weight guidelines and could excavate a lot of simulated lunar soil, Homer said, but it failed in the competition. The excavator had unexpected electrical problems and was unable to adequately demonstrate its capabilities during the team’s 30-minute test window, he said.
Homer said that going forward he expects to focus primarily on improving his glove and pressure suit designs.
“That was a little side project,” he said of the excavator challenge. “It was a lot of fun.”
