NASA Space Cosmos Inventors and Inventions

When Peter K. Homer, an out-of-work director of a local community center in Maine, first heard that NASA was turning to America's backyard inventors to brainstorm new technologies for a possible return to the moon, he had an idea. With NASA sponsoring seven design contests for everything from a new lunar lander to a new space glove, anybody with a home-brewed invention could enter. Homer's previous jobs included some gigs in the aerospace industry as well as work sewing boat sails. So, Homer told me not long ago, he ruled out building a flying spacecraft but decided that "the glove contest represented something of the scale I could achieve working out of my home by myself." He'd always been a garage tinkerer, he said, and being unemployed, he also wanted to prove to his 14-year-old son "that you can do anything if you put your mind to it." Oh, he added offhandedly, "the money is a motivator, too." At stake was a prize - presented with one of those giant cardboard checks - for 0,000.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

A Sewing Machine and a Dream Peter Homer in his workshop/dining room in Southwest Harbor, Me. His design for the space glove was one of three finalists in the NASA contest.

Multimedia Video The Winning Hand Related Goodbye, Columbus! (Jan. 5, 2003) Jack Hitt on an amateur historian who contends that the Chinese discovered America 70 years before Columbus. Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

Reaching for the stars: Peter Homer's space-glove design.

Last spring, Homer seized his family's dining room, occupied his garage and set out to build a better space glove for NASA. It doesn't sound like the most glamorous task in the larger effort of conquering the final frontier, or maybe even that big of a problem. But the space glove is fraught with little tribulations that, like a pebble in a shoe, can drive a space program half crazy. Because the air inside a spacesuit is highly pressurized, each time an astronaut flexes a muscle, he has to overcome the suit's resistance. It's actual work. And when it comes to the highly articulated precision that is the human hand, this means that the fine sinews are quickly exhausted and the fingers brutalized by the effort. Astronauts often return from space with their hands rubbed raw, sometimes bleeding. "In the early days," I was told by Alan Hayes, the C.E.O. of Volanz Aerospace Inc., the company that NASA chose to run the glove contest, "the astronauts lost their fingernails. It was really kind of gross."

Gary L. Harris, a giant in the world of space gear, told me that "flexing the hand in space is like squeezing a tennis ball." Harris is an industrial designer and the author of a book called "The Origins and Technology of the Advanced Extravehicular Space Suit." "There are 200-something bones in the adult body," he said, "and something like 26 of them are in our hand. No mechanical device made yet can duplicate it, yet it has the weakest muscles." As a technological puzzle, he went on, the space glove poses all the challenges of the spacesuit, in miniature. "The four fingers are like the four limbs," he said, "and the thumb is a like a shoulder - omnidirectional, capable of 360 degrees of motion."

A few months ago, Harris showed up at the New England Air Museum, next to the Hartford, Conn., airport, where the glove contest was held. Many of the amateur designers on hand had read Harris's book for clues on glove innovation and were thrilled to meet him, until they found out he would also be competing against them. Harris had teamed with a tall, quiet Muscovite named Nik Moiseev, the man partly responsible for the cosmonauts' glove in the Russian space program. It was Moiseev's idea to partner up with Harris and win the money. "There's no space work in Russia," Harris confided to me, adding that for the time being Moiseev was bunking in Harris's spare bedroom in Florida. (They joined forces with Pablo de Leon, the founder of a company that sells spacesuits.)

Even after I learned that only 5 of the (rumored) 10 contestants had arrived, the assortment was, in a word, diverse. Besides Harris, the Russian and Homer, there was an art student named Ted Southern from the Pratt Institute in New York. Southern moonlights as a costume fabricator for movies and has worked recently on the outfits in Julie Taymor's coming film, "Across the Universe." And those angel's wings on the Victoria's Secret models? Southern built the frames.

Then there was an elderly Irishman with bright, blue, wary eyes who'd rather his name not become public. He spoke with an old-school Bronx accent that would make Robert De Niro cry. He wore moth-eaten clothes, practically trembled with suspicion and trailed a pitiless cloud of ammonia. He quit the contest before it even began, as did Flint Hamblin. Hamblin flew in late from Utah but then announced that his lawyers were not keen on him publicly disclosing his new novel technology, so instead he lingered, adding his own cagey aura to the mix.

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Jack Hitt is a contributing writer for the magazine and is currently at work on a book about amateurs in America.

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