Astronaut glove. Credit: NASA

Astronauts working in space must wear protective, pressurized suits that also allow them to easily maneuver, so to repair satellites or add solar panels to the space station without constraints. One of the most essential elements of the suit is the glove.

As part of its Centennial Challenge Program, a prize program for the "citizen inventor," NASA is challenging inventors to develop a new astronaut glove. According to NASA:

Like an inflated balloon, the fingers of the gloves resist the effort to bend them. Astronauts must fight that pressure with every movement of their hand, which is exhausting and sometimes results in injury. Furthermore, the joints of the glove are subject to wear that can lead to life-threatening leaks. The Astronaut Glove Challenge seeks improvements to glove design that reduce the effort needed to perform tasks in space and improve the durability of the glove. In this challenge, competitors demonstrate their glove design by performing a range of tasks with the glove in an evacuated chamber. The gloves are also tested to ensure that they do not leak.

Two teams--Ted Southern and Peter Homer, who won the 2007 challenge and started his own company to produce his design--entered the 2009 competition, and have already undergone testing. While both contenders' gloves did not leak and passed the burst test, Homer's glove reached 20 psi, and Southern's glove maxed out at 17 psi. The competitors also had to insert their glove in a box and perform 30 minutes of exercises, which included pinching and gripping, and other manipulations that tested dexterity and flexibility. Judges will be scoring the performance.

The results are not yet in, but both designs were deemed "good" by NASA. The agency could possibly incorporate the glove designs into it's own design, called the Constellation Spacesuit, which will be used to return astronauts to the moon and build a lunar habitat.

Testing a glove design in the "glove box". Credit: NASA

The launch of NASA's new rocket, Ares I-X, on October 28 was the first test flight of a new launch vehicle since the Apollo missions. The flight was spectacular and historic, but the famous Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin says it was little more than a half-a-billion dollar political show.

In an editorial in The Huffington Post, Aldrin calls the rocket for "fake", because the Ares I-X was a prototype rocket built to look like the rocket designed to replace the aging space shuttles and take humans to the moon and beyond, Ares I. For example, its four-segment solid rocket boosters were taken from the space shuttle and the fifth segment was a mock, made of steel cylinders. The rocket's upper stage was also a mock-up (the final will include the J-2X engine and Orion crew capsule), but it used real parachutes for recovery of the boosters. The Ares I-X flight objectives were to gather data during the first two minutes of ascent, when the rocket is most likely to fail, to help engineers better design and development the Ares I.

Aldrin writes that technical problems have "haunted the Ares like leftovers from Halloween," and says that, "to stave off critics, three years ago the Project Constellation managers conceived of the 1-X flight to supposedly show some progress."

The concept of the Ares I-X flight, however, mirrors the development of the Saturn family of rockets that carried the astronauts, Aldrin included, to the moon. During the development of Saturn IB, for example, many test flights were conducted when different segments and parts of the rocket were engineered.

NASA's current plan is to use two rockets to return humans to the moon--Ares I for crew and Ares V as a heavy lifter, carrying things like a lunar habitat. Aldrin notes that it took just one rocket during the Apollo missions, and says that two rockets in development means "two price tags. Two ways for failure to occur. Or delays to develop."

Worse yet, neither rocket alone can accomplish a deep space mission. And deep space, such as Mars is, as our friends in the recent Augustine report stated, our destination in space . . . Ares 1 is too small, barely able to lift the crew space capsule. And Ares V is too weak to boost all of the elements together.

What do we need? One rocket for all our deep space missions. Save the taxpayer's money by canceling the Ares 1 and V. And go "back to the future" in designing the big beast.

Fortunately, Aldrin has a plan: use the commercial sector for transportation to the space station--which would save money--and start building a heavy lifter "worthy of Saturn V's successor." He says the moon should be an international affair, opening up the design competition outside of just NASA, and our efforts should be on Mars.

If we bypass a foolish Moon race . . . we will have time to refine the super booster to make sure it is compatible with our deep space goals, like missions flying by comets or asteroids -- or to the moons of Mars. Such a rocket would be ready when the time comes to colonize Mars. No more false starts and dead end rockets.

One thing the Augustine Panel's final report pointed out is that we should be building infrastructure in space, such as refueling technology, so that rockets that are smaller and cheaper could be used for missions that would otherwise be outside their weight class and larger rockets would have their capabilities enhanced.

The decision is still out on what the next U.S. rocket for space travel will be, but whatever it is (and Aldrin confesses he has his own design), he says, "heavy lifting doesn't have to be heavy spending, if we do the right job."

Along with its Centaur booster, the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) was deliberately smashed into the moon on October 9, in a bid to detect water that might be present as ice in some of the permanently shadowed spots on the moon's surface. At the time, ground-based astronomers, both professional and amateur, were disappointed when the impact failed to produce a plume visible from Earth. However, NASA scientists analyzing the data returned from LCROSS announced today that large quantities of water have been detected.

The plume kicked up by the impact of a spent rocket stage in a lunar crater as detected by the LCROSS probe minutes before it too crashed into the Moon. Picture courtesy NASA

The chosen impact site was in Cabeus crater, near the Moon's south pole. Preceding LCROSS on its suicide run by a few minutes was the spent Centaur rocket stage that boosted LCROSS toward the Moon (incidentally, the Centaur is one of the oldest and most reliable boosters in service, its basic design having first flown in 1963). Although too faint to see from Earth, when the Centaur crashed its plume was visible to LCROSS's camera and spectrographs. According to the scientists, water is the only material that matches the spectral analysis of the plume. They also detected the presence of other materials that have been collecting in Cabeus's shadows for billions of years, but these have not yet been identified.

How this data will play into the current policy debate over whether or not NASA should continue its plans to establish a base on the moon is unknown, but it does suggest that the Moon has at least a few surprises left in store.