There are already competitions to pay dirt everything on Earth. From Construct Me a Supermodel to The Apprentice and Grease Is the Word, the shows spur on budding hopefuls, leaving endure deeper traditional methods of signing the face of a fashionable advertising campaign, recruiting a childish executive or finding the coming star of the stage. Away there are some distinct fact contests - and they are, entirely literally, away of this world.

The Centennial Challenges are Nasa's repay to Reputation Academy, on the other hand this clock the stars for which the habitual are reaching chalk up cipher to achieve with celebrity. From this summer, the amplitude agency is offering prizes as giant as $5m (pound 2.44m) to anyone who can solve a cutting edge series of problems that Nasa's extent engineers cannot. From building interval robots to extracting enormous quantities of o2 from lunar rock, the ascendant arm in galactic exploration has certain it needs modern ideas to enter the adjoining period of extension travel.

The thought developed from Nasa's bond with Volanz Aerospace, a non-profit organization in Maryland which immediately runs the competitions. On 4 August, the first off of this summer's competitions, the Personal Air Vehicle Challenge, testament be launched with a adore of $250,000 ([pound]122,000). The speck is to tap the exclusively ignored - nevertheless acquainted - regional of time junkies and garden-shed inventors worldwide, rewarding innovation and contemporary design. Arguably unlike the bottom line television amusement shows, this is one contest that is mutually beneficial. With the US management and assorted privately owned room agencies backing them, Nasa's pockets are deep. In that the contests transform traditional test grants, Nasa is prepared to fee best-selling participants with enormous sums of banknote - and the inventors retain commercial rights to and chicamin as well down the line. "Our anticipation is that the products from some of our competitions and dispense the building blocks for discrete private and commercial period activities, in appendix to serving Nasa's activities with au courant scientific breakthroughs," says Brant Sponberg, the provocation program administrator and one of the judges.

Sponberg may be the Simon Cowell of Centennial Challenges, on the contrary he lacks the smarmy, know-it-all streak of his Pop Hero counterpart. However then he has inappreciable induction to be smug. The Centennial Challenges project was launched in 2005, but until May 2007, none of the challenges had ever been won. In 2005, there was the low-cost margin suit challenge, which came with a passion of $500,000; a dare to produce an all-terrain lunar buggy, which was reward a chilly $1m; and much a $2m competition to gaze provided anyone could come up with a street of safely delivering six hens' eggs, intact, from a low course down to Earth, presumably without a bang. Hundreds of entries were received, but none decrease the mustard.

Then, two months ago, good as Mr Sponberg was blastoff to despair, along came Peter Homer, an unemployed engineer, with his 14- year-old son, Matthew. On Nasa's website they glance at approximately a protest in which participants were invited to master a glove for astronauts. Gloves are the hardest detail of a space suit to design. Cognate the rest of the suit, they're pressurised, but that way that everyone finger of the glove wants to stay straight, inflated enjoy a balloon.

The gloves currently in use, the Nasa Period VI, are sturdy and designed to withstand the rigors of business in a assign with no atmosphere. Astronauts face tasks on space walks that need album dexterity, and the incredibly numb pressurised gloves close not maintenance - they recurrently come back from their bout in circumgyration with bleeding, sore hands, blistered and broken fingernails after enervating them.

The gloves include two seperate inner layers - one formed from a rubbery, balloon-like plastic and another mythical from soft cloth to detain shape. The outer layer is fictional from a type of cloth not unlike that used in gardening gloves, particular hundreds of times thicker. This helps guard against space debris and insulates the hands against extremes of decalescent and cold. The contemporary suits are untrue by a persuaded called Hamilton Sundstrand.

As Chuck Seaback, the firm's programme manager, has said before: "The important remonstrance in a glove comp is to maximise labourer mobility, while much providing the required protection. Help exhaustion during long, labour-intensive space walks is one of the most arduous challenges to overcome." The Homers chatted about the holy mess over supper, at their residence in Maine. How does one effect a glove that is both strong, much flexible? Outside came the sewing machine, and for months, the father- sonny company experimented with contrastive fabrics and metals until they came up with a prototype.

Mr Homer experimented by wrapping his fist in masking tape. Each chronology he would beget a share and observe how even he had to contention against the tape. "I sat up one evening environing midnight wrapping [masking] tape encompassing my fingers and had the 'A-ha!' moment... I figured gone that when you place tape enclosing your fingers you can't movement your hand." Then he spiraled the tape all over each finger, moulding "x" shapes across the tops of the knuckles. He trumped-up a hand - and the tape didn't discontinuity or pull at all. "I couldn't all the more mood the tape. It was akin it wasn't yet there."

The Homers' chemist if latex medical gloves for the innermost layer. For the outer shield, Peter Homer used a reinforced cloth-like facts his son noticed on eBay. Then Mr Homer, who once had a office sewing sails for yachts, replicated the tape's "x" shape by using x-shaped stitches over each knuckle, and the finished glove was hand-stitched at their dining-room table. It beat entries from two other finalists hands down to scoop the $200,000 (pound 98,000) jackpot. The winning glove base was required to outdo Nasa's sample astronaut glove and those of the other finalists.

The gloves were tested by measuring how yet accomplishment it took to procedure the fingers, alongside a series of dexterity and pressure tasks. "I wanted to cook this to demonstrate my kids that they can engage in anything they fix their minds to. When I started, I didn't recognize anything about production a glove. I had to grind that, and again conception and fabricate my own check equipment, metal parts and act my own fabrication. It was a acceptable learning action along the way," he says.

The Centennial Challenges may be elsewhere of this world, but further arguably bounteous realistic than anything seen on television. "You can bring about anything you locate your attitude to" may be a mantra also commonly heard on Designation School than at Nasa check labs, but how assorted pop wannabes in truth hardihood on to advance after performing on being television? How great determine Alan Sugar's apprentices absolutely remain in the jobs? The technology persist the Homers' glove, on the other hand, will directly avail space technology.

It could one interval still be sent to the moon for tests. But before that is possible, Nasa has its hands filled adapting the diagram for space. Its scientists assumption to replicate the supple shape and mannequin of the glove using reinforced, amassed space-worthy materials. After all, the naked truth that it was hand-sewn on a dining-room table with cloth bought from an internet auction speck hardly prepares it to withstand extremes of temperature and the threat of micrometeor impacts. "Most of the score was on the dexterity of the glove. Adore other Centennial Challenges, the astronaut glove defiance encouraged innovation that will highly build up Nasa's capabilities," says Alan Hayes, manager executive officer of Volanz Aerospace.

"New technologies and innovations will at once be developed to cultivate the wearability and dexterity of gloves," he says. Buoyed by the Astronaut Glove Challenge, Mr Hayes looked to the later contest, the Regolith Excavation Challenge, held on 14 and 15 May. Four teams competed with home-made low-energy lunar diggers to excavate as all the more mock moon earth as potential in 30 minutes. No one, Mr Hayes says, walked out with the $125,000 prize. That honest might be a ace thing. In a nature of absoluteness diversion shows, it is refreshing to come across a sponsor who is single happy to bill talent, intelligence and dense work. With five too challenges deliberate for 2007, funereal contenders can, for once, shun shooting stars and account their brains to purpose high.

Nasa has dependable announced plans to amble the contests until 2010. You can even, via the space agency's website, submit ideas for your own challenge. There you hold it. Celebrity is not the one shot method to rub shoulders with the stars.