#1691: Handpaper

I remember reading about how the Shuttle astronauts had serious trouble with the gloves of their spacesuits whilst in orbit.

In order to get any feel via the rubberised tips of the pressurised gloves, these had to be pulled tightly onto the ends of the fingertips -after a day’s hard graft in space, lots of fingernails had been lost (some astronauts, it seems, even remove their fingernails pre-flight).

A particularly significant problem is delamination in which the nails develop protuberant flakes which snag painfully on the glove interior.

Today’s invention is to help prevent this problem during long EVAs. It consists of a patch of finely abrasive material inside the back face of each of the glove’s fingertips and which maintains smooth ends on the already short nails.