Call it open-source, crowd-source, user-generated, whatever: the anyone-can-contribute, cream rises to the top no matter its origin model exemplified by everything from the Firefox browser to the Ansari X Prize is also paying dividends for NASA.
Witness NASA's latest challenge: a contest with a $200,000 top prize for inventors to create a glove. (By NASA's own admission, gloves are astronauts' least-favorite part of a space suit, owing to their tendency to interfere with the delicate work spacewalkers must do while outside a pressurized capsule.)