Paper Planes in Space

Remember making paper airplanes in school and holding competitions to see if they
could make it from the back of the class to the blackboard? Well, the Japanese have
taken it a giant leap forward.

In March, Japan’s space agency announced it was working on launching a plane
made through the ancient art of origami, or paper folding, into outer space for feasibility
studies. The project leader for the agency, Shinji Suzuki, also a professor at the
University of Tokyo’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, told The Associated
Press he initially thought the idea was insane.
“It sounded like a simply impossible, crazy idea,” he said. After mulling it over,
however, he concluded that the plane might survive the return to Earth if it came down
“extremely slowly.”

In a test conducted in early February, a prototype about seven centimetres long and
<001F> ve centimetres wide survived 12 seconds of Mach 7 speeds, and temperatures up to
230 C, in a hypersonic wind tunnel—conditions approximating what the plane would
face re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. The plane theoretically could get back to Earth
because re-entry from outer space involves passing through several atmospheric layers
that last only a few seconds each.
The idea was originally put forward by Takuo Toda, the head of the Japan Origami
Airplane Association. He spent 18 months <001F> guring out the perfect technique to fold
an origami spacecraft from only one sheet of paper—no cutting, stitching or taping
involved. The project relied on paper donated from the association and Suzuki’s
resources from the university.

The space-ready origami paper is made from heat-, wind- and water-resistant sugar
cane <001F> bres that are sprayed with a special coating. The coating, combined with the
plane’s rounded edges and nose cone, and virtually non-existent weight, will reduce the
dangerous, heat-generating friction that causes most damage to vehicles re-entering
Earth’s atmosphere—theoretically at least.

Astronaut Koichi Wakata has agreed to throw several origami shuttles into the wake of
the International Space Station, which travels at Mach 20 some 400 kilometres above
Earth. Findings from the experiment could be used to develop new lightweight space
probes and help design a full-scale shuttle that re-enters the atmosphere slowly to
reduce friction and heat.

The only problem? There’s currently no way to track the plane if it manages to return
to Earth. So far scientists have only come up with the idea of writing a note on the plane
in several languages.

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