Origami Spacecraft to Fly Home

Origami-Space-Craft
The guys over at the University of Tokyo are creating a paper airplane which will fly from the international space station, back home (hopefully). Astronauts will launch it soon. A few problems exist though. First is that when a shuttle hits the atmosphere it is travelling at around mach 20 which causes it to get seriously hot and use those heat deflecting tiles across the shuttles belly.

So, a paper airplane will be thrown out of the space station, which is travelling at speed it’s self, and yet they expect the plane to land safely. Apparently this will be achieved by treating the paper (in some mystical way) to make it be able to withstand the extra heat. Now I don’t expect to see the airplane fly through the atmosphere at mach 20, but it should still be going quite fast to get hot.

No launch date is set and they are hoping a hand written message on it might make it in to the hands of someone on the ground. It will be cool if that happens!

Via: Inventorspot

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