Finally... A Paper Airplane That Won't Land You In Detention!

If you love flight, perhaps you have experienced the urge to throw a paper airplane from a really high place... but what if you had the chance to throw a paper airplane from the International Space Station? It turns out a Japanese professor and a group of origami masters have collaborated on a paper airplane which will fly that very mission.

According to the London Telegraph, Professor Shinji Suzuki, from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Tokyo, worked on the project with the Japan Origami Airplane Association. They used silicon treated heat resistant paper, folded to create a tiny paper aircraft with a rounded nose.

Tossed from the space station, it will be travelling at Mach 20. By the time it encounters significant heating in the atmosphere, it will have dropped to Mach 7. Amazingly, a smaller version of the plane survived a test run at Mach 7 in a wind tunnel last week, where it survived temperatures as high as 570 degrees Fahrenheit. As Ray Bradbury fans know, that's quite a feat.

Professor Suzuki says the hope is to have a real paper spacecraft ready to send with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, when he travels to the ISS later this year. He says the technology from paper planes could lead to the development of new transport craft, which makes this paper airplane a serious science experiment.

So... why didn't our grade-school science teachers ever buy that excuse?

FMI: www.aerospace.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/welcome-e.html