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Origami Plane to Fly From the Int. Space Station
SK writes "The University of Tokyo and the Japan folded paper (origami) plane society hopes to fly a paper airplane from the International Space Station to Earth. The plane will be 30-40cm long and weigh about 30 grams. A University of Tokyo research group has successfully designed a special paper plane model that was able to withstand a Mach 7 high velocity stream for 10 seconds. The experimental plane was about one-fifth the size and withstood temperatures as high as 300C without burning up." Unfortunately for most of us reading this, the original source is all in japanese.
... i can think of much better ways to spend money.
Better ways for *you* to spend money. I personally would spend quite a lot of money to be able to drop a paper plane out of a space station.
This is brilliant! The use is obvious. We need cheaper reentry vehicles. These vehicles would not be designed to bring back passengers, but there are times when you have 50 (harmless) samples and would like to get one of them to a lab earth-side.
First, for those who say they've never seen a paper airplane break 100MPH, that's at 1 atmosphere. Mach 7 is definitely not at 1 atmosphere.
Second, for those who say it would flip, try writing a stability proof sometime. do you know how to apply inverse kinematics? can you write an equation for the Jacobian of a human elbow joint?
Third, the first step is to try one small paper plane. It'll probably not work, and we'll have to try again. Eventually, we might get a working 8" plane. Some day, we might even have a meter long plane that can bring 3 ounces back to earth.
Imagine an astronaut who is sick, and we need to get some lab tests run. Sending a shuttle or Soyouz down is incredibly wasteful. OTOH, a paper airplane could be equipped with a tracking device (think 1-2oz GPS & transmitter) and a small sample case. We drop the plane, and it's got a 1-in-3 chance of getting the sample into the right hands, in a usable condition. So we drop 5 or 10 and hope for the best.
Think of the potential when we start building larger stations & craft in space. A line of bolts could shear off, and we might not have the ability to analyze it in space. We drop one on each of 5 paper planes, and get a good idea from 2 that we recover of what happened. Were the bolts defective? Was it a fatigue issue? Were they improperly installed?
Imagine a very low cost mission to a near Earth crossing object. Half a dozen paper planes could let us get a few ounces of samples on the cheap.
Andy
I'm not associated with the project, but I do have common sense.
For those who think this is a high-risk project, risk is the chance of failure multiplied by the cost. The cost of throwing a paper plane from the ISS is low compared to other experiments, and we will learn quite a bit, not matter what happens.
For those who think this is a waste of money, I understand. You would have never funded the research into better clocks that eventually led to better navigation, which led to Columbus' voyages. The idea of opening a new frontier does not excite you. You would have us turn inward like the Chinese did at one point, burn your own ships, and never venture out again. You will accept a stagnant society. Based on my understanding of you, I offer one suggestion: Please commit suicide. We're better off without you.
Andy
So what is the point of this, exactly? I mean other than to launch a paper plane from what could be argued as a really cool place to throw one from?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No, it won't. You're assuming it'll somehow magically come to a dead stop when released, then start to fall straight down. What will really happen is that it'll just get shoved into a slightly lower orbit, so it will hit the atmosphere at pretty much orbital velocity, just like the shuttle does.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Apparently you haven't read the study on tinfoil hats.....
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
Tinfoil hats actually amplify frequencies controlled by the government (very likely the ones the government would choose to use for mind control). The tinfoil hat is a lie.
Unless, of course, this study was produced with government funding and is an attempt to dissuade people from wearing their hats........the conspiracy lives on.
Layne
Back of the envelope time:
The cost to launch something to the ISS's orbit is something like $10,000/lb. Let's say they make it from typical 20-lb bonded paper - the kind you'd pull from a copier.A 500-sheet ream of 20-lb actually weighs about 5 lbs, or 1/100th of a pound per sheet. Do out the math, and it works out to about $100/sheet of paper.
Ouch! That's an expensive paper airplane!
I think the odds are against ever finding it. You might need to launch a hundred to have a decent chance of actually having someone find one.
Since there is no mention of instrumentation or tracking, I fail to see even the remotest point to this exercise. Who will know (or care) if this "plane" survives a Mach 7 reentry? It would take months or yers to deorbit if they just throw it out the shuttle. In the meantime, it joins all the orbiting debris as a hazard to near-Earth navigation. Even a paper airplane is a serious piece of debris if you are orbiting in the opposite direction. Kudos on the wind tunnel research, though. How about a study on the aerodynamics of a 20 thousand yen note with origami folds?
I preferred the google translation.
>Land in the world where you do not know the fairy who could deliver" a dream said.
Milton couldn't have said it better.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Don't underestimate the power of pure curiosity. Maybe launching paper airplanes from a space station isn't directly going to contribute to anything great like curing cancer, but when that great thing does happen, I'm certain that the big leaps are going to be made by people that just followed their curiosity, instead of worrying about the significance of what they're doing.
As an example, Richard Feynman had sort of a breakdown early in his career. His inspiration had run out, everybody was waiting for the genius to do something brilliant, and he was feeling miserable. Then he decided that he wasn't going to care about people's expectations, about what kind of research was respectable, he was just going to follow up on the little things that interested him. He sat in a cafeteria, looked at a spinning plate (I don't remember the details, there was a spinning plate somehow) and he decided he would try to figure out the forces that made that plate spin like that. He did figure it out, proudly showed it to some senior, who said 'great, but what's the relevance'. There wasn't any, he'd just followed his nose, and solved a problem. Later that little solution turned into to the research that earned him a Nobel prize and became the most accurate scientific theory to date (or second most accurate, I'm no expert).
The point is that many scientists don't work well on something that is prescribed in any way. They need absolute freedom to just do stuff that interests them. If they really have to they can work on things that are more immediately relevant, but not with passion, and it'll never be as great as the stuff they do when just follow their instinct. And these scientists tend to be the ones that come up with the great breakthroughs.
So if these guys want to send up 30 grams with the next shuttle, and take up three minutes of the astronauts' time, I'm fine with that. It's important in a subtle way. It's also very cool.