Origami is one of many arts n’ craftsy endeavors that I have taken up over my lifetime, earnestly determined to become a master artisan, only to be stumped by technique, short on patience, and bored silly enough to abandon the craft after about one week. (Other artistic undertakings include knitting, cross-stitch, embroidery, charcoal drawing, silkscreening, and scherenschnitte).
In fact, origami was one of my earliest artistic failures. Back in the 80s, origami was a trendy past time for kids, and I tried to master this ancient Japanese art using an origami “kit” with an instruction book and special origami paper squares. I remember having difficulty conceptualizing the required folds from the two-dimensional illustrations with the dotted lines, arrows, and shaded sections. Even today, staring at the origami instruction to the right, I am utterly confounded and slightly angered.
I muse upon origami because of this article about how Japan might launch 8-inch by 4-inch origami shuttles from space to travel back through the atmosphere to Earth. The idea and spacecraft design comes from the head of the Japan Origami Airplane Association, who “spent 18 months figuring out how to fold a perfect origami spacecraft from a plain sheet of paper — without cutting, stitching or taping it — and tested hundreds of designs in the process.”
It’s an idea that’s crazy enough to appeal to lots of Japanese, and the Japanese space agency has promised to fund feasibility studies for this origami shuttle. The biggest challenge isn’t that the paper will disintegrate during re-entry (the paper is coated in heat-resistant sugar cane fibers), but that “there is no way to track the paper craft or predict when or where they may land.” Could you imagine: Suddenly, an origami space shuttle descends from the ski? Little yellow men, anyone?
