PaperPlane
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Brits launch paper plane into space, show depth of their national debt
It used to be that British engineering enthusiasts would send entire cars up into space, but not in today's age of austerity. No sir, all you're getting this time is a paper plane. A trio of amateur space junkies has successfully lifted and released a paper glider from a height of 90,000 feet, earning itself the glory of being the first to ever conceive of and execute the feat. It took them a year to perfect the vessel, named the Vulture 1, and they used a helium balloon to get it to the requisite height before achieving a relatively bump-free landing 23 miles from the launch site. The whole thing has produced some pretty nice imagery, which you may check out at the source link below, and some inevitable gloating from the Reg crew, who were behind the whole thing and can also be found in the More Coverage section.
"Researchers" hope to launch paper airplanes from space
There's certainly plenty more than just hard science going on in space, and it now looks like a group of researchers from the University of Tokyo are aiming to get in on that action as well. To that end, they've teamed up with the brains behind the Japan Origami Airplane Association to develop an origami aircraft that'll supposedly be capable of surviving the flight from the International Space Station to the Earth's surface. They even seem to have made some progress already, with them set to test an eight centimeter long prototype in the wind tunnel at the University of Tokyo later this week, where it'll face wind speeds up to 5,300 miles per hour. Of course, it'll face a few more obstacles than that in space, although the researchers assure us the plane has been "treated to withstand intense heat."[Via Tech Digest]
