JAPAN:Like any dedicated scientist, aeronautical engineer Shinji Suzuki loves showing off his work. Ten years in development, the aircraft he helped design sits in his university office, awaiting permission to launch.
"Some people say this is a very silly experiment," he says, tenderly lifting the 30cm-paper plane off his desk. "I'm not giving up on it."
Professor Suzuki's goal is simple: he wants to take his origami creation, which weighs 28 grams and is made from a single sheet of white business paper, to the International Space Center, orbiting 400km above the planet, and send it floating back to earth.
The problems seem obvious. Flying at 20 times the speed of sound, most of Suzuki's colleagues believe the flimsy plane will burn up on re-entry. Even if it somehow reaches terra firma, many doubt the plane will ever be found. Suzuki, who teaches at the University of Tokyo, insists that he is perfectly serious. His experiments last year with a hypersonic wind tunnel proved that a prototype can survive speeds of mach 7 and temperatures of 230 degrees. Worldwide media coverage will, he says, help locate the plane, which carries greetings in 10 languages, including Chinese and English. Japan's best-known astronaut Koichi Wakata has pronounced himself a believer.
All that stands in the way are the scientists who run the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA),which has to sign off on the project. "They laughed when they first heard it," admits the professor, who says the first suggestion was to launch it from the space shuttle. A series of meetings with JAXA officials looked promising and led to a promise of €211,000 in funding, until Suzuki ran into a brick wall with a senior bureaucrat. Says the professor: "He said he'd think about it," often a polite euphemism in Japan for "Go away".
After so much work, neither Suzuki nor his partner Takuo Toda, head of the Japan Origami Airplane Association, are willing to abandon the launch. Suzuki says he is motivated primarily by a desire to boost the profile of science, especially among the young. "I want to show that strange ideas have some possibility of coming into reality. I think it will stimulate children's interest in the unknown and the seemingly impossible." He once took his origami creations to his son's elementary school. "The children were wide-eyed, and my son was proud."
