It's UM and it's SF on the light side --

Origami from orbit

It would be way cool if they can pull it off.

But IMHO it's carrying "faster, cheaper, better" to extreme lengths!

It's a paper shuttle but coated in heat resistant material.................so a flying tile..........?

It's an interesting experiment in material heat endurance, to say nothing of upper atmosphere dynamics...but, of course, there's an inherent 70% chance they'll land in the sea!

To do this right, they need to launch like 10,000 or more of these all at once. It would be fascinating to see the global distribution of landing sites for those few that might be recovered.

And actually the recovery problem is not insignificant even if many of them hit land & are found. How many languages should the "return to sender" message be written in? (I know that the researchers would want them back.) How many would actually be sent back regardless? Kids might just want to play with them, and who could blame them? Hell, I'd be tempted to keep one out of its sheer coolness. Others would put them right on eBay, I'm afraid.

If you made, say, a thousand - stacked them up in some sort of release mechanism, parked it on the Kibo external platform and released them, at speed, downward - you could distribute along the ISS orbit, in such a way whereby one or two might make it down. Have each primary school make one to the fixed design and then send them all up. I love paper planes - infact I'd love to fold this design if I could find it, it looks fantastic.

Doug

Just one: http://www.paperplanefromspace.com....

Then you put as many languages as you want on the web site which explains to the reader what it is they have found.