Friday, March 28, 2008

Waste of taxpayer money - in Yen

[migrated from myspace blog]

You probably thought it was only the U.S. gov’t that wastes taxpayer money. Japan is trying to show they have what it takes to spend millions on pointless endeavors as well.



Japanese scientists and origami masters hope to launch a paper airplane from space and learn from its trip back to Earth.

It’s no joke. A prototype passed a durability test in a wind tunnel this month, Japan’s space agency adopted it Wednesday for feasibility studies, and a well-known astronaut is interested in participating.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, accepted it Wednesday for three years of feasibility studies and promised up to $300,000 in funding per year.

Takuo Toda, the head of the Japan Origami Airplane Association, had nursed the idea of flying a shuttle-shaped paper plane since NASA in 1977 launched its first space shuttle Enterprise, a craft without an engine or heat shield that was used to perform test flights in the atmosphere.

He 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.


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