Paper Planes from Outer Space

Getting into orbit these days is a rather simple proposition for those who have the means. Strap your payload into a rocket, ratchet the speed up to 17,500 mph, and suddenly (well, eventually) you find yourself in a perpetual free fall 200 miles above the Earth. Newton, you rock!

However, getting back to Earth from orbit is decidedly more complex. Whereas at the beginning of your journey you burned through tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen to accelerate you to orbital speeds, the only means to shed that speed during reentry is to turn your spacecraft into a giant air brake. Newton, you suck!

NASA has spent billions of dollars trying to get this right, and as evidenced by Columbia we still can't guarantee a safe return.

We use a fleet of shuttles covered with the most technologically advanced heat-shedding systems ever conceived, but Japan, in one of their most telling one-upmanships, is building a paper airplane to do the same thing. Crazy.