Origami in Space

[Rick]

Picture the solar system's largest telescope, a telescope as long as the island of Manhattan, incorporating a lens the size of a football field: an instrument possessing the resolution to examine earth-like planets around neighboring stars light-years away. Now picture a paper airplane. Could the latter lead us to the former? The answer is: perhaps.

At the moment, it's the brainchild of a group of innovative scientists at one of the world's most secretive research facilities, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, located about 40 miles east of San Francisco. LLNL, or "The Lab," as it is locally known, is run by the Department of Energy with a primary mission of studying things nuclear — both reactors and bombs. Within its brain trust, a lot of interesting and out-of-the-box scientific ideas get hatched and built in ancillary fields ranging from advanced computation to genomics. The Eyeglass is one such out-of-the-box idea — it would be about 25,000 miles out of the box, in geostationary Earth orbit.

See: http://www.langorigami.com/science/eyeglass/eyeglass.php4