Origami-inspired materials could soften the blow for reusable spacecraft

Origamizer is one of my favourite toys to play with on a Sunday afternoon:

http://origami.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~tachi/software/

A neat paper on the algorithm for finding the origami path:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Origamizer%3A-A-Practi...

I love the interplay between art and science. During my PhD I was lucky enough to work with an Origami artist (1) to help mathematicallly describe the folded structures he fabricated. One of such shapes was the one described in the article, I'm sure many more use cases will come, over the years.

(1) https://www.mattshlian.com/

Relevant to this: https://news.mit.edu/2019/engineers-demonstrate-lighter-flex...

Cellular design is a coming revolution in industrial design and manufacture. As far as I know, there aren't any commercial products that cater to this being of mechanical design.