Robert J. Lang is respected in the art community for folding a mean swan. He's written a half-dozen books on how to make paper airplanes, ants and animals. An admirer called one of his works "arguably the best moose design ever."

In engineering circles, Lang is known as a guy who can figure the best way to stow a car's airbag.

With a sheet of paper and techniques of the ancient Japanese art of origami, Lang can solve just about any problem with a few creases. Folding together his artistic skill, a Ph.D. in applied physics and a background at NASA, he also dabbles in how to take a telescope the size of a football field and stuff it inside a rocket.

Lang says origami can help solve this problem and more. The engineering consultant figures that this odd intersection of art and science can improve the design of deployable solar arrays, antennas, or even gargantuan solar sails, a device that could propel a spacecraft out of the solar system by taking a free ride on the charged particles of the solar wind.

"As the Galileo team would surely attest, the fate of the mission can depend on proper precision unfolding," Lang said in an interview, referring to a forever-stuck antenna that limited the mission's ability to return data to Earth.

Origami's most alluring application to space science might be the folded version of a giant telescope, a 100-meter monster that would be 40 times more powerful than Hubble and could spot specs of light in the far corners of the universe or image Earth-like planets around nearby stars.

Which is exactly what Rod Hyde is working on.

Hyde and Sham Dixit, both of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, are designing a big flat telescope out of a thin membrane which, if deployed and unfurled, would make Hubble look like a Radio Shack starter scope. They call it the Eyeglass.

"The Eyeglass is a two-part telescope," Hyde explained, "in which a large, thin, diffractive lens gently focuses light towards a small conventional telescope, acting as an eyepiece, a short distance away."

The lens spins in space, like a giant LP record, so that centrifugal force keeps it flat. And like an LP, the lens is made of a series of concentric grooves. Each groove acts as a separate bit of lens, focusing light on the eyepiece. Such a telescope would have enough light-gathering power to spot footballs on Earth from thousands of miles up or, if pointed the other direction, take pictures of Earth-like planets around other stars.

The project is five years old, and while a full-size Eyeglass is not yet in sight, the researchers are currently building a 5-meter (16-foot) prototype.

"One key challenge facing all large space telescope designs is that they must be packed into fairly small payload compartments for launch into space," Hyde said. "Origami can be very useful for an Eyeglass telescope by providing a compact way to fold it up for launch."

So Hyde tracked down Lang, the Martha Stewart of stowage.

"You have this 100-meter sheet of plastic that you need to get into orbit, and the only thing we have for launching objects into orbits are rockets that are at most 3 to 5 meters in diameter," Lang says. "So you have to fold up, or otherwise scrunch up this giant sheet to stuff it into the rocket. The problem is, if you just stuff it any old way into the rocket, you'll form permanent marks in the plastic, which will destroy the optical quality of the lens."

The key, Lang says, is a precise folding pattern that avoids sharp creases. The present Eyeglass design resembles the action of a collapsible umbrella.

Paper art could solve other vexing science problems, too.

"Origami helps in the study of mathematics and science in many ways," says Martin Kruskal, a Rutgers mathematician. Kruskal and Lang discussed their ideas last week at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Kruskal says origami is simpler to develop than most scientific theories and a lot easier to apply. Of course, any kid who has ever made a snowflake could tell you that.