The fold that flew

The Miura fold reached space in 1995.

Japan's Space Flyer Unit, launched in March of that year, carried an experiment called the 2-D Array: a membrane solar panel folded in Kōryō Miura's pattern, designed to deploy from a single edge. It opened in orbit and was later retrieved and returned to Earth. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, writing in 2014, confirmed the flight plainly: a Miura-fold solar panel, tested in space in 1995.

Where the pattern came from

The most surprising part of the story is that Miura did not invent the pattern as art. He found it in failure.

When a thin-walled cylinder is crushed under pressure, it does not collapse randomly. It buckles into a repeating diamond pattern — the Yoshimura pattern, named for the researcher who described it. Miura, studying how structures fail, recognised that this natural crease could be reversed: what a cylinder does under stress, a flat sheet could be made to do on purpose. He called his version the developable double corrugation, and published it in 1969.

A fold born from the way things break.

What we will not tell you

You will often read that the James Webb Space Telescope's sunshield is a Miura fold. We have looked carefully, and we cannot support this. NASA's own descriptions of the sunshield name no origami pattern at all; they describe a bespoke, many-layered folding scheme with release mechanisms and tensioning cables. The Miura pattern is a single-degree-of-freedom tessellation. The Webb sunshield is not.

The real Miura flight was quieter, and earlier, and Japanese. We would rather tell you that one, correctly, than repeat a better-known story that isn't true.