Futuristic design
Holiday brochures for well-travelled tourists will soon include space-flights. And at around £150,000 a ticket, you might expect a little extra bit of luxury. This is why Astrium, the European space jet manufacturers, have called in iconic designer Marc Newson. Newson, an Australian whose company is based in London, is famous for his futuristic designs and was once named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

Current expectations are that the space jet will launch in 2012. Newson already has plenty of experience designing the interiors of conventional aircraft, but he faces a very unusual set of scientific and engineering problems in the space jet. In only 80 seconds the space jet will travel 60 kilometres in altitude so passengers will need to be very well secured.

Health and safety
As it reaches over 100 kilometres in altitude, the space tourists will be able to experience over three minutes of free floating gravity. As Newsom says, the cabin design faces a vast range of ‘technology and regulatory issues’, but that’s what keeps it fresh, the challenges of ‘learning about new technologies and processes’ to get around the physical problems. ‘You have to respect basic cabin and safety issues’ and this is why he thinks it’s just like ‘designing in the early days of flight’.

One of the ways Newson addressed the safety issue of floating inside the craft, and experiencing gravity was to ‘maximize the volume of the cabin’, so passengers wouldn’t be floating into objects. ‘It was a huge ergonomic challenge’ and it also served the purpose of making the space jet as light as possible.

Rotating seats
His toughest challenge was the seats. As sci-fi movie fans will recognise, there is always a point in space flight when the vertical experience of shooting into space and escaping the earth’s gravity gives way to the horizontal experience of conventional flying. As Newson points out, conventional aircraft seating would mean passengers ‘flying off their seat’.  So the seat is designed to ‘rotate by 90 degrees’ and also cope with the fact that the passengers’ bodies will ‘weigh three times more than normal because of the G-force.’ This is futuristic design not just as style, but for real.