Well, that’s one thing you can do on a suborbital flight

The British tabloid The Sun checks out a mockup of the SpaceShipTwo cabin on display at the Science Museum in London. So what could future SS2 passengers do on their suborbital spaceflights? “It could give visitors a opportunity to see life in space and maybe the chance to try and spot aliens and UFOs.” Um, right. But then, what do you expect from a paper arguably best known not for its hard-hitting insightful journalism but instead for its “Page 3″ topless pictorials?

On a more serious note, Business Week examines the design of the SS2 interior in an interview with Dick Powell, cofounder of design company Seymourpowell. He noted that Virgin wanted a full-sized model of the cabin “but they didn’t have the budget for us to do it” initially, although Powell won them over in the end by telling them they didn’t want a 3D computer model “that wasn’t very convincing and looked a bit crap”. The actual design work for the cabin interior wasn’t that out of the ordinary, he added. “The truth is that the processes by which you make planes, trains, rockets, and consumer products are all broadly the same… The individual companies [we work with] all have certain idiosyncracies but really, it’s not rocket science.”