Virgin Galactic presents the interior cabin of its tourist space plane

I was standing inside the Virgin Galactic tourist space plane with three translucent green heads floating in front of me. One of the chiefs explained how the white and teal passenger seats that dotted the cabin walls were made of aluminum and carbon fiber materials. White, disembodied hands were gesturing in midair when the head spoke, which belonged to Jeremy Brown, design director for Virgin Galactic.

In reality, Brown’s head is not green nor is it separated from his body. Brown, the other two virtual tour guides, and I were wearing Oculus Quest headsets, allowing us to virtually get to know and examine the inside of the cockpit of the Virgin Galactic space plane called VSS Unity. It is the company’s primary spacecraft, designed to take paying customers to the edge of space and back to quickly prove weightlessness.

Virgin Galactic, led by billionaire Richard Branson, had high hopes of showcasing the new booth design during a spectacular in-person event, according to Virgin’s eye-catching unveiling theme. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Virgin Galactic decided to have the booth present a virtual one. During a live broadcast event today at 1PM ET, the company will take enthusiasts on a virtual tour of the booth, while those looking for a more personalized experience can download a smartphone app, showing the interior and the exterior of the spacecraft in augmented reality. The company loaned headphones to me and other Oculus Quest journalists, allowing us to have the immersive experience of seeing the booth with our own eyes.

“For us, the interior is the point, in a way,” George Whitesides, the newly appointed Virgin Galactic space officer, previously the company’s CEO, told me before the tour. “Experience is the point. And so, in many ways, the product is the cabin and how it relates to the spatial environment and views from space. It’s about this. “

I started the tour on the virtual track, with VSS Unity in the foreground. Brown joined his fellow floating heads: Stephen Attenborough, the commercial director for Virgin Galactic, and Jeremy White, the design director for design firm Seymourpowell, who helped with the project. Next to Unity were two white Range Rovers. They are the cars that will transport customers to the spacecraft from Spaceport America, the giant turtle-shaped building in New Mexico that serves as the main hub for Virgin Galactic. I moved around Unity by moving a joystick on one of the two Oculus controllers in my hands, which lit up the track for me like a ghost coming in and out of existence. After playing around a bit, my guides changed the track settings for the interior of Unity.

Image: Virgin Galactic

Suddenly, he was inside the fuselage, flanked by the three floating heads. Six passenger seats that looked like they wouldn’t be out of place in a race car were attached to the walls of the spacecraft. The white and teal chairs were designed in part by Under Armor, which also helped design the blue flight suits that customers will wear during their travels. The seats will be tailor-made for each passenger, Brown told me. There are four different sizes of seats that the company can change in the cabin, and the company can add additional padding to the seats to ensure each customer adjusts comfortably during the flight.

The seats were far apart, with a long gangway embedded between them, running down the center aisle of the spacecraft. The rear wall of the fuselage sported a giant silver mirror displaying a twisted image of the cockpit. The mirror will provide customers with a live view of themselves in microgravity. “I think it is just a brilliant design choice,” Whitesides said. “It is probably the largest mirror placed on a spacecraft, spacecraft, or space habitat. And the idea is that people can really experience themselves in space and get an idea of ​​what that looks like visually. “

Sure, looking at yourself will be great, but the goal of the trip is the view outside Spaceship. “Each seat is a window seat,” Brown told me. Next to each seat was a large circular window with a thick black border. Another window was placed directly above the head of each passenger. When the crew reaches microgravity, they can float from the side window to the roof window with ease. The edges around the windows also had small cracks: grab handles for floating passengers to grab onto to peek through the glass.

Image: Virgin Galactic

The cockpit picks up some signals from Branson’s Virgin Atlantic planes. The lights around the windows will shine in different colors depending on where VSS Unity is on their journey into space: white for the initial climb and orange for when the rocket engine starts. The lights dim in space. Small screens on the back of each seat will show each phase of the journey to passengers as well.

In the scene we were in, the lights from the window glowed white. I looked out the window and noticed the New Mexico desert below me. VSS Unity was not yet in space; It was at an altitude of 35,000 feet, the height at which the actual space plane will fall from its transport plane and start its engine, rising into space. Brown hit a switch I couldn’t see, and we went back into the cabin, but the view outside the windows changed. This time, we were able to see the stars and the curvature of the Earth above our virtual green heads. We were in microgravity (well, in the headphones).

In this scene, all the seats reclined to give people more room to float around the cabin once Unity reaches space. Here, above the atmosphere, passengers will unhook from their seat belts. The harness consists of five gray straps that converge into a circular buckle found on a passenger’s chest. A simple twist will free them all, and a special mechanism will retract the seat belts. That way, passengers don’t have to deal with the belts floating around them at zero g. “We had an internal phrase called ‘kelping’, you know, like a kelp forest, and we wanted to avoid that,” Whitesides said.

Brown moved his virtual white hands around each seat to point out the mechanics of the straps. Meanwhile, White placed his floating hands on the edge of a window and stuck his green face through the glass. The movement gave me an idea. I stood on the chair in my apartment and went through the roof of Unity. I was halfway in space. The Earth was shining on me: the orange desert of the southwestern United States at first glance through my secret sunroof. After a brief moment of wonder, I sat down again. “Sorry, I had to,” I said.

Image: Virgin Galactic

The attention to detail was quite remarkable. Each headrest had small crevices to accommodate anyone who wore their hair in a ponytail for flight. The top two seat belt straps on each chair were connected to protrusions called “presenters,” making it easier for customers to find their belts when they need to reattach themselves to their seats. “[Our customers] they have different ranges of motion and different amounts of physical strength, so we wanted to make sure that was very easy to do in zero gravity because people will put their five-point harness on zero-g, “said Whitesides.

Then there were the cameras. Sixteen cameras are located throughout the cabin to capture the experiences of future crews. Each window had a camera to capture moments of awe, while other cameras on the floor and ceiling will provide more complete views of floating passengers. They assured me that the images would be downloaded quickly after a flight so that each client could get their videos as fast as possible once on the ground.

Standing there in the virtual fuselage, I found myself eager to really test the flight. But there is still a long way to go for Virgin Galactic before people experience these elegant chairs in space. The real VSS Unity is still equipped with the seats, on the one hand. And Virgin Galactic still has more test flights to do. So far, the company has only flown into space twice, taking off from the Virgin Galactic test site at California’s Mojave air and space port. The company needs to make another test flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico, which has not yet happened.

“Once we do that, then we will essentially start putting test passengers or spaceflight participants in the back seats, which will be really exciting,” Whitesides said. “They will be the ones to confirm that all the design choices we have made in this booth are correct.” And then after some of those flights, it’s time for Branson to fly on Virgin Galactic’s first dedicated trade mission to space. However, there is no solid timeline for that.

When my tour ended, the leaders of my guides disappeared one by one. I picked up my Oculus headphones and returned to my one-bedroom apartment, still very much located on Earth. Perhaps someday Virgin Galactic customers will be able to escape the limits of gravity within this sleek and elegant cabin. But for now, a virtual escape is the best we are going to achieve.