Marc Newsom Designs Spaceship Planned for Orbit in 2012

Known for his visually seductive product design, Marc Newsom is now trying to sex up space flight. The Astrium leisure space craft was unveiled in Paris last week and features interiors, color schemes, some exterior elements, and passenger interactions designed by Marc Newson. In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, Newsom talks about the design challenges of visualizing a space ship.

"Designing for the aerospace industry is incredibly challenging in terms of the level of technology and maze of regulatory issues," he said. "Everywhere you turn, there's a regulation telling you to go back again. You're always being challenged to find new ways of doing things. That experience helped me to get my head around the spaceplane."
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"We installed as many windows as we could without compromising the structure and made them look bigger by framing them," he said. "To enhance the experience of zero gravity, we needed to maximize the volume of the cabin, because the last thing you want is to bump into things when you're floating around. It was a huge ergonomic challenge to fit everything in."

His toughest design challenge were the seats, which not only had to be compact and light, but comfortable both when the spaceplane was flying at a conventional angle as an aircraft and near-vertically as a rocket. "It's fine to sit upright in an aircraft seat when it's going straight ahead, but if it went straight up, you'd fly off the back of your seat," said Newson. "We needed a seat that could rotate by 90 degrees, and shift around the passengers' bodies, even when they weigh three times more than normal because there's so much G-force."

Conventional electronic seats would have been too heavy, so Newson worked with Sogerma, a French company owned by EADS, to develop a new seat. Their solution was what Newson described as "a very, very high-tech hammock" mounted at two points to pivot on an axis whenever the spaceplane changes angle. "You're letting gravity work for you, rather than against you," he explained. "Whatever the angle of the aircraft, the passengers face upwards and their position relative to the Earth remains the same, until they reach zero gravity and undo their seat belts."

The Astrium leisure spacecraft is outfitted with jet engines which will take its pilot and four passengers to 49,000 feet, where its rocket engine will kick in to take the craft up to 190,000 feet and then to zero gravity at 320,000 feet. It's set to launch in 2012, for the bargain basement price of $265,000 a seat.

Virgin Atlantic, Richard Branson's space child also has a celebrity designer onboard with Philippe Starck.

[via PSFK, Core77 and The International Herald Tribune]

More photos after the jump.

photos courtesy of: EADS Astrium / photo C. Mériaux 2007