Down-to-Earth Spaceship Design

British design firm Seymourpowell came up with the concept interiors for Virgin Galactic's spaceship. Still, they say design isn't rocket science

by Helen Walters

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It's rare that a company gets the opportunity to invent an entirely new industry, but that's exactly what Richard Branson and his team at Virgin Galactic are doing. Together with legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, Branson & Co. are working to make commercial space travel a reality.

The first passenger flight won't take off until at least summer 2009, and they're still far from having final ship designs. In the meantime, Virgin needed a version of the spaceship to entice would-be passengers and show those who've already shelled out the $200,000 ticket price that their money is in safe hands. That's where London design agency Seymourpowell came in. A trusty stalwart of the British design scene, Seymourpowell is well known for groundbreaking work for clients including Unilever (UNLVF), Yamaha, Nokia (NOK), Tefal, and Dualit. This time its challenge was to come up with a conceptual spaceship interior.

"Part of our problem is how to educate the world about our product without actually having it," says Ned Abel Smith, brand and marketing director for Virgin Galactic, who commissioned Seymourpowell after seeing an interior it had created for a luxury model by Bell Helicopter Textron. "I was so excited at the idea of getting them involved. They're not just designers, they're problem solvers. They created an incredible animation and set the benchmark for building our product. They really gave us a backbone, and as a marketing tool, the animation has been fantastic."

Window Seat

For its part, designing something for which there was no precedent didn't faze Seymourpowell in the slightest. In fact, the animation came about as push-back to Virgin. "They wanted a full-size model—which they did actually manage to get built in the end—but they didn't have the budget for us to do it," says company co-founder Dick Powell. "Anyway, we argued that they didn't want a 3D model that wasn't very convincing and looked a bit crap. Instead, the animation could show off the passenger experience."

As such, the film features the whole trip, showing how seats (which obviously need to be in exactly the right position for blast off) could retract into the floor once in space so that the passengers could float around the cabin without getting tangled up. Portholes, not a big feature in NASA spacecraft, are placed all over the vehicle—after all, there's neither up nor down in space.

"The design problem was a human problem first and foremost," Powell continues. "The truth is that the processes by which you make planes, trains, rockets, and consumer products are all broadly the same. The way you bash metal is the same if you're making car-body panels or a washing machine. The individual companies [we work with] all have certain idiosyncracies but really, it's not rocket science."

Who's the Rock Star?

This resolutely down-to-earth attitude permeates every aspect of Seymourpowell, which started in 1984 as a partnership between Powell and graphic-designer, advertising-creative, film-production-designer, jack-of-all-creative-trades Richard Seymour and now boasts a staff of around 60 people.

The stars of two British design TV shows, Designs on Your… and Better by Design, and design industry favorites (both have served, separately, as the chair of D&AD, the British creative industries' swankiest organization), Seymour and Powell nonetheless pride themselves on their plain talk, and both partners fiercely eschew the designer-as-rock-star trend. Ironic, really, given that one of the first of those rock stars, Philippe Starck, looks to have been given the nod to design the real interior of Spaceship Two.

But Seymour and Powell aren't bitter. "We design Yamahas, or Nokias, or Doves.