My colleague David Boyce has been creating "papercraft" models of spacecraft for education and outreach, with some impressive results.

Phil Mills of the Space Frontier Foundation showed me at UKSC2008 the scratchbuilt NewSpace models he made, including a Skylon docked to a Bigelow station, partly inspired by my blog post: [1], [2], [3]

Orbiter is an impressive software package for modelling spacecraft, designed by Martin Schweiger of UCL, with a large number of third-party plugins. It has even been used to prototype manned Mars missions. The range of NewSpace models for it seems to be a little limited, though:-

• SpaceShipOne: Yes
• Falcon-9 + Dragon: Yes
• SpaceShipTwo: No
• Bigelow station: No
• Dreamchaser: No
• Silver Dart: No
• Skylon: No

Unless, of course, you know better :-) It would be nice to come up with a consistent and plausible set of Orbiter models for a NewSpace economy in cisLunar space, with orbital fuel depots, stations at L1 etc...