Rocketeers.co.uk - a British view of commercial spaceflight

No, really...

The photo at right is a full-scale testbed (somewhere between a mockup and an engineering test model) of a manned orbital space capsule, built in the UK by Andy Elson around 2005 for a US corporate customer in the NewSpace industry (I know who, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to say...). It had hammock-type acceleration couches for five crew, crew interface systems and a working life-support system with 30-man-day capacity.

Elson has considerable experience of engineering for high-altitude manned systems, having worked on a number of record-breaking balloon flights, and the GKN Mission Everest parajet flight over Mount Everest.

UPDATE: Thanks to Rob Coppinger of Flight Global for following up on this. The spacecraft is called Magic Dragon, and was built as a demonstrator for SpaceX prior to its involvement in the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme. The capsule was designed to be launched by a SpaceX Falcon 5. SpaceX has since moved on to its more powerful Falcon 9 rocket and its updated capsule design, Dragon. The photo shows Magic Dragon prior to its shipment to the SpaceX facility at El Segundo, California in 2005.