Yesterday morning Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic Airway pulled up to the IAC Building in a hydrogen fuel-cell-powered Chevy Equinox SUV. There he was joined by executives from GM and Rolls Royce to announce a smorgasbord of environmental initiatives. A clear theme was hard to distinguish, other than the color green.

Click 'View Photos' to look inside the cabin of SpaceShipTwo. And for an eye-popping video ride, scroll to the bottom of the page

Virgin Galactic today unveiled a mock-up of the slick, Philippe Starck–designed interior of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital tourist vehicle.

There were acrobats from the Cirque du Soleil, a mechanical objet d'art that looked like a mad inventor's spaceship, and a voluble computer-generated wizard that bore a disturbing resemblance to a bathrobe-clad George Carlin-the ceremony in Toulouse, France, that marked the completion of Airbus's first A380 was nothing if not pomp-filled. But when four kids finally tugged on a huge tasseled cord and the curtain fell to reveal the largest jetliner ever built, the spectacle was just beginning.