Here comes Florida. That’s the message the head of Space Florida conveyed to Florida Today in today’s issue. Steve Kohler said that he has been talking to Virgin Galactic “among others”, trying to lure them to establish operations in the state. Kohler didn’t indicate if those discussions with Virgin were for operations in addition to the company’s announced plans in New Mexico, or as a backup should the company become disenchanted with the Land of Enchantment. Kohler admitted that New Mexico has already made a big financial commitment, “But there’s a long way from that and something coming out of the ground.”

SPACE.com published yesterday an overview of PlanetSpace and its plans to develop the Silver Dart spaceplane. What’s noteworthy about this review is that space tourism is a relatively low priority for the company, which is instead pursuing orbital flights to the ISS (and presumably other destinations, if any) as well as point-to-point flights, taking advantage of the Silver Dart’s designed capability to glide for long distances. “This is the killer application for space industry,” GEO Geoff Sheerin said of point-to-point flights. “You’ve got a destination already.” Later in the article, Sheerin ranked suborbital tourism flights third in the list of preferred missions for the Silver Dart. “If they’re not flying to orbit, then I’d like to fly them point-to-point and if they’re not flying point-to-point than I’d like to be flying them on short jaunts into space on space tourist flights, ” he said. Of course, the company first has to raise money and develop the vehicle—neither of which will be an easy task.

The British tabloid The Sun checks out a mockup of the SpaceShipTwo cabin on display at the Science Museum in London. So what could future SS2 passengers do on their suborbital spaceflights? “It could give visitors a opportunity to see life in space and maybe the chance to try and spot aliens and UFOs.” Um, right. But then, what do you expect from a paper arguably best known not for its hard-hitting insightful journalism but instead for its “Page 3″ topless pictorials?

On a more serious note, Business Week examines the design of the SS2 interior in an interview with Dick Powell, cofounder of design company Seymourpowell. He noted that Virgin wanted a full-sized model of the cabin “but they didn’t have the budget for us to do it” initially, although Powell won them over in the end by telling them they didn’t want a 3D computer model “that wasn’t very convincing and looked a bit crap”. The actual design work for the cabin interior wasn’t that out of the ordinary, he added. “The truth is that the processes by which you make planes, trains, rockets, and consumer products are all broadly the same… The individual companies [we work with] all have certain idiosyncracies but really, it’s not rocket science.”