Oolite Bulletins

Following the links through some pages, I ended up here: Elite25 @ GameCity Squared (the 2009 archive.org download of the site)

Mark Bolitho, a friend of Ian Bell and origami artist, created models of the escape capsule, the Cobra Mk3, the Sidewinder, and a Thargoid for the 25th anniversary of Elite. The explanation videos are hosted on Vimeo and still exist, the PDFs for all but the escape capsule are lost.

Did someone save copies at the time?

dunno about that site, but this link comes up now and again here
http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/ecp/frontier.htm

Found that one as well when I searched the Forum, but it is more for simple paper models than origami.

The origami instructions mention the website http://www.creaselightning.co.uk – I don't see the Elite ships on there but there's a link you could use to contact Mark Bolitho and see if he's still got the PDFs on file.

I already have contacted him. He was very nice but he kindly answered that he would prefer that the instructions are not published by a third party as he is uncertain about copyright. He did send them to me though, but I can't put them on here. I asked specifically about that. Sorry.

I'm sure there is "unfolding" software freely available.