Quote:'First luxury space hotel' plans to offer zero gravity living – for $792,000 a night (April 2018)

A Houston-based company said this week it plans to open the “first luxury hotel in space” by late 2021.

Orion Span would not be the first operation to offer rides into space. A number of wealthy travelers have flown to the International Space Station (ISS) with the Russian space programme – which said recently it too plans to open a “space hotel” in 2022.

Quote:The First Luxury Hotel in Space Is Set to Launch in 2021

Welcome to the new space race, which now includes Orion Span, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. For now, however, we’d much prefer an earthly luxury hotel experience to one that will set us back $9.5 million a stay.

Quote:An ultra-luxe space hotel could launch as early as 2024 (14 January 2021)

Tom Cruise has reportedly already snapped up tickets – rumoured to cost upwards of £40 million – to this extraterrestrial destination.

Co-founded by NASA’s former International Space Station manager Michael Suffredini, the cutting-edge Texas-based startup has announced plans to launch the first segment of a new commercial space station by 2024. The $2 billion project, known as ‘AxStation’, will double as a luxury hotel for daring jet-setters and space enthusiasts who are looking to take their adventuring to new heights.

Quote:Spent Shuttle Fuel Tanks Envisioned as Structure for Research Space Park (MARCH 29, 1987)

BOULDER, Colo. —  A consortium of 57 major universities and research institutions has put together a bold plan to build its own space station out of discarded fuel tanks from routine launches of the space shuttle.

The space station planned by NASA is being designed to push technology to the limits through the use of artificial intelligence, high-speed computers and sophisticated hardware.

Quote:The first 'space hotel' plans to open in 2027

How one aerospace company is preparing for the advent of tourism in outer space.

The word vacation conjures many images: pristine beaches, glittering ski slopes, outstretched highways and theme parks. It doesn’t call to mind cosmic journeys upon colossal rotating wheels, or vistas defined by the long arc of Earth’s surface — but it might soon.

Six decades in, the Space Age is marching steadily into its commercial phase, allowing more and more private individuals to purchase passage beyond Earth’s atmosphere. In just the past few months, the billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have paid to cross or arrive at the edge of the Kármán line, the boundary between our atmosphere and outer space. Beside a budding clientele of Bezos and Branson stature, the era of full-fledged pleasure trips to space seems at hand, even for a multi-day escape.

To accommodate such a jaunt, the Sacramento start-up Orbital Assembly Corporation (AOC) has announced plans to open a space hotel by 2027. As the first of its kind, Voyager Station is slated to be a luxury resort designed to accommodate 280 guests and 112 crew members, complete with a restaurant, a bar, a concert hall, a gym and even a cinema.

If this sounds preposterous, Tim Alatorre, OAC’s vice president and architect behind the hotel, understands the skepticism. But it won’t be long, he insists, before such talk is commonplace. “I think it’s going to be a normal thing, where your mom went to space, your dad went to space,” he says. “Being an astronaut is not going to be a novel thing anymore, because everyone has done it.”

The concept of the rotating wheel, proposed in the early 1900s as a way to generate artificial gravity, was later popularized in the 1950s by the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (Voyager was originally named in his honor). Thanks to the centrifugal force it produces, visitors will be able to move about normally, more or less. Or, as OAC puts it on its website: “We provide gravity.”



After blasting off from Earth, guests will arrive at a central, zero-gravity docking hub. From there, elevator shafts will carry them outward to a chain of “habitation modules” arranged around the circumference of the circular station. It’s only there, at the edge of the wheel, that the centrifugal force will be strong enough to keep guests and their surroundings firmly grounded.

Quote:Rhonda Stevenson - Stevenson also heads the non-profit organization ─ Tau Zero Foundation ─ dedicated to pioneering advancements toward interstellar flight, focusing on the intermediate steps of advanced propulsion and energy storage for on orbit capabilities and beyond. She is the creator and host of the “Space Matters” show, a syndicated weekly digest of space industry activities and relevant conversations.

In 2013, Stevenson founded Blue Elysium Enterprises, which provided strategic executive consulting to technology companies. Earlier in her career, she was chief marketing and promotions officer at Deep Space Industries, and founder of Space Mining and Resources Coalition.

Quote:Beginning at least in the 1960s expectations of space tourism have been the “stuff” of space activism. To date, however, the prospect for broad, sustainable space tourism remains a dream. I would argue that much of the boosterism in the space tourism arena has been predicated on hopes and dreams, unicorns and rainbows, rather than reality.

Despite recent visibility, space tourism is hardly a new concept. Mention of the idea goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and with the development of workable rockets in the late 1950s the concept gained a foothold. Perhaps the most exciting early effort took place when Pan American World Airways announced in 1968 that it would take reservations in anticipation of future space tourism as a promotion for the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reportedly Pan Am received over 93,000 reservation requests for a service it had no prospect of beginning.

In 1969 Lt. Gen. Samuel C. Phillips, director of the NASA Apollo program, predicted that commercial space tourism would be available to healthy adventurers who could afford it by 1987. A year earlier, Barron Hilton began talking about building a hotel on the Moon and proposed a “space shuttle service” that would ferry passengers for a round-trip price of $1,500 (about $15,000 today), in addition to another $1,000 for two-week stays at the Lunar Hilton. The hotel was not a small beach bungalow either. One account had it with 5,000 rooms and its own private “ocean,” although details of its design were never forthcoming.

The idea did not die easily and as late as 1999, Hilton was reportedly considering a $25 billion space hotel in collaboration with 16 other groups. A two-week trip would initially cost $2 million per person, dropping to $415,000 by the fifth year. Without explanation this grand scheme quietly faded from sight.
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Early Ideas of Space Tourism