The idea of a hotel in space if not a new one:
humanity, collectively and individually, has long dreamed of leaving our atmosphere,
and combining it with one of our favourite activities, vacation, seems like a perfect
match. Soon, that dream is set to become a reality. Well, providing you’re very wealthy.
The project set to make this dream come true for a lucky few is the Voyager Space Station Hotel,
which is currently in the serious planning stages. Despite a few delays, the hotel is
expected to begin construction in 2026, and could be open for business as early as 2027.
The designs of Voyager are based on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but not in
the way you might think. Designers of the Voyager Station say Kubrick’s design was intentionally
sterile and isolating, and they wanted to go down exactly the opposite road, creating a
homely but fashionable space location that will feel somewhat normal in its more conventional
‘hotel’ attributes - the beds and showers, for example, won’t be particularly ‘spacey’.
The hotel will be designed and built by the same people behind the space station itself,
the Orbital Assembly Corporation. The main draw, naturally, will be the incredible views
out of the window, but the hotel is intended to have plenty of elements of luxury, too.
Early drawings show a structure that looks a lot like a ferris wheel, with individual
‘pod’ rooms evenly spaced around it, offering the ultimate in private rooms with that view.
Outside the pods, visitors will have plenty of entertainment options,
including a 400-person viewing spot - large enough to host everyone on board,
including the staff - which will be combined with a lounge and bar.
Facilities will also include a spa, a gym, themed restaurants and even a concert venue
to enjoy from up on high, all of which can be taken in while the hotel circles
around the globe in orbit at a rapid pace of complete circle of the planet every 90 minutes.
Themed restaurants will play on a few space tropes,
including making ‘dried ice cream’ available to guests,
though the restaurants are expected to be high end despite the novelty elements, with top
chefs on board. “There'll be no burgers and fries,” the company behind the project has joked.
Some of the other facilities seem somewhat bizarre in context. The designs also feature a library and
cinema, for example, and while they’re no doubt ‘nice to have’, catching the latest blockbuster
or sticking your nose in the pages of a novel seem poor uses of time spent orbiting the earth to us.
One key aspect of the project will be the use of centrifugal force to simulate gravity.
In order to do this, the whole circular hotel will spin as it orbits, generating an outwards
force that will act in place of gravity. This is necessary because a lot of guests may have trouble
withstanding anti-gravity as a permanent part of the experience, something for which astronauts
undertake substantial training. Gravityon board will be roughly equivalent to moon gravity,
so there will be a substantial change for guests to cope with. That said, the level
of gravity will vary depending on your location in the hotel, as designer Tim Alatorre explains:
"The station rotates, pushing the contents of the station out to the perimeter of the station,
much in the way that you can spin a bucket of water. The water pushes
out into the bucket and stays in place," he says.
“Near the center of the station there's no artificial gravity,
but as you move down the outside of the station, the feeling of gravity increases.”
Low gravity activities will be held near the centre, then, including activities
like games of basketball which explore the extra bounce and leap available in space.
As well as the facilities for guests, the hotel has serious self-sufficiency requirements,
and will dedicate substantial space to things like water, air and power systems, as well as space
dedicated to the crew that operate the hotel - a sought after job in the coming years, we suspect.
Not all of the hotel is going to be available to the public, and equally, of course,
most of the public aren’t going to be able to afford to visit the hotel. While the super rich
enjoy what will undoubtedly be one of the most unique and in-demand holiday experiences on offer,
some governments and even wealthy private individuals will be able to buy stakes for
more permanent options on a stay, to be used for anything from training,
to scientific work, to the most unlikely of holiday homes.
Getting to the Voyager, of course, will be another major undertaking.
Guests will have to travel on the SpaceX Starship shuttle to get to their holiday location,
and that means a period of training before a visit can be made. It will also, inevitably,
mean restrictions on the health and fitness of guests wishing to participate.
The first indications of the cost of the stay are hefty to say the least, with reservations
for a stay of just three days said to be going at around the 5 million dollar mark.
For context, this could be a whole lot worse: the first would-be spaceflight
crew made up of private citizens each paid $55 million a ticket for Axiom Space’s trip,
with just three buyers taking up the option at that price to travel to the
International Space Station for eight days, and scheduled to launch in 2022.
There are other companies looking to get into the “space travel for ordinary people” game, too,
with Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX also on a somewhat similar path to the Voyager project.
There are even likely to be more versions of the Voyager,
too, with the makers saying that once in place, the hotel could be really lucrative
and that’s already led to interest in building second versions from other buyers.
Even the competition won’t push prices down to affordable levels for most of us for some time,
though. There are, naturally, huge build costs associated with this kind of project,
and the transport rates aren’t exactly affordable,
either. For the foreseeable future, this is certainly a holiday for the ultra wealthy.
Oh, and if you are in that category, a word of warning before you splash out once the trips go
on sale... Aurora Hotel, an exclusive previous plan for a Space Hotel from a different company,
was supposed to launch in 2021 and take customers into space from 2022, but hasn’t got past the
concept stage yet. It’s very possible that 2027 date might just be a touch unrealistic.
Eventually, though, the Voyager team hopes that a
trip to space will become more in the realms of realism for everyday people;
more like an expensive trip to a high-end theme park, or a plush beach resort.
"We're trying to make the public realize that this golden age of space travel is just around the
corner. It's coming. It's coming fast," Orbital Assembly Corporation head John Blincow told CNN.
Sadly, for most of us, it might not be affordable in our lifetimes, but the excitement is real.
We can picture the punny advertising slogans now - the only hotel that’s out of this world!
But would you go, if the prices became affordable? Tell us in the comments.