Looking for accommodations that are out of this world? Then you’ll be happy to hear that Houston-based startup Orion Span has plans for an extraterrestrial luxury space hotel that it hopes to launch in 2021 and have ready for occupancy the following year. The announcement was made recently at the Space 2.0 Summit in San Jose, California.
The modular hotel, dubbed “Aurora Station,” will house six people at a time, as well as two crew members, while orbiting 200 miles high and circling the Earth every 90 minutes. It’s not a destination for the budget traveler, however — wealthy space tourists will need to pony up $9.5 million per person, or about $791,666 per night, for a 12-night stay. Room service and a minibar are probably not included.
“We’re selling the experience of being an astronaut,” CEO Frank Bunger told Bloomberg. “You reckon that there are people who are willing to pay to have that experience.”
Potential guests will need to undergo a three-month training regimen prior to launch, beginning with online courses and progressing to contingency training in Houston. The company says it has “taken what was historically a 24-month training regimen to prepare travelers to visit a space station and streamlined it to three months, at a fraction of the cost.”
The spacecraft itself will be approximately 34 feet long and 14 feet wide, or about the size of a private jet. Guests will be able to experience zero gravity, watch the sun rise 16 times per day, participate in research experiments, and even kick back in a virtual reality holodeck.
Several companies have expressed interest in plans for space tourism, so hotels in orbit can’t be too far off. Orion Span has no contract yet with a launch provider, leading to questions about the aggressive timeline of the venture. Analysts suggested to Bloomberg that the announcement could be an effort to attract publicity and funding, rather than an outline of a realistic time frame.
Executives at the company are former NASA employees who worked on the International Space Station. Bunger said the Aurora Station design will work with current launch configurations such as those used by SpaceX. He also suggested the possibility of partnering with a government space agency.
The company didn’t disclose how much it’s planning to raise for the Aurora Station project, but Bunger predicted that costs will decline rapidly in the near future. “Everybody’s forecasting that they’re going to fall,” he added. “Almost every week, there’s another rocket launch company that’s starting up with a new way to get to orbit cheaper, faster, better.”
You can reserve your spot now by making a fully refundable $80,000 deposit on the company’s website.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.