This luxury hotel will be 322 kilometres up and US$792,000 a night
The idea is not that far-fetched, but one sceptic says a start-up’s audacious plan may be a trial balloon to see how many wannabe astronauts sign up
Aboard the International Space Station, an astronaut’s life is typically work, exercise, rest, repeat. But what if your chance of having the right stuff for Nasa’s astronaut corps is, to say the least, minimal?
Aurora Station, billed as the “first luxury hotel in space”, may be for you. Houston-based Orion Span Inc. hopes to launch the modular station in late 2021 and welcome its first guests the following year, with two crew members accompanying each excursion. The platform would orbit 322 kilometres (200 miles) above Earth, offering six guests 384 sunrises and sunsets as they race around the planet for 12 days at incredibly high speeds.
Once, such a thing would have clearly been the stuff of fiction. Now, in the age of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, the idea that a private company would launch an orbiting hotel seems almost pedestrian.
“We want to get people into space because it’s the final frontier for our civilisation,” says Orion Span’s founder and chief executive officer, Frank Bunger, a former software engineer. Orion Span’s offering won’t be for everyone, however: Launch and re-entry are not for the faint-hearted.
“We’re not selling a hey-let’s-go-to-the-beach equivalent in space,” Bunger says. “We’re selling the experience of being an astronaut. You reckon that there are people who are willing to pay to have that experience.”
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Beyond the physical limitations to embarking, there are also the fiscal ones.
The 12-day stay starts at US$9.5 million per person, or about US$791,666 a night. Aurora Station is planned as a 35-by-14-foot (10.7-by-4.3-metre) module, or roughly the interior volume of a Gulfstream G550 private jet, according to Bunger. The station would accommodate as many as four guests, plus the two crew members. The company requires an US$80,000 deposit, which is fully refundable, and began accepting payments last week.