Luxury hotel in space to cost $792,000 a night

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 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 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 civilization,” said 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 of heart.

“We’re not selling a heylet’s-go-to-the-beach equivalent in space,” Bunger said. “We’re selling the experience of being an astronaut. You reckon that there are people who are willing to pay to have that experience.”

Beyond the physical limitations to embarking, there are also the fiscal ones.

The 12-day stay starts at $9.5 million per person, or about $791,666 a night. Aurora Station is planned as a 35-by14-foot 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. The company requires an $80,000 deposit, which is fully refundable, and began accepting payments on Thursday.

Orion Span is assessing potential funding sources to get the endeavor off the ground, but won’t disclose how much it wants to raise for the project, a spokeswoman said. It reflects the type of commercial venture that’s become more common over the past decade, fueled by decreases in launch costs and an influx of venture capital. Since 2015, startup space companies have attracted $7.9 billion in investment, according to Bryce Space & Technology LLC, a consulting firm.

“The commercialization of LEO (low Earth orbit) is an exciting prospect, but it will be an exercise in determining what ideas are more real than others,” said Phil Larson, a former space policy adviser to President Barack Obama who worked for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp. He is now assistant dean and chief of staff at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science.