HOTELS SOON ‘OUT OF THIS WORLD’

TBILISI—TIRED of your ordinary earthly vacations? Some day soon you might be able to board a rocket and get a room with a view—of the whole planet—from a hotel in space.

At least, that is the sales pitch of several companies racing to become the first to host guests in orbit on purpose-built space stations.

“It sounds kind of crazy to us today because it is not a reality yet,” said Frank Bunger, founder of US aerospace firm Orion Span, one of the companies vying to take travelers out of this world.

“But that’s the nature of these things, it sounds crazy until it is normal.”

US multimillionaire Dennis Tito became the world’s first paying space tourist in 2001, traveling to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket for a reported $20 million. A few others have followed.

Since then, companies like Boeing, Spacex and Blue Origin have been working on ways to bring the stars into reach for more people— opening up a new business frontier for would-be space hoteliers.

$35,000 a night

US space agency Nasa announced in June that it plans to allow two private citizens a year to stay at the ISS at a cost of about $35,000 per night for up to a month. The first mission could be as early as 2020.

But the growing movement has raised questions about the adequacy of current space laws, which mainly deal with exploration and keeping space free of weapons, not hotels and holidaymakers.

“It is difficult now to want to do things in space and get a clear answer from (space law),” said Christopher Johnson, a space law adviser at the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group.

“For something as advanced as hotels in space there is no clear guidance.”

Orbital holiday

Orion Span plans to host the first guests on its Aurora Station—a capsule-shaped spacecraft roughly the size of a private jet—by 2024, said Bunger.

Accompanied by a crew member, up to five travelers at a time would fly up to the station for a 12-day stay costing at least $9.5 million per head, he said.

In orbit, guests would take part in scientific experiments, enjoy some 16 sunrises and sunsets a day and play table tennis in zero gravity, he said, adding about 30 people had already put down a $80,000 deposit to save a seat.

“We haven’t seen this kind of excitement about space since the Apollo era,” Bunger told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

Californian company the Gateway Foundation is hoping to build a massive space station able to sleep more than 400 people—including tourists, researchers, doctors and housekeepers.

Solar-powered and shaped like a wheel, the station would spin around its core to create artificial gravity on its perimeter, equal to about one-sixth of that on earth, said its architect Tim Alatorre.

The group aims to complete the station, named after Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist who later worked on the US Apollo program, by 2028.

Without disclosing how much a space holiday would cost, Alatorre said the goal was to make the station “accessible to the everyday person.”