By the end of 2021, a project from a Hollywood movie will be a fact: The first luxury space hotel, Aurora Station, will be ready to welcome a select few. The newly formed American company Orion Span promised that by then it would have built it and put it in orbit around the Earth.
"By the beginning of 2022, we will be hosting tourists, astronauts, space exploration and even production activities at Aurora Station," the company said, according to the APE-MPE.
The space hotel will orbit the Earth at a distance of about 360 kilometers, just below the International Space Station (ISS) at 400 kilometers, and will complete a full orbit every 90 minutes.
An overnight stay will cost about $ 792.000, but it will probably not be possible to stay overnight. A stay of 12 days will cost at least $ 9,5 million in total, including transportation costs.
"We do not sell anything like 'let's go to the beach' for space. We are selling the experience of becoming an astronaut. "There are a lot of people willing to pay to have this experience," said Frank Bunger, founder and CEO of Orion Span.
Orion is already building the space hotel in Houston, Texas, using some engineers who were involved in the construction of the International Space Station.
The station-hotel Aurora (Dawn) will have dimensions of 13,3 by 4,3 meters and space for passengers of 160 cubic meters (compared to 916 cubic meters of the ISS). It will be able to accommodate four tourist-clients and two crew members, most likely former astronauts. If things go well, the hotel will be able to grow with the addition of new spaces. Each tourist will first go through three months of space training.
Of course, there is a long way to go from the plans to the implementation, as the company does not even seem to have secured the necessary funding, nor has it entered into an agreement with any launch company to put the hotel on track.
Another US company, Axiom Space, plans to launch a commercial space station into orbit around the Earth by 2024, as will the US-based Bigelow Aerospace. Virgin Galactic is preparing shorter tourist flights in space (at a cost of about 250.000 per person), while Elon Musk's Space X also has plans for space tourism around the Moon.
Between 2001 and 2009, seven individuals made eight "tourist" trips to the International Space Station, each paying $ 20 million to $ 40 million. The trips, organized by the American company Space Adventures, were made with Russian "Soyuz" missiles.
If nothing else, the cost of space tourism seems to be falling somewhat, although it remains a game for the rich…
