Voyager Station ... a space hotel to open in 2027
This decade may see humanity's first hotel in outer space being built, as the Orbital Assembly Corporation is set to begin work on building the Voyager Station, the world's first space hotel, in low Earth orbit in 2025, to be operational early in the year. 2027
The hotel is supposed to be equipped with restaurants, cinemas, spas, and rooms with a capacity of about 400 people.
The Voyager Station is in the form of a large circle 200 meters in diameter that rotates to generate an artificial gravity that is set at a level similar to the gravity found on the surface of the moon.
The hotel includes many of the features you might expect from a cruise ship, and has a series of capsules attached to the outside of the rotating ring.
Some of these 20 x 12 meter capsules can be sold to the likes of NASA and the European Space Research Agency.
The Gateway Foundation runs some of these units dedicated to things like: crew quarters, air, water, and power.
This will be the next industrial revolution, said John Blincow, founder of the Gateway Foundation, which runs some of the Voyager Station capsules, adding that circulation is vital, and people cannot stay on the space station for long without gravity.
Orbital Assembly Corporation aims to make multi-month stays within Voyager Station possible.
The station - which orbits the globe every 90 minutes - also includes a gym, kitchen, restaurant and other essential facilities for people who are scheduled to be there for the long haul.
The company hopes to sell parts of the hotel to permanent stakeholders, including government agencies looking to use the site as a training center or property owners looking to set up an on-board villa, while the other units are being rented out.
The idea of building a space station that revolves around a central circular wheel goes back to the early days of space travel, in the idea of NASA's Apollo engineer (Wernher von Braun).
The Voyager Station concept, a similar idea but on a much larger scale, first appeared in 2012 with the launch of the Gateway Foundation.
The company plans to test the concept with a smaller prototype station and a freely-flying microgravity facility similar to the International Space Station.
When the test is complete, a robot called STAR builds the Voyager Station in orbit after the company completes some tests of gravity.
No details have been revealed about the cost of building the space station, or the cost of spending a night in the hotel, although the company says construction costs have become cheaper thanks to the reusable launch vehicles.