World's First Space Hotel To Begin Construction In 2025 With Rooms For 400 Guests

Construction work is set to start on the very first space hotel which sleeps 400 and comes equipped with a cinema, spa, and restaurants in 2025.

The Voyage Station, a project of the OAC (short for Orbital Assembly Corporation) is scheduled to operate in 2027 in low-Earth orbit.

The space hotel resembles a large circle and will rotate to create artificial gravity similar to that of the Moon. It will sport features you would expect on a cruise ship like a cinema, a health spa, and themed restaurants.

Voyage Station comes in the form of a rotating ring with a series of pods attached to the outside. These pods can also be sold to ESA, NASA, and the like for space research.

OAC hasn’t revealed the costs of building the space hotel nor the cost of spending a night there. However, it did say things were getting cheaper thanks to reusable launch vehicles.

The Gateway Foundation will run some of the 24 modules which are for air, crew quarters, power, and water. The hotel will also have facilities like restaurants, a gym, and kitchens to meet the needs of people who will have to spend a lot of time in space. The rest of the modules will be leased or sold to governments or private companies.

Some of the possible use cases of these modules include buying multiple pods to make a hotel with restaurants, spa, and gym; or buy one to create a space villa. Governments could buy some of these modules to train their own astronaut crew or for their science projects.

The idea of a station in the shape of pods attached to a rotating wheel dates back to the earliest days of space exploration and belonged to Wernher von Braun.

Braun was one of NASA's Apollo program architects back in the 1950s. The design of the Voyager station is based on a similar idea but on a far larger scale.

The Gateway Foundation was set up in 2012 and in 2018, it established the OAC to realize the ambition of an orbiting station.

While we have no idea how much it costs to build the space hotel, the launch of SpaceX Starship and SpaceX Falcon 9 has made it possible to send large objects into Earth orbit.

For a long time, the cost of sending one kg of material to space stood at $8,000. However, the success of reusable Falcon 9 has cut it down to $2,000. SpaceX predicted that the upcoming Starship would bring that down only a few hundred dollars.

Reusable rockets also make orbiting stations like the Voyager possible as they allow for regular connection with Earth.

The OAC team includes pilots, architects, engineers, and NASA veterans to set up a system with several pods serving a wide range of purposes and a high-speed space train.

The plan is to build 24 20m-long and 12m-wide modules, each with a different function. Some will be for science purposes and others will be a movie theater and hotel rooms.

The team also wants the inner wheel to feature facilities of a cruise ship like a spa, gym, bars, libraries, and viewing lounges. The biggest difference is the Voyager will make a full circle around Earth every 90 minutes.

The OAC team plans to test the design with a small prototype and a free-flying microgravity facility.

According to Gateway Foundation founder John Blincow, the station will be the next revolution in the space industry.

Blincow said rotation is essential as it’s impossible to keep humans on the space hotel without gravity for too long. We are talking about spending months at a time in space especially when people work as the hotel staff.

He said human bodies will fall apart without gravity and the station rotating rate can be increased or decreased to have a higher and lower gravity.

Once the company is done with the tests, a robot called Structure Truss Assembly Robot, or STAR for short, will be in charge of assembling the Voyager frame in orbit.

The first construction will be a 61m gravity ring in Earth orbit. The ring can spin to create 40% of our planet’s gravity or Mars’ gravity level. The whole project takes three years to construct and once it’s in orbit, putting it together will take three days.

While making a hotel was the initial idea, the company hopes that they would be able to lease pods to ESA, NASA, and other agencies.

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