Do you want to stay at the first ever hotel on the Moon? Well, it’s going to cost you a pretty penny — an initial deposit between $250,000 and $1 million — just to secure your stay.
That’s what a startup called GRU Space — the letters apparently stand for “Galactic Resource Utilization” — is offering to would-be vacationers after the company opened its website for online reservations this week, as reported by Ars Technica. If all goes to according to plan, the first truly one-star hotel will start accommodating guests in the 2030s.
It all sounds pretty far fetched, according to Ars, especially since the company has only two full-time employees, including founder Skyler Chan who graduated from University of California, Berkeley last year. But the company does have seed funding from startup accelerator Y Combinator, so while it’s clearly a castle in the sky, at least there’s some money behind it.
“I realized I was born in this time where we can actually become interplanetary, and that is probably the singular most impactful thing one person could do with their time,” Chan told Ars about the impetus behind the company.
In a white paper published on the GRU Space website, Chan lays out the company’s ambitious goals that goes beyond being a mere lunar hotelier. The company will initially build a hotel, then start constructing a Moon base and other important infrastructure for a human colony. Eventually, GRU would function like a space-faring version of the Hudson Bay Company, the storied fur-trading enterprise that was established in 1670 and which was given permission via royal charter to oversee laws, trade and property in the Canadian wilderness.
Still, how does this hotel thing happen when there’s nothing but coldness and dusty regolith on the surface?
Chan says the company envisions first sending an inflatable structure to the Moon’s surface via space lander in 2029. That first mission wouldn’t just test a habitable structure, but would also construct bricks from lunar regolith for future buildings. Then in 2031, the company plans to send a larger human habitation pod — the hotel — to be placed into a “lunar pit” that would shield visitors from cosmic radiation and other dangers.
By 2032, the company will have the small hotel on the lunar surface up and running and would be able to accommodate four guests for stays of multiple days. Curiously, the company published images on its website that depicts a future established hotel which bears a striking resemblance to the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco — which seems kind of outrageous, but Chan has a reason.
“SpaceX is building the FedEx to get us there, right?” Chan said. “But there has to be a destination worthy to stay in.”
More on lunar colonies: Check Out This Beautiful Design for a Moon Habitat
The post Moon Hotel Now Taking Reservations appeared first on Futurism.
