World’s First Luxury Space Hotel Called Aurora Station Hopes To Launch in 2022 And The Von Braun Station’s Space Hotel With Artificial Gravity Will Be In Orbit By 2025 With Cruise Ship-Style Amenities
Californian company The Gateway Foundation has released plans for the Von Braun Station, a cruise ship-style hotel floating among the stars.
1. The Gateway Foundation is building a space hotel, based on the concepts of a Nazi and American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.
2. The space station is expected to be operational by 2025.
3. The company plans to assemble it in orbit, using robots and drones.
The aim is to get the hotel off the ground by 2025 and make it fully operational for travel by 2027. Terrestrial construction on the Gateway Foundation’s project is set to begin October 1, 2019.
Modern luxury interiors help ground the space, which will have artificial gravity.
The Von Braun station is just one such space-based tourism option in development. Also planning to propel people into space are Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX company and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company, not to mention the International Space Station — which recently announced the possibility of commercial collaborations.
The Von Braun Station is also not the only space hotel design in the works. Earlier in 2019, US-based space tech startup Orion Span released plans for a luxury space hotel called Aurora Station, which it hopes to launch in 2022.
Aurora Station aims to sleep just 12, whereas the Von Braun Station will sleep 352 people with a maximum capacity of 450.
The Von Braun Space Station is the world’s first space hotel.
Among the stars
According to digitally rendered video and images released by the Gateway Foundation, the station resembles a rotating wheel, comprised of 24 modules, orbiting the Earth.
But how would the physics of the hotel work?
Tim Alatorre, a senior design architect at the Gateway Foundation, says the rotating wheel would create a simulated gravity.
“The station rotates, pushing the contents of the station out to the perimeter of the station, much in the way that you can spin a bucket of water — the water pushes out into the bucket and stays in place,” he tells CNN Travel.
“Eventually, going to space will just be another option people will pick for their vacation, just like going on a cruise, or going to Disney World.” Mr Alatorre added. But before you start counting your coffers to ensure a cabin on the station, there have been questions raised about the logistics of the project and its ambitious launch date.
Near the center of the station there’s no artificial gravity, Alatorre says, but as you move down the outside of the station, the feeling of gravity increases.
The Gateway Foundation’s hotel design is named for Wernher von Braun, an aerospace engineer who pioneered rocket technology, first in Germany and later in the United States.
SpaceX Starship and The Von Braun Rotating Space Station
This could be viewed as a controversial move. While living in Germany, von Braun was involved in the Nazi rocket development program. He later worked on the Apollo space program in the United States.
The name was voted for by the Gateway Foundation members because the station is based on designs von Braun sketched out some 60 years ago.
“The basic physics of the station hasn’t changed since the 1950s, the way the station rotates,” says Alatorre.
The main difference is the modern materials — new metal alloys, carbon composites, 3D printing, and launchpad technology that, says Alatorre, make a space hotel more probable in our current era.
Space tourism is an expensive game — Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic plans to launch passengers into sub-orbital space at the hefty sum of $250,000 per person, per trip.
Meanwhile, Aurora Station says a stay in its space hotel will cost an eye-watering $9.5 million.
Price-wise, in the early phases the Von Braun hotel will also be catering to those with dollars to spend, but the foundation is hoping to make it equivalent to “a trip on a cruise or a trip to Disneyland.”
Warm aesthetic
So what will Von Braun Station be like inside?
Alatorre says the hotel’s aesthetic was a direct response to the Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” — just maybe not in the way you might think.
“It was almost a blueprint of what not to do,” says Alatorre. “I think the goal of Stanley Kubrick was to highlight the divide between technology and humanity and so, purposefully, he made the stations and the ships very sterile and clean and alien.”
Instead, Alatorre wanted to bring a slice of the earth to space, to avoid a laboratory, overly Star Trek-esque feel.
Onboard, there’ll be warm suites with carpets and stylish monochrome touches and chic bars that wouldn’t look out of place back on Earth, just with star-gazing views.
There will also be plenty of fun recreational activities for guests to enjoy, says Alatorre.
“We’re going to have a number of different recreation activities and games that’ll highlight the fact that you’re able to do things that you can’t do on Earth,” he says. “Because of the weightlessness and the reduced gravity, you’ll be able to jump higher, be able to lift things, be able to run in ways that you can’t on Earth.”
A sport that’s intriguingly called “supersize basketball” is one such concept, according to Alatorre.
‘Starship culture’
If it all sounds like a space-age gimmick, Alatorre is emphatic that the concept will have widespread, enduring appeal.
“People will want to go and experience this just because it’s a cool new thing and they’ve never done it before,” he admits.
“But our goal — the overall goal of the Gateway Foundation — is to create a starship culture where people are going to space, and living in space, and working in space and they want to be in space. And we believe that there’s a demand for that.”
That means having space be a place where thousands of people are “living, working and thriving.”
The Gateway Foundation also intends the space station to be used for research purposes, as well as asteroid mining.
Alatorre says the Von Braun hotel wants to be “the first in orbit,” but that even if the Gateway Foundation doesn’t launch by 2025, the company knows one of its competitors will.
Space tourism is the future, he says, and the Gateway Foundation believes that the future’s imminent.
Sustainability in space
Given the design is still exactly that — just a design — there are some questions that remain unanswered about how the space hotel will function in actuality.
For example, it’s been suggested that living in low gravity for an extended period of time is damaging to the human body. While vacationers will probably only visit the hotel for a few weeks, staff will plan to be there for six months to a year.
They’ll adjust schedules as needed, says Alatorre, but right now, the foundation thinks this proposition would be “perfectly safe.”
There’s also the sustainability question, as people look for more eco-friendly vacations, surely going to space is not the solution?
Alatorre points to SpaceX’s Raptor engine, which uses methane instead of petroleum-based fuel, suggesting “eco-friendly” rocket designs are the future.
He says recycling will be woven into the fabric of the space hotel.
“On the station itself, it’s going to be about the most environmentally friendly vacation you’ll ever have. Because we’re recycling everything,” says Alatorre.
“There’s no amount of water or trash or waste that is going to be discarded, everything will be recycled, reused, stored, converted to some other form.”
From moonshots to Mars
The US government recently vowed to revisit our lonesome natural satellite within five years, but the real action is arguably elsewhere as a trio of companies bankrolled by billionaires – Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX – compete to conquer the final frontier.
The obstacles are formidable; the progress is remarkable. Whether or not we witness commercial space travel take off in 2019 (in both senses of the phrase), the expert analysis of Stanford University’s Professor G. Scott Hubbard – a former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center – suggests that we stand on the threshold of a new era.
After the moonshot, the US wants to send astronauts to Mars. And then? Because we won’t stop there. Michael Collins, who piloted the Apollo 11 Command Module around the Moon as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounded across its sterile surface, expressed this ever so well: ‘It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand,’ he said. ‘Exploration is not a choice, really; it’s an imperative.’
Or as another Buzz might say: to infinity and beyond.
The Grand Tour redux
So will my children ever enjoy a Grand Tour of the Solar System, as envisaged in NASA’s charming Visions of the Future posters? (Do check them out.) Will they stand in the shadow of Mars’ Olympus Mons, which rears to more than twice the height of Everest? Will they gape at the raging auroras of Jupiter, hundreds of times more powerful than our own Northern Lights? Will they sail the methane lakes of Titan, Saturn’s most enigmatic moon?
Alas, no. If it comes to pass, such a journey would be the preserve of a privileged few for many generations; just as the original Grand Tour of Europe was restricted to the aristocracy, so a round-trip of our galactic neighbors would remain beyond the reach of all but a coterie of plutocrats for the foreseeable future.
There’s a fair chance, however, that my children’s generation will see the curvature of the Earth from a sub-orbital flight, and some of them might, just might, leave a footprint on the Moon (thanks to Wallace and Gromit, Harvey already spends a lot of time speculating about this possibility).
However, the company remain committed to their vision, viewing the Von Braun Station as the first step in mankind’s journey to colonize, and seemingly commodify, space, with the company planning to build further stations (including a hotel that can accommodate up to 3000 people per month), before colonizing Mars and mining the asteroid belt for raw materials.
Find out more about the project on the company’s official website https://gatewayspaceport.com
