After decades of being some kind of far-fetched fantasy, it looks like space tourism is set to become an actual, genuine thing. Space flights are already under way (for the super-rich, anyway) and they’re set to be opened up to the general public later this year. So what’s the next step?
Well, it appears that the next big thing for interstellar tourism may well be ‘space hotels’. Californian company the Orbital Assembly Corporation has not one but two space hotels in the pipeline, and it says that the first could be up and running by as early as 2025.
Called the ‘Pioneer Station’, Orbital Assembly’s first hotel will be able to accommodate up to 28 guests. It’ll consist of five pods, arranged in a constantly rotating ring so that the hotel has a relatively normal degree of gravity inside.
The second project is called the ‘Voyager Station’, and it’ll be much, much bigger than Pioneer. With a greater range of luxury suites, options for fine dining and even a basketball/trampoline area for people to muck around in lower gravity, Voyager is expected to house 400 guests.
Orbital Assembly has put together some renders of the projects, and, even if they weren’t in space, these places would look pretty damn fancy.
If all this looks incredibly exciting to you, well, the good news is that all this stuff is essentially right around the corner. Orbital Assembly wants to have the Pioneer Station up and running by 2025 – just three years away.
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