The Gateway Foundation Space Hotel

2021 may seem a strange time to be thinking of a long distance holiday. It is a period when people throughout the world are unable to venture far from their homes. The Covid-19 pandemic will end eventually, but when even a trip to the shops can need careful planning, the idea of a vacation in space seems even more of a sci-fi fantasy than ever.

Not to the Gateway Foundation though. March 2021 saw the American organisation announce ambitious plans to open a 400 bed space hotel as early as 2027. In fact, its Voyager Class space station looks like offering a pretty comfortable experience. There are plans for bars, a restaurant, food court, casino and a gymnasium so that guests can enjoy their stay in style. There will even be a concert venue, plus a park with a vertical garden to provide some earth-like green space.

The hotel will look very much like one of those sci-fi designs of years gone by. It will be constructed in low Earth orbit (LEO), with an inner and outer ring. It will look like a giant Big Wheel in space just like those seemingly fanciful designs of the 1950s. Staff, management and environmental services will be located in the hub of the station, while guests will be located on the outer ring. The whole space station will be approximately 300 metres in diameter, revolving slowly in order to provide a low gravity environment for its occupants.

Actual gravity levels can be varied according to how quickly the space station spins, but are expected to be similar to that which would be experienced on the Moon, about one sixth of that on Earth. This will make things much more comfortable for guests, who won’t have to worry about the space sickness potential of weightlessness, nor of their toothpaste floating across the cabin when performing their morning and night time ablutions. On board atmospheric pressure will be much like that on Earth, so guests will be able to breathe normally without the need for a spacesuit.

Plans are for there to be up to 500 rooms in the hotel eventually, but these will not all be ready on day one, as the station is gradually commissioned and tested until maximum occupancy is achieved.

The opportunities this will offer are astounding. In the early days of operation, there will only be relatively low occupancy. Yet if just one hundred people arrive every day for a two day stay, there will be room for around 40,000 people to visit over a full year. When fully opened and at full capacity, over 100,000 people per year could be comfortably accommodated. When you remember that in the sixty years or so since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, barely 500 people have been into space in total, this would represent a truly remarkable increase in numbers.

The Voyager Class will be much more than just a hotel too. There will be room for scientific research modules and NASA training facilities. There will also be spare capacity for national space agencies and private companies to lease or buy facilities to carry out space and low gravity research.

Construction by the Foundation’s Orbital Assembly Corporation is due to begin in 2025. $1 billion has been raised already toward the $22 billion estimated cost of the station, and further investment is being raised.

With capacity and facilities like this, it does seem as if everyday space travel and tourism really could be a reality long before the end of the decade.