Startup Announces Plans To Build A Hotel On The Moon

This week, a startup from San Francisco announced plans for a luxury hotel on the moon…yes, you read that right.

Galactic Resource Utilization Space, better known as GRU Space, says it wants to build an initial inflatable lunar hotel by 2032, before eventually building a permanent lunar hotel using the materials on the moon’s surface.

If successful, the project could see the moon being used as a new centre for tourism, particularly for high-net-worth, adventure-seeking travellers.

Building The Hotel

According to GRU Space, the lunar hotel will be constructed in stages. The first stage, V1, would be an inflatable structure built on earth and transported to the moon in partnership with a company like SpaceX.

This inflatable structure will look to host up to 4 guests for around 5 nights.

Later versions would see capacity growing to around 10 guests and replacing the inflatable structure with more solid buildings constructed with polymerised lunar soil, meaning no materials need to be transported from earth.

In the announcement, GRU said that the hotel would include systems like oxygen generation, air and water recycling, radiation shielding, temperature control and emergency evacuations so it can operate safely in space.

If you want to see what it might look like, they released a render too…

A Big Price For A Once-In-A-Lifetime Trip

But if you think the vision of building a hotel on the moon is ambitious, wait until you hear how much it costs to stay.

GRU Space has already started taking reservations, with deposits ranging from $250,000 to $1 million, depending on the package selected. Whilst the final price has not been confirmed, the company has said a full stay could cost upwards of $10 million.

But who would pay this? Well, GRU estimates that some of its earliest customers are likely to be space travellers and high-net-worth people looking for an adventure.

And when it comes to some of the experiences they are looking at putting on at the resort, early ideas include moonwalking, rover driving and lunar golf.

To put this into perspective, only 12 humans have actually walked on the moon. GRU believes that creating commercial tourism on the moon could really drive this up over the next 10 years.

A Lunar Economy?

GRU Space was founded by Skyler Chan, a 22-year-old Berkeley graduate who previously worked at Tesla and has experience with NASA-funded space projects.

When talking about the project, Chan describes it as a way to build a ‘lunar economy’. After all, if tourism to the moon starts to become more regular, then there’s nothing to say residential construction couldn’t begin soon after.

Not The First To Sell Space Experiences

Whilst a lunar hotel is still an aspirational idea, GRU Space isn’t the only company looking to take on space tourism.

Virgin Galactic has already had a few successful journeys into orbit, giving passengers a few minutes of experiencing and seeing space.

Other startups like Unastella and Aton Space Travel are also exploring space tourism, focusing on lower-cost travel options that can take people into orbit for short spaces of time.

Even SpaceX has flirted with the idea of space travel, including the now-cancelled dearMoon project, which planned to send artists on a SpaceX spacecraft around the moon.

Could Lunar Holidays Be Coming Soon?

Despite making headlines all over the world, a lot of questions around safety and whether this is actually feasible still remain.

After all, it’s all very well rendering a picture of a hotel and having grand plans to build one, but is there actually demand for this? And is constructing a hotel on the moon really possible?

Well, we will wait and see. But for now, it does seem like space tourism could be a real industry in the not so distant future.