If reports are to be believed, the world will soon get its first 'space hotel' by the end of 2021. A Houston-based company, Orion Span, plans to open Aurora Station, a 35ft-by-14ft space craft that will be able to accommodate four travellers and two crew members for 12-day stays in space.
The company's mission is to build and sustain human communities in space.
The Guardian reports that guests will be charged US $9.5m each, or about $791,666 a night and refundable deposits of $80,000 can now be made online.
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In a press release, Orion Span said it would take “what was historically a 24-month training regimen to prepare travellers to visit a space station and streamline it to three months, at a fraction of the cost”.
The proposed hotel will zero gravity flying throughout the station, views of home towns from space, the ability to take part in research experiments like growing food while in orbit, and live-streams with friends and family at home through high-speed Internet.
"We want to get people into space because it's the final frontier for our civilization," Orion Span's founder and chief executive, Frank Bunger, told Bloomberg.
According to Bunger, the price Orion Span is offering for their luxe-space hotel is reasonable at less than $10 million per person as the price of space launches is declining.
"Everybody's forecasting that [launch prices are] going to fall," he told Bloomberg. "Almost every week there's another rocket launch company that's starting up with a new way to get to orbit cheaper, faster, better."