The space hotel “Aurora Station” will be launched by 2022

The emergence of private space companies not only contributes to the technological and scientific development of mankind, but also brings the time of mass space tourism closer. Orion Span presented the...

The emergence of private space companies not only contributes to the technological and scientific development of mankind, but also brings the time of mass space tourism closer.

Orion Span presented the project of the “Aurora Station” orbital hotel at the Space 2.0 Summit in California. The guests of the hotel will be able to spend 12 days seeing the Earth from space in a state of weightlessness.

Aurora Station is a single-module space station with a length of only 13.3 meters. The station can accommodate 6 people at a time: 4 guests and 2 crew members.

In order to rest from earthly worries in orbit, tourists will have to undergo three-months of training and education. Guests will be able to communicate with the Earth from the station via high-speed internet.

The head of Orion Span, Frank Bunger, says that the mission of the company is to make space more accessible to all people. The approximate cost of the space tour is $9.5 million, and pre-orders are already available: you can book a ticket for $80,000. The creation and launch of “Aurora Station” will cost the company about $99 million.

Until now, only the company Roskosmos, together with Space Adventures, delivered tourists to the ISS and housed them in the Russian part of the station. In comparison, the tickets cost an order of magnitude more: from $20 to $40 million.

Space tourism is only just beginning to develop, but Orion Span already has competitors. China is developing a spacecraft that can accommodate up to 20 passengers. And the company Bigelow Aerospace introduced a project for its space hotel in 2017, but in a near-moon orbit.