California company plans moon hotel, accepting $1M deposits for rooms
A California start-up company is offering travellers an early reservation at a proposed hotel on the moon. But there’s a hefty deposit of $1,000,000 required. And the tentative opening date isn’t for another six years.
Galactic Resource Utilization Space was founded by Skyler Chan, a graduate of the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. The company bio for the 22-year-old says he has built vehicle software at Tesla, constructed a NASA-funded 3D printer that was sent into space, and became an U.S. Air Force trained pilot at the age of 16.
The company moniker is shortened to GRU, which is also the name of the villain in the Despicable Me movies who at one point wanted to steal the moon. Indeed, the company’s white paper outlining its plans concludes: “It’s time to steal the moon.”
GRU launched its booking website this week. It outlines an ambitious plan — first GRU mission to the moon in 2029, habitat established in 2030 or so, and then — boom. A hotel with a view of the Atlantic Ocean. And the Pacific. Also the Indian. The company’s video shows expansive rooms with large windows, while an artist’s conception of the exterior looks like a stone temple from a video game, complete with moody lighting.
GRU says it will use “a proprietary habitation modules system and automated process for transforming lunar soil into durable structures.”
The white paper is a mix of hopeful philosophy and science. It talks about the need for humanity to become intergalactic, with the moon as a vital first step, and also includes charts on transportation costs and power requirements.
But it also lays out “The ‘Top Secret’ GRU Master Plan,” which is back-of-the-napkin simple: “1. Build the first hotel on the Moon. GRU solves off-world surface habitation. 2. Build America’s first Moon base (roads, mass drivers, warehouses, physical infrastructure on the Moon). 3. Repeat on Mars.”
The company is also looking for help, with an ad seeking a “founding member of technical staff,” a job it says will pay US$80,000 to US$130,000 a year.
“You will be responsible for structural and mechanical systems that must eventually survive vacuum, regolith, thermal extremes, and human life support constraints,” the ad reads. “This is a systems-heavy, deeply hands-on, high-agency role.”
It adds: “You’re not ‘supporting’ a program. You are the program.”
The million-dollar deposit is presumably refundable if the hotel fails to open, but there’s an additional fee of US$1,000 (non-refundable) to keep reservations restricted to serious and well-heeled travellers. GRU says it expects the average stay to be five nights. Travel time, barring any great advances in rocketry, is about three days each way.
Those with less than seven figures to spend can still buy merch from the GRU shop, which sells hats, tees, mugs and the ever popular space hoodie.
For $1,400 you can even purchase a “moon brick.” The company says the bricks are “produced from simulated lunar regolith simulant, stamped with the GRU logo,” adding: “These bricks are made using the same technology we’ll use to build structures on the Moon.”
The concept of hotels in orbit or on the moon is not a new one. One of the earliest was unveiled more than 60 years ago at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago, where dancers performed a number called “out of this world” in a mockup of a hotel called the Lunar Hilton.
A Chicago-area newspaper noted in its issue of Aug. 27, 1958: “This could mean that the Hilton chain is dickering with the idea of opening the first hotel on the Moon.”
That was some ambitious dickering, given that the first human spaceflight was still more than two years away, and the first human lunar landing still more than an decade out. Would-be lunar tourists are still waiting for the grand opening.
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