Moon to get first hotel by 2032 (but don’t look at the price tag)

Gazing at Earth, walking on lunar rocks and a round of low-gravity golf.

That is what the average holiday could look like as soon as 2032, after the plans for the first-ever hotel on the moon were unveiled.

New company Galactic Resources Utilization (GRU) Space – with backing from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and AI giant Nvidia – is asking hopeful space tourists to pay as much as £750,000 (10% of the £7.5million ticket) to reserve a spot, although the first hotel will only have four guests.

Metro takes a look at how the first lunar hotel will make it into space and why it will be the first step to building cities in Mars by 2060.

The timeline for space tourism was unveiled by the firm just weeks before Nasa is due to launch its first crew to the moon in more than 50 years.

With investment from SpaceX and defence technology company Anduril, GRU plans to construct an inflatable space hotel on Earth and land it on the lunar surface in 2032.

It will first accommodate four guests, who will stay in rooms overlooking the stars for five nights.

It will be equipped with air recycling and oxygen generation, water recycling, temperature control, emergency escape system and radiation shelter for solar storms.

GRU Space’s founder Skyler Chan, 22, told Metro: ‘We believe that humanity will become interplanetary before we die, due to the evolution of technology we’re seeing.

‘We are in a pivotal moment in human history. If we succeed, billions of human lives will be born on the Moon and Mars and be able to experience the beauty of lunar and Martian life.’

If all goes to plan, GRU Space will bring 12 rounds of tourists to the moon each year.

Chan said: ‘It won’t be your traditional hotel. That is why people are getting excited.

‘Think about all these experiences you can have in the Moon Hotel.

‘Moon walking. Looking out the window and seeing the Earth and the stars.’

Guests could even play golf on the moon, Chan told Payload, like Nasa astronaut Alan Shephard, who hit two balls during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971.

Making the Moon habitable

The key thing Chan and his team need to do is solve off-world habitation, which is the question of how humans can safely live on the moon, Mars or anywhere else in space.

According to GRU’s whitepaper, this can be done by sending as little weight from Earth as possible, while creating as much living space as possible on the Moon.

GRU will first test this out by sending a test mission in 2029, which will inflate a small version of the future hotel on the Moon.

In 2031, they will then send a much large mission and erect an inflatable structure near a lunar pit – a deep hole that may have warmer temperatures under the surface.

Then by 2032, Chan said GRU will deploy the first hotel on the Moon.

A ticket won’t be cheap, however, with the company warning the ‘final pricing’ will likely ‘exceed $10 million’ (£7,500,000).

But Chan, a recent graduate at the University of Berkeley, stresses space travel could soon become so commonplace that those prices won’t last for long.

He explained: ‘Taking a flight used to be something only for the ultra wealthy and billionaires to do. But today anyone can take an economy class flight.

‘It is going to be the same thing with the moon.’

New ‘Moon brick’ technology

Once that is complete, the hotel will be scaled up to fit 10 guests and will be modelled on the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

There will be one big difference, however. The hotel will be built with moon bricks.

These bricks will be made from the most common material on the moon – lunar regolith (moon dirt) – and will be processed to turn into it into a strong building material.

Best facts about the Moon

How long does it take to get to the moon?

If the Moon was your final destination, it would take you approximately three days with current rocket propulsion, according to Nasa.

However the agency’s New Horizons probe when it passed the moon in just 8 hours 35 minutes while en route to Pluto.

How was the Moon made?

The most widely accepted theory is that the Moon was created when a rock the size of Mars smashed into Earth about 4.5 billion years ago.

Is there water on the Moon?

Yes! Water is in the form of ice trapped within dust and minerals on and under the surface.

It’s been detected in areas which are in a permanent shadow, so are very cold and allow the ice to survive.

What does the Moon smell like?

Apollo 11 astronauts discovered the moon has a smell, which clung to their spacesuits and lunar samples.

The astronauts described the smell as metallic, similar to burnt gunpowder or when a firecracker goes off.

It was likely a result of a chemical reaction between the lunar dust and the oxygen in the air, but those lunar samples did not smell when back on Earth.

That regolith-built outer structure will provide more protection that will allow for longer stays, lower total radiation doses, and lower risks from meteoroid impacts.

When scientists have figured out how to do this, it will be the ‘Promethean moment’ for space tourism, Chan said, which will trigger an ‘explosion of new technologies’.

GRU Space wants to use these new capabilities to build the United States’ first moon base, which will feature roads, warehouses and ‘mass drivers’ on the lunar surface.

In December, US president Donald Trump announced plans for Nasa to return astronauts to the moon by 2028 and to establish the first elements of a permanent lunar base by 2030.

That base will deploy nuclear power systems on the Moon and in orbit, according to the executive order he signed.

Before then Nasa will launch its Artemis II mission as soon as the first week of February 2026.

The mission will take astronauts further into space then ever before and set the stage for a moon landing Artemis III mission in 2028.

Living on Mars

GRU, which is backed by startup accelerator Y Combinator and wasselected as part of Nvidia’s ‘Inception Program for Startups’, won’t stop there.

‘After we build the first Moon base we just want to repeat that on Mars,’ Chan explains.

‘Since we’d have proven our technology and the capability.’

How will humanity ever be able to live on the moon, you may ask.

Chan said it will be entirely possible, in fact he even set up a club called Mars Habitat while at Berkeley, looking at the possibility of using sulfur-based concretes as building material.

GRU’s whitepaper said SpaceX’s Starships will be sent to Mars by 2029, but won’t be able to land.

By the mid to late 2030s, they estimate that they’ll be able to send large payloads to Mars with a high chance of success.

Their end goal is to establish a population on center, which will be home to ‘millions of humans’, within the next three decades.

Moon hotels – a reality check

Before you go out and start buying your spacesuits, maybe it’s time for a reality check.

Chan said: ‘There are a lot of unknowns, a lot of things to figure out.

‘This has never been done before in human history. We are taking a very bold swing.’

The GRU’s roadmap relies on technology in lunar power and lunar comms which is still very much in development.

The university graduate couldn’t give a specific timeline for when GRU would be able to develop off-world surface habitation, only saying they are moving ‘as fast as we can’.

His plans will also need regular and reliable crewed flights to the lunar surface, a favorable regulatory environment.

However Chan’s ambition remains undaunted.

He told Metro: ‘We want to inspire the next generation to look up at the moon and realise that it is not just something that you see before bed, but one day could be something that you wake up on.’

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