Space Hotels Are Here (Sort Of)
Welcome to the orbital hospitality industry, where asking about room rates reveals that space tourism exists in a superposition of “actually happening” and “catastrophically expensive,” and considers “sort of” a perfectly acceptable marketing qualifier. In this examination of commercial space stations, we discover that humans who aren’t astronauts are genuinely living in orbit for weeks at a time—assuming they have the financial resources of a small nation and a flexible definition of “holiday relaxation.”
Our quantum-coherent correspondent guides us from Dennis Tito’s pioneering twenty-million-dollar stay in 2001 through the billionaire suborbital joyride era, examining near-term projects like VAST’s Haven-1 (launching 2027), mid-term ISS replacements including Axiom Station and Orbital Reef, and the pie-in-the-sky rotating hotels that have been “just twenty-five years away” since 1968. Meanwhile, the real science reveals why Kubrick’s Station V remains aspirational rather than operational, how current space tourism ranges from four-minute weightless experiences to multi-week ISS stays, and why the transition from government-funded exploration to commercial orbital infrastructure requires equal parts innovation, patient capital, and government grants to bridge the gap until markets materialise.
Economic Reality Warning: This episode contains concepts such as “fifty-five million dollars per orbital hotel stay,” “suborbital tourism costing half a million for four minutes of weightlessness,” and “break-even projections extending into the twenty-third century.” Listeners may experience side effects including appreciation for the balloon analogy (that only works if you ignore the inside of the balloon), understanding why building hotels before customers exist is considered sound strategy in aerospace, and the uncomfortable realisation that “space tourist” currently means “phenomenally wealthy individual willing to sign liability waivers that make solicitors uncomfortable.” Side effects are considered normal and may persist until rotating hotels with artificial gravity actually exist.
From Kubrick’s Vision to Current Reality
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey and gave us Station V—a massive rotating wheel in orbit with a Hilton hotel, Howard Johnson’s restaurant, and Pan Am shuttle service. The vision was based on serious aerospace proposals from Wernher von Braun and seemed not just plausible but conservative for the year 2001.
We missed that deadline by several decades. But Kubrick got the fundamentals right: space tourism would eventually happen, it would require serious infrastructure, and someone would fund it. He just overestimated how quickly “technically possible” becomes “economically viable.”
Today’s near-term reality involves private astronaut missions to the ISS costing fifty-five million dollars for multi-week stays, and small commercial stations like VAST’s Haven-1 scheduled for 2027. Mid-term projects for the late 2020s and early 2030s include larger stations like Axiom Station, Orbital Reef, and Starlab—designed to replace ISS functionality with tourism as one revenue stream among many. The rotating hotels with artificial gravity? Still firmly in the “next twenty-five years” category, where they’ve been living comfortably since the 1960s.
The Suborbital Experience: Blue Origin’s New Shepard and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo offer brief trips to the edge of space—ten to fifteen minutes total flight time, with only three to four minutes of actual weightlessness. Cost: approximately $450,000 per seat. You don’t orbit Earth. You don’t see sixteen sunrises. You go up, experience a few minutes of microgravity whilst admiring Earth’s curvature, and come back down. It’s less “space tourism” and more “very expensive fairground ride with excellent views.” But it proves a market exists, at least among the extraordinarily wealthy.
Why Rotating Hotels Remain Science Fiction
The engineering challenge is straightforward to describe and phenomenally difficult to implement: build a structure large enough that when it rotates, centrifugal effect creates something approximating Earth-normal gravity. This requires a wheel or torus hundreds of metres in diameter, massive on-orbit assembly, perfectly balanced mass distribution, and structural integrity to handle constant rotational stress whilst maintaining pressure.
The benefits are equally clear: artificial gravity solves most health problems associated with long-duration spaceflight—bone loss, muscle atrophy, cardiovascular deconditioning all mitigated by spinning fast enough that the outer rim feels like standing on Earth.
Various companies have proposed these concepts. The Gateway Foundation announced the “Von Braun Station” in 2019—a rotating wheel for four hundred guests. It generated tremendous publicity, impressive concept art, and precisely zero actual hardware. This pattern repeats: announce ambitious rotating station, release beautiful renderings, attract media attention, discover that building it requires technology that doesn’t exist, funding that isn’t available, and launch capacity that remains theoretical.
The Commercial Station Reality: Axiom Station takes a remarkably clever approach—building whilst the ISS still exists. Their first module launches and docks directly to the ISS, providing operational experience whilst the station provides backup life support. Additional modules follow, gradually assembling an independent station. When the ISS decommissions around 2030, Axiom simply detaches and continues operating. It’s the aerospace equivalent of building your new house in the garden whilst still living in the old one, then moving in just before demolition. Sensible, if you have several billion dollars and access to orbital construction capacity.
The Market That Might Exist Eventually
Current space tourism serves an extraordinarily limited market: individuals with tens of millions of dollars, willingness to undergo months of training, medical clearance for spaceflight, and flexible definitions of comfort. Dennis Tito pioneered this in 2001, paying twenty million dollars for a week aboard the ISS. Several followed until the programme ended in 2009.
Axiom Space revived orbital tourism in 2022 with private astronaut missions—multi-week ISS stays for approximately fifty-five million dollars per seat. This is currently the only operational pathway functioning as orbital tourism. The ISS becomes the hotel, Axiom provides booking and logistics.
But the ISS is temporary, retiring around 2030. If orbital tourism continues, someone needs actual commercial destinations. Haven-1 represents the fastest transition—a single-module station launching 2027, designed to prove the concept works before scaling to larger facilities. Mid-term projects like Axiom Station, Orbital Reef, and Starlab aim to provide permanent commercial infrastructure by the early 2030s.
Whether sufficient market exists to justify this infrastructure remains uncertain. Current economics require government grants bridging the gap until—or unless—markets materialise. It’s building hotels before customers exist, hoping “if we build it, they will come” works better in orbital mechanics than it typically does in terrestrial real estate.
Join us for this exploration of orbital hospitality and economic reality, where Stanley Kubrick’s vision meets contemporary aerospace engineering, billionaire joyrides prove markets exist for the sufficiently wealthy, and the real science reveals why space hotels are genuinely here—just considerably more expensive, less comfortable, and further from artificial gravity than we imagined in 1968. Because in the multiverse of space tourism, we’re all just potential customers waiting for the price to drop from “entire fortune” to merely “catastrophically expensive.”