Work on the world's first space hotel will begin in 2025 and it will have restaurants, cinemas, toilets, a gym, other essential equipment for people who will be at the station longer, and rooms for 400 people. Created by the Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC), the Voyager Station could be operational as early as 2027, with infrastructure built into orbit around the Earth.
The space station will be a large circle and will rotate to generate artificial gravity that will be placed at a level similar to the gravity found on the surface of the Moon.
No details of the cost needed to build the space station or the cost of spending a night at the hotel have been revealed, although the OAC says construction costs are getting cheaper thanks to reusable vehicles like the SpaceX Falcon 9 and the upcoming Starship.
The idea of â??â??a space orbiting station built around a central, circular wheel dates back to the earliest times of space travel, an idea by Wernher von Braun. He was one of the architects of NASA's Apollo program and in the 1950s proposed a wheel-shaped habitat that rotated to create artificial gravity.
The concept for the Voyager station, which is a similar idea but on a much larger scale, first came up in 2012 with the launch of the Gateway Foundation. OAC, the firm founded by the foundation to realize the vision of an orbiting station, was established in 2018 with the aim of making it operational by 2027.
If fully realized, it will be the largest man-made object in space.
