Orbital Assembly Corporation has announced plans to develop a space hotel (or special-purpose space station) complete with artificial gravity, designed to accommodate 28 guests in five modules built around a rotating gravity ring.
The California initiative aims to launch the first Pioneer-class space station by 2025, with an ambitious and possibly unrealistic timetable. However, Orbital Assembly seems determined to make it the first commercial, hybrid space station that can be used for both research and entertainment.
The Pioneer station is one of two designs for commercial space stations currently under development by the company. The first of these designs was the Voyager Station, which was announced in 2021. Still, Pioneer will launch before Voyager, a larger venture that will be built with the goal of being a kind of luxury space hotel that can accommodate 400 guests at a time.
In an emailed statement, Rhonda Stevenson, CEO of Orbital Assembly, said that the Pioneer design was “safe, secure and reliable to deliver revenue and profitability from both the tourism and commercial sectors in less time than our competitors sticking to NASA timelines.” He said it was a “modular station”.
In December 2021, NASA awarded three contracts to privately owned US companies Blue Origin, Nanoracks, and Northrop Grumman to develop low-Earth orbit space stations for both public and commercial use. NASA aims to have these space stations in orbit and operational by 2030.
Privately owned space stations will replace the International Space Station (ISS-ISS), an orbiting laboratory currently housing Russia’s Roscosmos cosmonauts alongside astronauts from NASA and the European Space Agency. Public-private hybrid space stations commissioned by NASA will replace the ISS in low Earth orbit, where they will serve both research and commercial interests.
Despite pending competition, Orbital Assembly hopes to become a successful name in commercial space tourism. “Multiple revenue streams from the commercial, research and tourism markets will enable us to subsidize the travel market for stays of one or two weeks,” Stevenson said. We expect them to be motivated to plan more frequent stays.”
Orbiting Pioneer stations are designed to simulate one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, which they would do by rotating around a gravity ring about 61 meters in diameter. According to the company’s statement, having a weightless environment on a space station will allow people to act normally while eating or drinking from a glass and sleeping without being tied to a bed. Creating artificial gravity also stands out as a way to reduce the harmful health effects of microgravity on the human body.
Space tourism is currently seen as an attractive and potentially lucrative business that is attracting a lot of corporate attention. However, this nascent industry is just taking shape and the challenges of building a truly flying space hotel are not yet fully known, such as how willing people are to pay millions for a space ticket.
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