Space hotel to open in 2012

Now here's a thing, want to impress the wife or gf with a romantic weekend away in a hotel? Paris? Rome? New York perhaps?

Naaahhh, forget it, they have all just become redundant as locations for that special trip to show how much you care!

A Barcelona based company have come up with the ultimate destination hotel, 'Galactic Suite' in space.

You better have some deep pockets to go along with the amour though.


Seems they've done their homework though and they figure there are enough would be pioneers around to make the business workable.


The Mile Hile Club? Pfft, old hat my friend.


Start saving now.

Nobody fancy a weekend away then?

Plus $20 million for a flight there and back.

This "hotel" appears to be a bunch of hype purely to get money out of investors. All they've got so far is a design and some kind of anonymous source of funding. Nothing concrete at all. No way is it going to happen by 2012 I'm afraid.

What kinda spaceship is that!? @ bluedave, which firm are you talking about here?

Count me in, but I think 2012 is probably about a decade too optimistic. Bigelow Aerospace is at the forefront of the space hotel business, at least from a technological perspective. They're currently orbiting two inflatable modules which aren't terribly unlike the ones in bluedave's picture.

I really think the private space station technology will be ready before a private man-rated launch vehicle and capsule will be. There is talk about docking with a NASA Orion capsule (in development) or a Russian Soyuz capsule (flying) but I don't think the latter is very likely. The Soyuz requires a ton of rendezvous and docking dedicated equipment on the passive module side. Given that EADS has already tried to buy the technology off the Russians, I doubt that any private up-start will be able to convince Yuri to sell.

It would be nice if there were an international standard for future docking interfaces. My guess is that Bigelow will adopt the next generation APAS docking system. It has its roots in the the Shuttle-Mir program, and RSC-Energia got the contract to develop the first generation, so it would seem a good standard to design all future vehicles to.

Most expensive in the galaxy? Oh come off it, $4 mio is peanuts to us Alpha Centaurians. And who would want to spend 3 days hovering over a dump of a planet like Earth anyway? Do a grand tour of the spiral arms, fly through the Orion Nebula, check out a few pulsars, and take a trip right up to the brink of the central black hole. Bit more pricey than $4 million, but you can take out a loan, and by the time you get back a few million years will have passed away, along with your creditors.

Come to think of it, you could even buy your own star complete with planetary system. Lots of real estate out there - just think what you could do...

good line for a porno