Startup Orion Span plans to launch its “Aurora Station” space hotel in late 2021 and begin accommodating guests by 2022. One caveat: a 12-day stay aboard Aurora Station will cost you at least $9.5 million. Still, compared to trips taken by other orbital tourists who have paid anywhere between $20 million – $40 million each time, this is still relatively affordable to the wealthy. (These private missions were brokered by the Virginia-based company Space Adventures and employed Russian Soyuz spacecraft and rockets.) “We are launching the first-ever affordable luxury space hotel,” said Orion Span founder and CEO Frank Bunger.
There’s been innovation around the architecture to make it more modular and more simple to use and have more automation, so we don’t have to have EVAs [extravehicular activities] or spacewalks. The goal when we started the company was to create that innovation to make simplicity possible, and by making simplicity possible, we drive a tremendous amount of cost out of it,” said Bunger to Space.com.
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