How Much for a Room at Earth's First Space Hotel? - TIME
Orbital Technologies
Imagine waking up as your alarm's going off, reaching over and opening a window...and gazing out at terra firma in repose. No, not a poster of planet earth affixed to your window, but the real deal, viewed from your very own hotel suite, hundreds of miles above the planet's surface.
If a bunch of Russian engineers and Russia-based company Orbital Technologies have their druthers, it could happen to you (granted a very wealthy you). It'll be called the Hotel in the Heavens, according to The Guardian, a four-room zero-gravity orbital inn located at the crossroads of Yes and No Joke.
(MORE: Could Space Hotels Finally Be Here?)
"The hotel will be aimed at wealthy individuals and people working for private companies who want to do research in space," says Orbital Technologies' CEO Sergei Kostenko. "A hotel should be comfortable, and this one will be." Comfortable enough for space, anyway—those four rooms will accommodate up to seven people.
What'll it cost? About $984,000, or nearly a million bucks per visitor for five days aboard—that's $164,000 for the ride to and from, and $820,000 for lodging. If you're sitting on that kind of spare coin, don't look for this celestial abode to grace a travel-booking website anytime soon, because it sounds like we're in for a five year wait before the space dock's doors open.
The hotel itself will cost $60 million, serve as a kind of fallback spot for the International Space Station should things ever go awry there, and it'll take two days to get to, courtesy one of Russia's not-so-posh Soyuz spacecraft. Guests will have access to showers and air-flush toilets, sleep in bags attached to walls (you pick your orientation) and enjoy some of the best food this side of, well, whichever side you're facing as you whip around the planet once every 90 minutes, enjoying 16 sunsets and sunrises daily.
MORE: Luxury Space Travel? In This Economy, We Didn't Think So
Matt Peckham is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @mattpeckham or on Facebook. You can also continue the discussion on TIME's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.
30 Aug, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNE6IES39IT4aEPVASjo8RpB5oMwqg&url=http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/08/30/how-much-for-a-room-at-earths-first-space-hotel/
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