Space Hotel By 2022: Russia Working On Luxury Space Tourism

The only way to go to the International Space Station right now is to become an astronaut. It takes a career-long process and training to be one of the people chosen to train to go to the ISS, and even then not all of the astronauts who train actually end up going to space.

But that might change in the coming years with plans in the work for space tourism, including a luxury hotel on the ISS. The Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos, started reviewing a business plan for the hotel, Popular Mechanics reported.

The hotel will be full of the amenities one would expect from a luxury hotel on Earth like a cabin with big windows, a space gym, personal hygiene amenities, and internet. All of this will cost each space-loving tourist a steep $40 million for a two-week trip, including the launch and return to Earth. But tourists who want to stay a bit longer on the station or also want to do a spacewalk will have to fork over another $20 million each, Popular Science reported.

The luxury hotel portion of the ISS would be a new addition that would add another 15.5 meter-long module to the existing station. It would add another 92 cubic meters of pressurized space for the tourists to use, according to the business plan that Popular Mechanics reportedly saw. That module would provide four sleeping quarters and a common area for the tourists to use, each with its own window.

The tourist module is estimated by the Russian company RKK Energia to take a minimum of five years to build, according to Popular Mechanics. Meaning the module wouldn’t be up and ready for use until 2022, less than a decade before the station is scheduled to retire.

Other companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are working on commercializing space travel, though the trips the companies are currently working on mostly entail space flights for tourists rather than long-stay vacations to space.

Blue Origin, started by Jeff Bezos, plans to send its first tourists to space in 2018. A successful launch of the rocket and capsule last week was a step in the right direction of accomplishing that goal. The flight to space and back down is expected to last less than an hour. Far different than two or four weeks on the ISS.

SpaceX is also planning to launch to private citizens to space in 2018. The company announced that two private citizens made a significant downpayment for a trip involving an orbit around the moon in 2018.