Orbital Assembly Corporation has announced that construction will begin on a 400-bed hotel in low Earth orbit in 2025, and will welcome its first guests in 2027. The first woman with a prosthesis will fly into space.
You can relate to Elon Musk in different ways, but SpaceX is gradually becoming the main space "cab". And the fact that private companies are investing in space flights changes a lot. Space is such a Wild West or Eastern Siberia - harsh territories that were mastered not by the state, but by private expeditions - cowboys and Cossacks.
Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC) announced the beginning of the development and construction of the Voyager Station hotel in low-earth orbit. Construction will begin in 2025, and its operation will begin in 2027. At least the company has such "Napoleonic" plans. The hotel, when fully deployed, will have 400 beds. Restaurants, bars, spas, fitness rooms. In general, everything that is in high-class cruise ocean liners. Only this "liner" will fly around the Earth in 90 minutes. Probably the most unexpected thing that the company plans to implement in its orbital hotel: there will be a floor and a ceiling, and it will be possible not to fly, but to walk. The hotel will be a revolving "wheel" with cabins and other premises located along the outer perimeter. The wheel will rotate at a speed sufficient for the centrifugal force to give "gravity" approximately equal to the gravity on Mars. It will be possible to walk around the station and look through the windows at our blue planet. In the center of this wheel, there will be a spaceport where spaceships will dock.
What is the likelihood that the hotel will actually open to its first visitors in 6 years? This is space. It's Complicated. The developers are counting very much on Elon Musk - a heavy StarShip rocket that will deliver cargo for the construction of the hotel. StarShip prototypes exploded on landing in both December 2020 and early February 2021. Musk remains optimistic. The next test is on March 3rd.
Virgin Galactic, another private space venture that plans to carry passengers into suborbital orbit, has postponed its maiden flight until 2022 after a test launch failure in December 2020.
But if so far not very good with rockets, the Zero 2 Infinity company plans to lift tourists to a height of about 40 kilometers above the Earth's surface using a helium balloon with a diameter of 128 meters. The entire flight will take about six hours. And they are already selling tickets.
Of course, until now the most expensive and large-scale space missions are carried out by state agencies - both the ISS and the landing of Perseverance on Mars is the business of Roscosmos and NASA. But private companies are already competitors. And they create a different image of space and astronauts. For example, in the first fully private space mission Inspiration4 aboard SpaceX's SpaceX Crew Dragon (there is even a private commander) there will be a 29-year-old woman Hailey Arsenault, a physician assistant at St Jude Research Hospital and a former patient with bone cancer. When Arseno was 10 years old, she underwent knee replacement surgery and a titanium rod was inserted into her left thigh. The woman still has leg pains and limps, but SpaceX allowed her to fly. But astronauts have always been the elite of human health, and until recently a man with a prosthesis could not even think about the possibility of flight into space.
In general, we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, with our heads up. We look to the sky.
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