First space hotels scheduled to open in 2025, are designed for tourism and business

Space development company Orbital Assembly has released concept designs of two space hotels that are planned to open in 2025 and 2027, and will cater to tourists and business travelers alike.

The hotels, which were originally conceived by The Gateway Foundation, are shaped like giant wheels connected by a system of elevator shafts that rotates as it orbits the Earth as guests enjoy their stay, scientists conduct research, and businesses manufacture products in space aboard the station.

Concept drawings for the The Voyager-class Space Station and Pioneer Station were published on Orbital Assembly’s website this week, giving Earthlings a first glimpse at the extraterrestrial hotels.

“The Voyager-class Space Station is OAC’s flagship project. Offering luxury accommodations and unprecedented opportunities for leisure, research, entertainment, and manufacturing,” reads the OA site.

“The large rotating stations are designed to produce varying levels of artificial gravity by increasing or decreasing the rate of rotation. Artificial, or simulated, gravity is essential to long term habitation in space. The station has been designed to accommodate commercial and manufacturing partners as well as national space agencies conducting low gravity research.”

The Voyager Station, set to open in just three years, is set to hold up to 400 people at a time. Newer concept Pioneer Station would hold only 28 people at once.

“Pioneer-class stations will be the first habitable platforms capable of providing artificial gravity, unlocking unprecedented opportunities for research, tourism, and long duration spaceflight. The Pioneer Class of space station marks a fundamental shift away from existing station architectures,” says Orbital.

The designs show a hotel not unlike the ones we are used to on Earth, but with extraordinary views of space. The hotels would include restaurants and many of the usual facilities guests are used to, but they would find themselves experiencing a change in the level of gravity as they traveled throughout the structure.

In a 2019 interview with CNN, Orbital Assembly COO Tim Allatore explained, “The station rotates, pushing the contents of the station out to the perimeter of the station, much in the way that you can spin a bucket of water — the water pushes out into the bucket and stays in place. Near the center of the station there would be no artificial gravity, but as you move down the outside of the station, the feeling of gravity increases.”