The world’s first space resort by Galactic Suite Ltd. is set to open to tourists in 2012. Funded by 3 billion dollars from an anonymous billionaire space enthusiast, the resort will be a bio-inspired orbital station. It has been designed to be a modular space habitat structure with a central-enclosed area where modules will be interconnected to a main docking port. Each of the modules will include a sliding diaphragm window to allow tourists a better view of the earth.
‘Galactic Suite’ would allow guests to travel around the world in 80 minutes.
Its Barcelona-based architects say the space hotel will be the most expensive in the galaxy, costing $4 million for a three-day stay.
During that time guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and use Velcro suits to crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.
Company director Xavier Claramunt says, “It’s the bathrooms in zero gravity that are the biggest.
“How to accommodate the more intimate activities of the guests is not easy.”
But they may have solved the issue of how to take a shower in weightlessness — the guests will enter a spa room in which bubbles of water will float around.
When guests are not admiring the view from their portholes they will take part in scientific experiments on space travel.
Galactic Suite began as a hobby for former aerospace engineer Claramunt, until a space enthusiast decided to make the science fiction fantasy a reality by fronting most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel.
An American company intent on colonizing Mars, which sees Galaxy Suite as a first step, has since come on board, and private investors from Japan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates are in talks.
To embark on this three-night stay in the space resort and eight-week training course on the tropical island, this ‘out of world experience’ will cost you 3 million euros.
Picturing myself in a spa room floating next to water bubbles that are equally imponderably floating all around me while I’m looking through a diaphragm or not window towards my native planet with a quite unusually fast rotating Sun around it takes my breath away. I bet it takes yours too, just like reading these lines does. Beware, though, people: it looks to me this fun is the kind of addiction that brings a wealthy man to ruin. And if you’ve already got to this last sentence reading my one-breath message, I’me sure you start to know how that must feel like.