Designs revealed for new space hotel
Californian company The Gateway Foundation has released plans for the Von Braun Station, a cruise ship-style hotel floating among the stars.
The aim is to get the hotel off the ground by 2025 and make it fully operational for travel by 2027.
The Von Braun Station is just one such space-based tourism option in development. Also planning to propel people into space are Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk's SpaceX company and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin aerospace company, not to mention the International Space Station which recently announced the possibility of commercial collaborations.
The Von Braun Station is also not the only space hotel design in the works.
Earlier in 2019, US-based space tech startup Orion Span released plans for a luxury space hotel called Aurora Station, in hopes to launch in 2022.
According to digitally rendered video and images released by the Gateway Foundation, the station resembles a rotating wheel, comprised of 24 modules, orbiting the Earth.
Tim Alatorre, senior design architect at the Gateway Foundation, says the rotating wheel would create a simulated gravity.
"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," he tells CNN Travel.
The name was voted for by the Gateway Foundation members because the station is based on designs von Braun sketched out some 60 years ago.
"The basic physics of the station haven't changed since the 1950s, the way the station rotates," says Alatorre.
The main difference is the modern materials -- new metal alloys, carbon composites, 3D printing and launch pad technology that, says Alatorre, make a space hotel more probable in our current era.
Price wise, in the early phases the Von Braun hotel will also be catering to those with dollars to spend, but the foundation is hoping to make it equivalent to "a trip on a cruise or a trip to Disneyland."
The Von Braun Station will sleep 352 people with a maximum capacity of 450.
