Space hotel

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As Space Hotel potential targets of be space tourism called in Earth orbit. No such facility has yet been implemented, as space tourism and the development of private space travel are only just beginning. Although the International Space Station ISS was already a destination for space tourists (seven paying customers visited the ISS from 2001 to 2009), this is an international and state-funded project and was not originally designed for this purpose.

Unrealized projects

Wernher von Braun's space station (1952)

First drafts and ideas were expressed by Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley . In March 1952, Ley wrote in the US magazine Collier's Weekly about a permanent space station, suggesting that it would be used as a space hotel . He named the station torus because of its shape . The article is based on a lecture given at the "First Symposium on Space Flight" on October 12, 1951 in New York. Even Wernher von Braun dealt early with comparable projects; In his 1953 publication "Station im Weltraum", he dared to make the optimistic prognosis for a wheel-shaped station with a diameter of 75 meters that the whole project would take about ten years and cost 4 billion dollars - it would take another five decades. until only the ISS space station, which is modest compared with these projects, was transported into space, the total cost of which is estimated at 100 billion dollars.

As early as the late 1960s, the Hilton hotel group was hoping to be able to build space hotels with the help of the space shuttle, which was planned as the successor to the expensive one-way rockets, the cost of which would be 10 dollars per kilogram transported into space, a value that remains despite the reusable elements of the Shuttles quickly turned out to be illusory.

In 1999 the Hilton hotel group made a spectacular proposal. She wanted to combine used outer space shuttle tanks into a ring in earth orbit in order to build a space hotel. Since no fewer than 13 tanks with the corresponding shuttle flights would have been required for this project, but NASA had planned all capacities for the ISS, the Hubble telescope and other projects, this project also proved to be unfeasible, especially the shuttle Program itself suffered from delays, mainly as a result of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. In addition, Hilton failed to get enough sponsors for the $ 6-12 billion project.

In 2001, the Technical University of Darmstadt, together with the DGLR, carried out an ideas competition among architecture students, in which 17 projects were submitted. The title of the competition followed by a public exhibition in Hamburg was “Early Bird - Visions for a Space Hotel”. The exhibition took place from September 20 to October 20, 2001.

The Japanese construction company Shimizu spoke in 2001 of the construction of a hotel by 2017. This should simulate 70 percent of earth's gravity by rotating itself. The construction would have cost around 35 billion euros.

A space hotel announced in 2001 by the company “MirCorp” for 2004 and 2007 by Galactic Suite for 2012 were not realized either.

literature

  • Dagmar Röhrlich: Hotels in Space? From everyday life on a space station. In: Karl-Heinz Wellmann and Utz Thimm: Why is it dark at night? What we really know about space. Kosmos, Stuttgart 2006, pp. 198-2006, ISBN 978-3-440-10719-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BBC: Hilton to back space hotel, March 9, 1999
  2. ^ Rheinische Post, May 3, 2001: Online catalog for future all-tourists
  3. ↑ First hotel in space planned for 2012, notification dated August 13, 2007
  4. ↑ Russian space industry plans space hotel , news from September 8, 2001