Please Don’t Call It Space Hotel

What a next-generation space station can offer and how you can benefit from it.

At present, we have the ISS and Tiangong. We also had MIR and a number of other space stations, which probably made the headlines less often.

Also at present, several companies have announced plans to launch commercial space stations into Earth’s orbit.

Orbital Reef is one of them.

It’s jointly developed, manufactured, and later operated by Blue Origin, Sierra Space, Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and Arizona State University.

In December 2021, NASA even agreed to fund Orbital Reef to a certain extent and collaborate with all partners. The aim is to foster a viable space economy before putting the ISS to rest (and to reduce the costs for NASA, obviously).

Now, what is the difference between commercial and non-commercial space stations?

Prior to the announcements just mentioned, almost all space stations were funded, developed, manufactured, and operated by government agencies such as NASA (of course they’ve always hired commercial bodies for a wide range of tasks) with their money coming from taxpayers.

Therefore, they were mainly used to conduct research and experiments said agencies approved of.

And, let’s face it, political interests played their part too.

These circumstances also lend themselves to the belief that astronauts are a small, selected group of people who are allowed to do something most “average” people will never even get close to trying.

Private companies on the other hand seek new opportunities to make money.

They plan to sell/lend/lease time and space on their stations and in exchange provide the habitat itself, plus logistics, maintenance, communication, and the like.

Naturally, you can’t rely on just one small group of customers (in this case NASA, etc.)

That’s why Orbital Reef is being planned as a “mixed-use business park”.

Research facilities are still going to make up a large part of the station, but not the only one.

Manufacturing in microgravity, developing media content, and — yes — tourism has also been proposed.

Access to space for everyone?

The people behind Orbital Reef seek to establish “an address on-orbit for everyone”.

In 2022, this might still seem a bit idealistic. At the moment, prices for a trip to space range from USD 250,000 on a Virgin Galactic flight to USD 55 million for a private two-week stay aboard the ISS.

But think of the companies you have worked with in the past or are working for or collaborating with right now.

Maybe they are working on a product or service that requires microgravity testing or research.

And they might be capable of financing a stay on a commercial space station.

Plus, the more people manage to put the money on the table and the more options there are, the more the prices will drop over time.

And the more people go to Orbital Reef, the more ideas, concepts, advocates for one thing or another will come back down.

Even if you went up there for some fancy R & R, I can hardly imagine that this is everything you’d be doing.

I just can’t imagine anything other than that the setting of you outside of Earth and all the professionals with their tasks, duties, experiments, and collaborations are going to prompt something inside you.

And this, I believe, is where Orbital Reef’s true power lies: Inspiration

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