First Orbital Hotel To Be Built
Correspondent:: "nu-monet v7.0"
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:54:14 -0700
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(Pictures at link)
http://myturl.com/001wx
Las Vegas hotel mogul, Robert Bigelow is hoping to take
tourists further than have ever stayed before. Stayed?,
that's right, his next hotel enterprise will take him
beyond Earth's atmosphere.
He is actively engaged in an effort to build the planet's
first orbiting space hotel to be called the CSS Skywalker
(an orbital resort). Bargain-basement room rate: $1 million
a night. For its water show, this hotel will have all of
Earth's blue oceans flying past its windows at 17,500 miles
an hour. Guests on board the 330-cubic-meter station (about
the size of a three-bedroom house) will learn weightless
acrobatics, marvel at the ever-changing face of the home
planet, and, for half of every 90-minute orbit, gaze deep
into a galaxy ablaze with stars.
Bigelow is betting $500 million of his personal fortune
that he can make it come true. He has hired veteran space-
travel engineers to perfect the technology, he has produced
nearly launch-ready hardware for testing, and he's floating
a $50-million prize to entice other companies to create a
safe, reliable orbital space vehicle to transport guests to
the front door--or rather, the airlock. The prize titled
"America's space Prize" will be awarded to the first
privately funded spacecraft that can send five people into
orbit and dock with a Bigelow Aerospace habitat. The deadline
is January 10, 2010, the date he plans to open his hotel.
At $7.9 million, Bigelow's tickets will be a relative bargain,
in comparison to the $20 million that some are paying for a
week long vacation in the International Space Station.
--
"Mars was destroyed with weapons from the future.
There, does that make you feel any better?"
-- nu-monet