Wolff is vice-president of international design consultant Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo, whose projects include the Legoland theme park in Windsor and the Disney Wedding Pavilion at Florida’s Walt Disney World. He is so convinced that the market will take off he has committed a substantial proportion of his company’s research and development budget to investigating the needs of space tourists.
“It’s important that we are in the forefront when the space race actually happens,” says Wolff. “We have decided to invest some of our own R&D effort to educate ourselves and come up with the concept, so that when somebody is ready, they will think of us not only as the firm with experience of hotel design but also as the firm that is up to speed on what it might be practical to build in space.” Wolff has got the second man to walk on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin, working as a consultant on the project.
WAT&G is not alone on this flight of fantasy. Last year, DaimlerChrysler and Germany’s domestic space agency announced plans to build a B&B 300 miles above terra firma by 2020. In the same week, Japanese concern Shimizu announced plans for a space hotel to cater for 64 tourists at a time. Not wanting to be left behind, Sir Richard Branson is reportedly setting his sights far higher, with a scheme for Virgin Hotel Galactica, and Hilton International chairman Peter George declared as long ago as 1998: “Hilton wants to be the first to put a hotel on the Moon.” A number of adventure-travel companies are even taking bookings for space flights.
The race is on, but it is clearly a big jump from designing hotels on palm-lined beaches to constructing one in orbit. Wolff’s team envisages a resort based on a spinning wheel. The rim of the wheel will provide the hotel’s accommodation pods, and the central hub will house its activities. The hotel is expected to cater for about 100 guests, as well as support staff. Guests will dine on food grown on board.
One requirement for the designers is that it allows people to experience weightlessness. “That’s why people want to venture into space,” says Wolff, adding: “It’s cheaper to design a zero-gravity hotel.” But some form of artificial gravity will be required so that guests can sleep without being strapped to their beds and eat without having to chase the food around the room. Artificial gravity is also necessary to prevent space sickness, which affects more than 50% of all astronauts.
Wolff’s solution is to provide both: “One of the controversial things we are proposing is that the hotel will have both zero and partial Earth gravity.” The outer ring of the space hotel will rotate fast enough to create a gravitational force about 25% as strong as Earth gravity, whereas the core of the hotel will be gravity-free, so recreation activities can be held in a weightless environment. “You would not have a soccer field: you would have a soccer volume, so the game could be played in a sphere,” says Wolff.
It is early days for the hotel’s interior. The designers at WAT&G are just coming to terms with the concept that, in a weightless environment, any surface could be the floor. Wolff explains: “On Earth, we start with a site plan and a floor plan, but in space we need to think of the interior in three dimensions – in volumes as opposed to planes.” Furniture will be inflatable, to cut weight and therefore the enormous costs of transport to orbit – which is now about £12 000 per kilogram.
The mass of components will be one vital factor; once in space, ease of assembly will be critical. Wolff is only too aware of the need for simplicity, having, in the interests of research, spent many hours cocooned in a space suit and gloves. “You’d want to pre-build whatever you can because assembling something in space is very difficult and time-consuming.”
WAT&G plans to cut costs by incorporating external fuel tanks jettisoned from space shuttles into the design. The hotel would use up to 15 of the 17 m diameter tanks to form the accommodation pods. The designers can keep the tanks’ large internal volume or subdivide it to form guest rooms. The idea of reusing tanks is not new. The first reports on the idea were published 25 years ago. “There is somebody at NASA in charge of external tanks who is a strong proponent of the concept,” says Wolff.
When it comes to the details of the hotel’s construction, the designers are leaving that to the specialists. “We’re not rocket scientists,” says Wolff without a hint of irony. Lightness and strength both have to be taken into account because, explains Wolff, “there is the potential for impact from space debris”.
Getting a sponsor for the project is proving to be as difficult – if not more so – than designing it. “We’ve had interest but nobody yet willing to put real money into it,” says Wolff dejectedly. The cost is literally astronomical. “The catch-22 is that for it to become available, it has to be affordable. But for it to be affordable, there have to be more people travelling.” With 16 companies working on reusable launch vehicles, the cost of getting to the hotel is set to drop sharply. Once this happens, says Wolff, “demand will fuel competition and lower prices”.
So, when does the reservation hotline open? “I believe 2017 is realistic because the people I’ve talked to are rocket scientists,” says Wolff. “They all believe that we have the technology today – after all, we’ve been taking people into space for 40 years.”
