The year that has just ended will be archived as the actual start of the space tourism period, and which has left us with a very special announcement: in 2027 we will have the first luxury space hotel around the Earth.
It seemed like a chimera just a couple of years ago and instead in 2021 we saw Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, bring into space, even if only a hundred kilometers high, himself and various friends and personalities in multiple flights of Blue Origin, the his space venture, we saw SpaceX bring newcomers to space around the Earth with its Inspiration 4 mission and we saw, just in December, a wealthy Japanese billionaire entering the International Space Station, at the sound of tens of millions of dollars.
For the record, we must also remember the negative performance of Sir Richard Branson, who for years has been selling tickets to go for a ride with his rocket plane up to 80 km high and wanted to beat the competitors at all costs. flying on 11 July, a week before Bezos, but in the end making up for a fool: the flight went badly but luckily no one was hurt thanks to the skill of the pilot of the rocket plane, which has never flown since.
And now, as if all this were not enough, we have had the closure with the announcement of the Orbital Assembly Corporation: for 2027, if all goes well, we will have a real luxury hotel in low orbit, about 400 kilometers from Earth. , which will see many thousands of stars.
The idea is not new if we want, it goes back to Wernher Von Braun, the father of the Apollo program, who considered a fundamental space station to go to Mars, and we are in the 50s of the last century. The appearance is that of a large Ferris wheel, tens of meters in diameter, like that of the Vienna Prater, which turns fast enough to create a centrifugal force that compensates for the absence of gravity, if you are in the outer ring of the space station.