GRU Space, a startup founded by 21-year-old Skylar Chan, hopes to open the world’s first moon hotel by 2032, and is already accepting down-payments from space enthusiasts with very deep pockets. The final cost of the rooms is still unknown, but Chan says it will exceed $10 million. The good news is that you don’t need to pay it all up front. The company is currently taking deposits of $250,000 to $1,000,000, depending on the options selected.
GRU Space isn’t the first company to boast about building a hotel on the moon, but what sets this company apart is the way it plans to go about making that a reality. Instead of shipping construction materials and machinery to the moon, it plans to use robotic systems to build durable blocks out of moon soil and assemble them into robust structures capable of surviving the harsh lunar environment. Construction of the world’s first moon hotel is expected to begin in 2029, pending regulatory approval.
Photo: GRU Space
“We live during an inflection point where we can actually become interplanetary before we die,” the GRU Space founder said in the statement. “If we succeed, billions of human lives will be born on the moon and Mars and be able to experience the beauty of lunar and martian life.”
Although GRU’s ambition of building “the first-ever permanent off-Earth structure” may sound like a fantasy, Skylar Chan isn’t your typical startup founder. He has been obsessed with space since he was just a young boy and has dedicated his life to his passion. By his mid-teens, he was already training as an Air Force pilot, helped develop a NASA-backed 3D printing experiment that was sent into space before graduating from Berkeley, and got accepted into Ycombinator last year, as the accelerator’s youngest solo space founder.
