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takyon writes:

You can now reserve a stay in an upcoming "luxury space hotel" for a "fully refundable" $80,000 deposit:

Well-heeled will have a new orbital destination four years from now, if one company's plans come to fruition. That startup, called Orion Span, aims to loft its "Aurora Station" in late 2021 and begin accommodating guests in 2022. "We are launching the first-ever affordable luxury space hotel," said Orion Span founder and CEO Frank Bunger, who unveiled the Aurora Station idea today (April 5) at the Space 2.0 Summit in San Jose, California.

"Affordable" is a relative term: A 12-day stay aboard Aurora Station will start at $9.5 million. Still, that's quite a bit less than orbital tourists have paid in the past. From 2001 through 2009, seven private citizens took a total of eight trips to the (ISS), paying an estimated $20 million to $40 million each time. (These private missions were brokered by the Virginia-based company Space Adventures and employed Russian Soyuz spacecraft and rockets.)

[...] Orion Span is building Aurora Station itself, Bunger added. The company — some of whose key engineering players have helped design and operate the ISS — is manufacturing the hotel in Houston and developing the software required to run it in the Bay Area, he said.

Aurora Station will orbit at an altitude of 200 miles (~322 km). The pressurized volume of the entire station is planned to be 160 cubic meters initially, compared to 916 m³ for the International Space Station, 330 m³ for a Bigelow B330 inflatable module, and 2,250 m³ for Bigelow's BA 2100 concept module. However, the company plans to expand Aurora Station with additional modules in the future, and may lease them out for long-term residents.

Also at the Orlando Sentinel and Space News.

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