THE NEVER-ENDING QUEST TO BUILD A HOTEL IN SPACE
Daniel Oberhaus
FEB—13—2017 10:49AM EST
The idea for a hotel in space is almost as old as the space race itself. It began at the 13th conference of the American Astronautical Society in 1967, two years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people on the moon. The topic of the conference was “Outer Space Tourism,” and it was there that Barron Hilton, son of the hotel mogul Conrad Hilton, gave a talk about hotels in space.
“Barron Hilton had always had this fascination with flying,” Mark Young, a historian at the University of Houston, told The Outline. “He was a glider pilot and sponsored airplane races, and this all kind of dovetailed into his passion for space hotels.”
Hilton imagined the first space hotels, dubbed Orbiter Hiltons, as something like “Hilton Inns, for short trips to space,” accommodating space tourists in low Earth orbit until they continued on to the Moon and other planets.
The hotels would be modeled after a conceptual space research lab designed by Don Douglas Jr., president of the Douglas Aircraft Company, who was known for dreaming up ideas for space stations. The buildings “would be 14 stories high and could comfortably accommodate up to 24 people,” Hilton told the conference attendees. “Now that may sound like a pretty small hotel, but my father’s first hotel in Socorro, New Mexico … only had 10 rooms.”...
https://theoutline.com/post/1073/hilton-never-ending-quest-to-build-a-hotel-in-space
