GRU Space, a company, has publicly unveiled plans to build a series of progressively advanced habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel modeled after San Francisco’s Palace of the Fine Arts.
On Monday the company began taking reservations, asking prospective occupants to put down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, which could secure them a place on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years.
It sounds outlandish, doesn’t it? By late December, when I spoke with founder Skyler Chan, GRU Space reportedly had only one full-time employee besides Chan himself. Chan also only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.
That could make the whole endeavor easy to dismiss as a whim. I’ll admit I’m fond of these kinds of stories. Chan seems entirely sincere. And despite all the discussion about lunar resources, I believe the most reliable long-term commercial activity on the Moon will be tourism—it would be an incredible destination.
So when I interviewed Chan, I approached the conversation with an open mind.
Who will the customers be?
Like many young people, Chan dreamed of becoming an astronaut. But during high school and later in college, he came to believe he could have a greater impact by enabling everyone to travel to space rather than going himself.
“I realized I was born in an era where we can actually become interplanetary, and that is probably the single most impactful thing one person could do with their time,” Chan said. “So I set out to build the systems and technologies necessary to enable that future. That’s what led me to go to Berkeley to study electrical engineering and computer science.”
