It’s Friday Evening, and you’re getting ready to board your spacecraft. It didn’t arrive on time, but only because it had to travel 240,000 miles back to Earth. Eventually, it arrives and you show your tickets and passports, making your way on board.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please put on your seatbelts. We’re getting ready for takeoff.”, says the spacecraft attendant. 3…2…1… you hear the deep rumbling as 11,000 pounds of fuel propel the rocket up with a speed of 25,000 miles per hour!
Within 10 hours, you arrive at the Moon, ready to check-in at your hotel. As you drive in a rover, you see a building roughly 100 feet tall in the horizon. But as you get closer, you realize something astonishing — it’s made completely out of ice.
But why? Why would we make such a large structure from something so fragile?
Well, the first reason is abundance. It’s estimated that the Moon has somewhere between 600 Billion and 2 Trillion Kilograms of ice throughout it. As such, it’s easier and cheaper to use that to build a hotel rather than export wood, steel, and concrete from Earth at a higher price.
The second reason is that ice is strong. Because of its unique crystal structure, each water molecule in ice is bonded to four other water molecules, forming a hexagonal lattice. This lattice structure makes ice very resistant to deformation. With the Moon hosting temperatures ranging from -173 degrees Celsius (-279 degrees Fahrenheit) at night to 127 degrees Celsius (261 degrees Fahrenheit) during the day, ice can withstand these extreme temperatures without cracking or breaking.
This is also why igloos are excellent during cold Antarctic winters. But, the difference here is that with ice, you’ll get stunning views of the moon during your stay.
A Hotel is just one example of what we can do if we use lunar resources for human settlement. Hotels are just the beginning; we could go beyond cities and towns offering different services to tourists. We have the potential to revolutionize the space tourism industry.
Since there won’t be as many maintenance costs including A/C or heating bills, we can make space travel more accessible to a wider range of people. Companies like Orbital Assembly and Axiom Space are already planning to launch commercial space stations in the near future, so it’s only a matter of time before we see the first space hotels open their doors. Let me know… would you plan a visit there for your next big vacation?
