Vacation at the world’s first luxury space hotel

Canary. Photo by 4028mdk09.

About the size of a jet, at 12 feet wide and 35 feet long, Orion Span’s Aurora Station space hotel is a “fully modular space station” that “will host six people at a time, including two crew members, for 12-day space travel hours,” all for the low price of $9.5 million.

With big aspirations and goals, the US based tech start-up is still in development – and funding – stages.

It plans to welcome its first guests in 2022, with the station’s launch happening in 2021.

“Our goal is to make space accessible to all,” Frank Bunger, CEO and founder of Orion Span, said in a statement last year. “Upon launch, Aurora Station goes into service immediately, bringing travelers into space quickly and at a lower price point than ever seen before.”

Astronaut experience
While a $10 million trip is outside the budget of most people’s two-week vacations, Orion Span claims to offer an authentic astronaut experience.
Says Bunger, it has “taken what was historically a 24-month training regimen to prepare travelers to visit a space station and streamlined it to three months, at a fraction of the cost.”

CNN

MEANWHILE

Taking one step closer to going to Mars, Space.com reports, “SpaceX conducts its first Raptor rocket engine test at the company’s McGregor, Texas proving ground in this video released by CEO Elon Musk on Feb. 3, 2019.”

Starship is the 100-passenger stainless-steel vehicle SpaceX is building to take people and cargo to Mars and other distant destinations. Starship will launch atop a giant rocket SpaceX calls Super Heavy.

Both of these vehicles will be reusable and Raptor-powered. Starship will sport seven of the new engines, and Super Heavy will use 31 Raptors to get off the ground.

A “hopper” prototype that SpaceX will use to test the Starship design on short flights within Earth’s atmosphere will have three Raptor engines. This hopper will debut soon, Musk has said — perhaps within the next month or so, if everything goes according to plan.

The first launches of the full-scale Starship-Super Heavy duo could follow in relatively short order. SpaceX is targeting 2023 for a passenger-toting mission around the moon and the mid-2020s for its first Mars flights, Musk has said.

Space.com

“Police want to register — and even subsidize — private security cameras. That’s just the start of the ethical challenges ahead.” (Washington Post)

Ring video doorbells, Nest Hello and other connected security cameras are the fastest-growing home improvement gadgets since garage-door openers.”  

We’re on a slippery slope. You’ve got a legal right to film in public places, including your entryway. There’s little agreement whether private cameras slash crime rates, yet police are setting up voluntary registries for private cameras in dozens of communities. Cities such as Washington have begun paying up to $500 for cameras on private property. Detroit is going further: Its mayor wants to mandate security cameras at businesses open late, with a live feed going straight to police.

Meanwhile, Ring’s owner Amazon.com filed an eerily specific patent to put its controversial Rekognition facial-identification software into doorbells. The purpose: to automatically flag “suspicious” people. (Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post, but I review all tech with the same critical eye.)

Washington Post

Nest is owned by Google.

“Both companies say they care about privacy, but neither company’s senior executives would discuss their ethical lines.”

“They won’t, but we can. We can already identify lines these technologies probably shouldn’t cross. So I spoke to lawyers, city officials and criminologists to make an ethical field guide for people who want tech to help us stay safe — but don’t want to be creeps.” ….

6. Facial recognition isn’t a product feature: It’s a superpower.

Stay tuned.

About the opinions in this article…

Any opinions expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this website or of the other authors/contributors who write for it.