GRU Space announces designs for "the first hotel on the Moon"

San Francisco start-up GRU Space has released plans for a hotel on the moon clad in lunar regolith bricks that it claims will be "the first ever permanent off-Earth structure built in history" if completed.

The GRU lunar hotel concept would be established in phases, according to Galactic Resource Utilization Space (GRU Space) with the company first implementing a program for "high‐end lunar tourism" and then eventually building a permanent hotel on the moon.

"We live during an inflexion point where we can actually become interplanetary before we die," said GRU Space founder Skyler Chan. "The key technical challenge we face is that humans cannot expand beyond Earth until we solve habitation on the Moon."

"[This is] the Promethean moment that allows for an exciting future in space. If we succeed, billions of human lives will be born on the Moon and Mars and be able to experience the beauty of lunar and martian life."

Renders of the hotel show a central rotunda and oculus, with three enclosed colonnades branching off the building and leading into smaller buildings.

The facade is covered with engaged Doric columns, and its material is pictured as a grey textured brick, which would cover internal inflatable modules.

GRU Space says that it will make this final building out of a combination of "a proprietary habitation module system and automated process for transforming lunar soil into durable brick structures", while the first iteration of the hotel will be an inflatable structure constructed on Earth and then shipped to the moon.

The final hotel will host up to 10 guests and be accessible via commercial flights operated by companies such as Blue Origin and SpaceX, according to a white paper published by the company.

The company is aiming to install the first, inflated iteration of the hotel, V1, by 2032, following testing on the moon's surface.

For now, a stay is marketed towards "adventurers, repeat private spaceflight participants, and those taking a 'honeymoon' to the next level".

GRU Space notes that the project's release was spurred by President Trump and NASA administrator Jared Isaacman's recently announced plans to establish the beginnings of pa ermanent Moon base by 2030, supported by the Ensuring American Space Superiority executive order passed in December.

"Building America's first Moon base is no longer a speculative thought experiment; it is now explicit US policy and a priority of the incoming NASA leadership," said GRU Space.

"Isaacman's Mars-via Moon vision and the new executive order together strongly suggest that one, someone will be paying to put humans and heavy infrastructure on the Moon this decade, and two, the winning solutions will be ones that can both satisfy NASA's safety constraints and serve paying private customers."

The recent privatisation of space travel has opened up a growing channel of projects proposed and in development by established and emerging companies. This includes everything from a space-ready hard drive designed by BIG, a solar tower designed by Foster + Partners and a space suit designed by Prada.

According to NASA's Nujoud Merancy, permanent buildings will be on the moon "within the next few decades" , while the design of space architecture is a growing field.

The current development of the space industry is largely driven by NASA's Artemis campaign, which aims to establish a long-term presence on the Moon with the ultimate goal of travelling to Mars.

GRU Space was founded by Skyler Chan and is backed by SpaceX investors, according to the company. Previously, Chan built vehicle software at Tesla and worked on a NASA-funded 3D-printer launched into space in 2024.

The images are courtesy of GRU Space

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