There is a huckster named Skyler Chan who is raising money from the tech bros in Silicon Valley to build a chain of hotels…on the moon. He has ambitious plans.
Those first two steps are just tests, delivering expandable modules to the moon. However, he is talking about building a habitat on the moon in six years, with even more extravagant plans for the future.
I’m sorry, but this is fucking insane. It’s just a grift to suck money out of techno-optimists who are already unmoored from reality. So why is Ars Technica posting an optimistic review of the idea? It’s not April First.
It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.
All of this could therefore be dismissed as a lark. But I must say that I am a sucker for these kinds of stories. Chan is perfectly earnest about all of this. And despite all of the talk about lunar resources, my belief is that the surest long-term commercial activity on the Moon will be lunar tourism—it would be an amazing destination.
So when I interviewed Chan, I did so with an open mind.
If you’re a sucker for these kinds of stories, you shouldn’t be writing them. Has Ars Technica no editors?
To think that lunar tourism is a hot prospect for the commercial development of the moon is ludicrous. Why would anyone want to go there like it’s a trip to Bali? Popular tourist destinations here on Earth tend to require a large support staff — there are deep infrastructure demands that you don’t see on the vacation brochures, like the small non-luxury houses of the staff, and the buses to transport them to your glamorous accommodations, and an extensive supply source for the gourmet meals. Who builds the more elaborate structure on the right? Why does it look like it has huge glass windows?
Also unreal: he explains that space travel is currently supported on two economic legs, government funding and the largesse of billionaires. He thinks he can provide a third leg by building tourist hotels that will cost people a half-million dollars per night, not including travel expenses. Who’s going to stay there? Your average middle-class college professor?
There is something wrong with people who look at the white paper put out by the promoter and think it is a serious document. I mean, this is their “master plan”.
- Build the first hotel on the Moon. GRU solves off-world surface habitations.
- Build America’s first Moon base (roads, mass drivers, warehouses, physical infrastructure on the Moon).
- Repeat on Mars.
- Once the Overton window increases and this moves from non-consensus to consensus, GRU owns property on the Moon and Mars (i.e., The Hudson’s Bay Company owning Rupert’s Land).
- Use the money to re-invest in resource utilization systems on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and beyond that are fed into the growing economies and civilizations in space. Reach our final form — Galactic Resource Utilization.
- Humanity reaches Kardashev scale Type III.
Put the comic books away, kid. That’s fantasy from step 1. But hey, Ars Technica promoted it, so that’ll help con some dim-witted venture capitalist out of some cash, which will allow Skyler Chan to live the high life for a while until reality pops his bubble.
You will not be surprised to learn that Chan graduated from college in May, 2025, and that he interned at Tesla.
Here’s a fanciful artist’s imagining of the GRU Hotel.
Artists rendering of a lunar hotel
Why does it have big windows directly to the exterior? Why is it warmly lit like a Thomas Kinkade painting? Why is there a conventional door to the outside?
Why would anyone go in or out of that fucking door, Skyler?
Swimming pool might be a challenge.
Steps 1-4 are basically to spend money.
But step 5 starts with “Use the money…” as if there was some income from steps 1-4. This is not a business plan. It is only a scam plan.
The Age of Lunacy rising. And why not the Moon…Katy Perry, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, et al have now flown into space…sorta. Next stop, Alice, the Moon! Then Mars. We gotta do Mars. Elon wants Mars. And, we want to send Elon to Mars along with some of his best buds. That’s not a scam, that’s a dream. You gotta have a dream. You don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true.
Step 5: https://comb.io/UssjDb.gif
Step 1: get billionaires inside your “moon hotel”
Step 2: “this way to the egress”
@1. rorschach : Actually, a lumnar swimming pool would be aweome.
Think Larry Niven explained why inone of his novels (A Patchwork Girl?)
Also Humajs could actually fly in lunar gravity if memory serves..
Obvs the door ther ewillbe an airlock and given China is seriously looing at landing onthe Moon and beating us to it and sicne alot of SF has looked at idea s for lunar colonisation, its really not that impluasible that we get there.
Arthur C Clarkes First Law applies. As does his second and third..
See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
& recall toowhat theysaid about the first Monn landings and even heavier than air craft before they were invented.
I don’t have a problem with that.
If the tech bros want to waste their money on scam lunar hotels, go for it.
Skylar Chan lives well for a few years while all that money is being redistributed to the rest of the economy.
Luxury goods providers need to eat too.
This gives 1950s pulp magazine vibes. Too bad Ray Bradbury is dead, he might have liked the imagery.
.
Meanwhile, real researchers are doing dull but real work to find which ideas might be feasible for resource utilization and habitat building.
Zach Wienersmith (the SMBC webcomic author) did BTW write a popular science type book about what might really work on Mars, I forgot the title.
If you want to read about genuinely good ideas, try “Summa Technologia” written by Stanislaw Lem 1966.
He independently proposed micro-and nanotech, as well as virtual reality.
It only got an English translation a decade ago.
.
And for a bit of humor applied to wild ideas, try “Star Diaries” by the same author.
There is absolutely nothing new about this scam.
It is generic.
I vaguely remembered a lot of libertarian scams involving floating ship cities offshore in international waters. Libertarian paradises with their own libertarian governments.
Here is what Google search has to say, edited for length.
There were at least 4 of them, all of which failed early on.
OK.
Just substitute Lunar Hotel for Freedom Ship or Libertarian Ship Paradise and there you go. Remember to spend that money quickly and Skylar Chan might want to save some for bodyguards and lawyers in case some investors want their money back.
Apparently Chan hasn’t read enough spy novels, or he’d know GRU is the Russian military intelligence service, and used the same abbreviation during the Soviet era.
A Kardashev Type III civilisation is impossible, as it is supposed to be able to capture all the energy the galaxy it’s located in produces. He might as well say Step 6 is flying tourists through cosmic rays so they’ll get superpowers like the Fantastic Four.
I remember a Bazooka Joe comic where two of them were dining at a restaurant on the moon-they didn’t like the restaurant because it had no atmosphere.
A fool and their money are soon parted.
There was another loonytarian settlement planned.
Galt’s Gulch was to be on planet earth in Chile.
The organizers collected $10 million and are wanted by the Chilean police for fraud.
I hope Skylar Chan is taking notes here.
At least the moon doesn’t have police so he isn’t going to be charged by the lunar authorities.
I’m sure there are far more frauds like this but this is enough for one day.
Elon Musk with his Mars fantasy is another obvious one.
GRU is also the name of the mad scientist protagonist of those Minion movies.
“So when I interviewed Chan, I did so with an open mind.”
As Momma always said, “Don’t keep your mind so open that yer brains fall out.”
Dóh! Sur etyped that too quick, too late at night / early morn. Take II – corrected version #6.
.***
@1. rorschach : Actually, a lunar swimming pool would be awesome.
Think Larry Niven explained why in one of his novels – even if it did become a murder scene memory serving. (
AThe Patchwork Girl?*)Also Humans could actually fly in lunar gravity if memory serves..
Obvs the door there will be an airlock and given China is seriously looking at landing on the Moon and beating everyone else to it and since a lot of SF has looked at various ideas for lunar colonisation for ages, its really not that implausible that we get there inthe end and find some way of making it work.
Arthur C Clarkes First Law applies. As does his second and third.
Recall too what they said about the first Moon landings and even heavier than air craft before they were invented. Humans are ingenious enough and determined enough to make it happen. Can’t wait. Hopefully in my lifetime.
Sure are a lot worse ideas and worse things a lotta $$$ gets spent and wasted on that do far less good and more harm.
(E.g. imagine even putting a quarter of the US military budget into a human lunar base instead.. Imagine Musk stopped funding nazism and put that money into funding human luar colonisation..)
.* See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Patchwork_Girl
@11. timgueguen : “Apparently Chan hasn’t read enough spy novels, or he’d know GRU is the Russian military intelligence service, and used the same abbreviation during the Soviet era.”
Huh. I thought it was the Cheka under the Tsars and then the NKVD and then KGB for the Soviet Union oof top of my head.
No, I don’t read many spy novels personally either and so guess I’m probly wrong? Still.
Where are the rotating knives?
i say get a moon base up and running. it’ll be expensive, but billionaires could fund it.
then threaten to drop rocks from the moon onto cities unless the cities pay protection money.
profit!
the moon base should be named “Heinlein Base” and the AI running it should be called “Mike.”
Be sure to check out the comments section at Ars Technica. Most of your comments/abuse has already been dealt. Plus, someone claiming to be Skyler Chan shows up for a bit to defend himself.
Well, at least the author admits they’re a sucker.
And who the AF names a company “GRU” anything? That’s a well-known set of initials for an organization no sensible person wants to be associated with.
SteveR@17 the KGB and its predecessors was under the direct command of the Soviet Central Committee, while the GRU was controlled by the Ministry of Defense. The KGB was in charge of both foreign intelligence gathering and internal security and counterintelligence, while the GRU was involved entirely with collecting foreign intelligence and conducting covert operations against foreign targets.
Steps for building hotels on the Moon:
1) Create a business plan
2) Raise beaucoup bucks from uber-wealthy
sheepdonors.3) … a miracle occurs
4) Profit!
I understand the term these techbros have for me is “space bastard” because I rain on their space colonization fantasies with all the obstacles they aren’t willing to think about. Even if this moon hotel is somehow technologically viable, I can’t see it lasting because of economic issues.
One thing that comes to mind: It’d probably be easy to breach the hull, and then we can have the reverse of Ocean Gate with similar deadly consequences.
Completely relevant in a way I can’t mention due to spoilers, but Ben Elton’s novel Stark is hysterical and timely (although written 20 years ago).
StevoR @17: the Cheka/NKVD/KGB were the USSR’s “civilian” intel service, and became the FSB after the USSR broke up. The GRU is Russia’s and the USSR’s premier military-intel organization.
Is that thing from mission 2 sitting in it’s own impact crater? I sincerely hope I’m reading that right and it’s not supposed to carry passengers while “landing”!
raven@7 Yeah, I’d prefer it if the tech bros wasted their money on grifts like that leaving them less to build their fascist utopia.
Also Humans could actually fly in lunar gravity if memory serves…
Sure, if someone builds a really huge — as in city-sized — dome, and fills it with breathable air to flap our wings in. That would add a good bit to the cost of our Moon hotel. (And yes, it would have to be city-sized just to make it worthwhile. Who would want to fly in a one-block enclosure that doesn’t even have room to build up speed, let alone do fun fancy maneuvers or avoid crashing into other Icarus-wannabees?)
Sure are a lot worse ideas and worse things a lotta $$$ gets spent and wasted on that do far less good and more harm.
“Hey, other rich morons have stupider, more wasteful and more dangerous fantasies than mine” isn’t exactly saying a lot; and doesn’t constitute a plausible business plan.
Skylar Chan lives well for a few years while all that money is being redistributed to the rest of the economy.
Luxury goods providers need to eat too.
Or, maybe we could just TAX THE RICH and redistribute that money toward those who need it most.
The restaurant will be good, but it will have no atmosphere…
oops christophe @12 beat me to it!
@hillaryrettig1, # 30, 31: That’s okay, it’s still a halfway decent joke. : )
SteveR@17, timgueguen@22, Raging Bee@26:
Yeah, there were a lot of duplicated agencies in the USSR where you had civilian and military versions with overlapping mandates; a lot of that probably dates back to Stalin actively trying to kneecap the military organization to some extent and bring those tasks under the Party leadership to limit the possibility of a potential coup.
For example, and actually still somewhat on topic, the USSR actually had separate civilian and military space agencies for a while. If you’ve ever wondered why the Soviet Union created the doomed Buran project, its version of the American Space Shuttle, that’s why: it was an inter-agency rivalry between the civilian and military space agencies with one trying to one-up the other.
There’s no vacation I’d look forward to more than a week in microgravity and 200x more radiation. Not to mention Mars, where you get the benefit of 700x more radiation.
Maybe they’ll have a spa! Yeah, they’d probably have to strap you down to the massage table to keep you there during it, but, what could be more relaxing?
Sign me up!
The answer to why it has big windows and a door is that it’s AI art, with a stupid prompt like “hotel on the Moon”, and he’s too ignorant to understand why that makes no sense.
Probably, but not necessarily, Deborah.
They could be purely esthetic.
Or they could be dust shield generators, decorated.
(https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-successfully-repels-lunar-regolith-on-moon/)
Or…
John, where did that information come from — the NASA library? The one Dear Leader just had liquidated? Oopsie… (Yet another data-point showing that private enterprise can never be trusted to do anything better than Big Gummint.)
PZ @14:
GRU is also the name of the mad scientist protagonist of those Minion movies.
That’s still a stupid name, especially for a company that hasn’t even hired any minions yet.
christoph @12: Speaking of comic strips, remember “Dick Tracy” when they had people playing golf on the Moon, with their shirts off?
Anybody else notice that there is a moon in the sky?
uusuzanne, no, I didn’t.
The gorilla suit syndrome! :)
It would probably be easier to build a hotel next to the Titanic. Safer too, I imagine.
Adjusted for inflation, the Apollo program cost $USD 257 billion in 2020 dollars. This put a total of 12 people on the Moon, all of them selected from elite military pilots at peak human fitness and then highly trained for the mission. None of them were passengers.
Gotta love those vacations where the days are more than 300 hours long and so are the nights, and those 30 hour sunsets…
… possibly what’s depicted in that last image. So, there’s not much chance for a tourist hotel that has to pretty much completely shut down every two weeks being profitable, unless there are highly illegal and profitable “amenities” involved, you know, like what mostly men are looking for. Of course illegal is defined by what corp. owns it all, but mostly this is drooling by those imagining a libertarian paradise.
“Swimming pool might be a challenge.”
Robert Heinlein wrote a story that included people strapping on wings and flying inside the air reservoir tank on the moon.
@ 40. uusuzanne : Anybody else notice that there is a moon in the sky?
Actually there’s probly trillions times trillions times trillions and more of them! In our own solar system alone we know Earth has one – setting aside quasi-moonlets like Cruithne ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_Cruithne ) as regularly debated on QI with updates for new discoveries and twists; plus of course all the thousands of artificial satellites which are a kind of artificial moon. Elsewhere Pluto has 5 moons or maybe one less if you classify Charon as a binary planet, Mars has a couple of moons – plus quite a few artifical satellites now, Jupiter has 97 moons and counting just the four Galilean moons being notably sizeable. Saturn has 274 and counting the most of all our solar systems planets and the other gas giants, dwarf planets and even asteroids as small as 740 metre Dinkinesh have their own moons in its case a contact binary moonlet named Selam. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/152830_Dinkinesh ) Then there are exomoons of exoplanets and brown dwarfs and rogue planets ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exomoon ) and so the total count of moons in the sky is likely many times the number of grains of sand on the beaches of Earth.
Anyhow definitely moons plural not singular! Oh and
@ 45. moarscienceplz : Can you recall what it was called? I think Asimov and others have also noted this and featured it in stories and novels too.Certainly recall human powered lunar flight inside Moon bases in some SF tales I’ve read albeit hazily gievn time and fallible memory.
Lunarpedia notes :
Source : https://lunarpedia.org/w/Human_Powered_Flight
It would certainly be one big attraction and something that people will want to do – I expect the lighter gravity and its various effects and consequences will have a lot of appeal for a lot of people. Myself included.
It isn’t a conventional door. Clearly the interior side of that would look different and be an airlock and it certainly doesn’t look like your average door to me.
To acess the lunar surface for a whole number of possible reasons including exploration, maintance of the exterior, trvael to other nearby structures, vehicles and locations, sucha s ladning pads, lunar taxi ranks, etc ..
For viewing and to make the structure visible across a wide distance amybe eg lighst o phone towers, skyscrapers, etc .. on Earth. We do not of course know that those are real windows aat all rather than decorative illuminated features. Clearly this is artwork intended to convey the concept and potential appearance and possibility not a detailed architectural blueprint. It would very liekly inreality be justa tiny fraction of infrastructure that is mostly hidden beneath the regolith toprotect from radiation, micrmeteorites and other hazards.
@46. Oh and ..
.. yeah, I noticed.
StevoR, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menace_from_Earth
@22. timgueguen, #33 jenorafeuer, #26. Raging Bee : “The GRU is Russia’s and the USSR’s premier military-intel organization.””
Ah, okay, thanks. Something new learnt today.
@25. hillaryrettig1 : “Completely relevant in a way I can’t mention due to spoilers, but Ben Elton’s novel Stark is hysterical and timely (although written 20 years ago).”
Great novel and sauire and recomendation seconded – did you see the TV series Stark Trailer (1min 22 secs) they did of it too? Screened on ABC years – decades now – ago.
@43. chrislawson : Yes but different age, different technology, different circumstances, purpose and group here. Differnt fnding too.
Different funding – and note we gained an incredible amount from the Apollo moon porgram and it was absolutely worth it in so many ways beyond the merely financial and tangible and scientific.
Also the Apollo Moon-landings were the most remarkable and promising thing that our species has ever done in my view and I’m sure many others.
@49. John Morales : Cheers!
Does he mention the radiation levels on the Moon’s surface? Does he mention the fine abrasive dust on the Moon that is going to play havoc with machinery and electronics as it did with some of the Apollo missions? No, it’s all about glamorous and imaginative renderings for sales brochures that have nothing to do with the nitty-gritty of life on the surface of these bodies. Bit like Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants
Maybe he’ll work with NASA and other organisations or end up doing so? There are already plans such as the one noted here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-2/#comment-2289846
Albeit Trump s plan and orders so yuck there but still.
^Of course Trump is no JFK but the basic superpwoer is determined to do X by date Y and puts every effort into doing so and throws enough money, people, enbergy etc ..at it and it gets there still applies.
The issues with our species returning to our planet’s main natural Moon (& more & beyond) have NOT been scientific or technological for a long time but rather political and motivational and cultural.
______________________________________________ principle
@ 46 StevoR
Guys why are you assuming that’s a moon? I assumed it’s the Sun, but could be Earth. A quick goog shows the albedo (brightness) of the Earth is twice that of the Moon, so a “full Earth” would be brighter than a full Moon.
I grew up with “Space 1999” so not impressed.
https://catacombs.space1999.net/main/images/spacehd/cc/spcc0004.jpg
X-D