Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

The commercial space sector is in its infancy, and it is very easy to get caught up in the hype and promises that start-ups in the sector bring with them. At times, this is made worse by publications and media outlets swallowing every statement made by the CEO of SpaceX hook, line and sinker, without applying a modicum if critical thinking (yes, I’m looking at you, Ars  Technica, Space.com, Everyday Astronaut and Marcus House), encouraging publications to act more like PR mouthpieces than offering professional reportage.

Take, for example, Galactic Resource Utilisation (GRU) Space, and their claim that in by 2032, they will be operating the world’s first hotel on the Moon and will follow it up with a larger version before offering the same on Mars; framing the moves as the first necessary steps towards humanity becoming a galactic civilisation.

Exactly how serious this company – comprising two founders and a “consultant” – might be in its aims is unclear. But from the company name (GRU – to close to Felonius Gru, the man who planned to steal the Moon in 2010’s Despicable Me to be coincidence , and likely intended as a “har, har” joke) through to some of their wider claims, it’s hard to see this as little more than (at best) naïve thinking.

Certainly, the company’s website and “whitepaper” give rise to a wealth of questions, in terms of the reality of the idea of a hotel on the Moon, through the claims GRU Space make concerning it, to the claims made by the company’s founder. Given this, it’s hard to know where to start in analysing GRU Space and their entire “plan”; both the website and “whitepaper” are fill with gross over-simplifications and logical fallacies whilst at the same time simply skipping over key aspects and costs required of such an undertaking. Take for, example, the company’s 6-point “master plan”, the first 3 steps of which read:

1.       Build a hotel on the Moon. GRU solves off-world habitation.

2.       Build America’s first Moon base (road, mass drivers, warehouses, physical infrastructure on the Moon).

3.       Repeat on Mars.

Who’d have though establishing facilities on the Moon and Mars would be so “simple”. and that’s ignoring the arse-about face progression of steps 1 and 2 – build your hotel then build the infrastructure to support it? Is that not akin to building a housing estate and then providing the necessary road, power, water, sewage, etc., infrastructure?). I’m also going to ignore step 3 entirely, as it involves everything else I’ll cover in this article – with each one being of far greater magnitude.

Steps 4 through 6 of the “plan” are hardly better, drawing as they do on terms such as the Overton Window, and Kardashev Scale and mixing them with further logical fallacies in order to make a (very poor) case for investment whilst offering objectively misguided / misunderstood parallels together with dichotomies of thinking which further underscore the inherent naivety throughout the “whitepaper”.

In terms of misguided parallels, the “whitepaper” draws on space tourism and tourism on Mount Everest as demonstrations of the potential for a hotel on the Moon to have mass appeal. In terms of the former, the company points to the rise of space tourism in the last 5 years, presenting a graph suggesting tourism far outweighs astronaut flight into space. However, the data presented ignores the fact that almost 50% of said tourists have participated in sub-orbital flights to the edge of space; a very different proposition to flying to orbit – or the Moon to the point where it has absolutely no bearing on the latter.

Turning to Mount Everest, while it is true that tourism has made up the lion’s share of ascent to the summit of Mount Everest, since the 1990s, less than 8,000 individuals have made the trip to summit of the mountain. Both sub-orbital flights to the edge of space and to the summit of Mount Everest aren’t cheap: the latter comes in at between US $50,000 and US $120,000 for a trip with “good” to “excellent” logistical support; whilst sub-orbital flights cost somewhere in the range of US $225,000-US $400,000. None of these price points are exactly accessible to a mass market. And they don’t come anyway close to the costs GRU Space is projecting. costs presented no sound financial foundation other than vague predications from the likes of the SpaceX CEO (and we all know how accurate those tend to be) .

By their own guessimates, GRU Space are planning to offer 5-night stays at their “Moon hotel” for an initial US $$27,083,335.00 per person, which they claim will fall to just under US $1 million. However you cut it, the first is several orders of magnitude greater than the cost of an 8-minute flight to the edge of space, and enough to make even the very wealthy baulk. The second, meanwhile operates on a false assumption, something I’ll come to in a moment. As such, it is hard to see GRU Space leverage the kind of real money they will need to make their plans a reality.

In terms of cost to customers, the “whitepaper” glosses over / ignores a lot. First, the suggestion they will be using either the Starship HLS or Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 2 lunar landers – both of which, it is not unfair to say, will have other priorities (assuming the SpaceX HLS actually reaches a point where it can enter service), making their use in a parallel commercial venture somewhat questionable. More to the point: these vehicles will require periodic refuelling to remain operational – at an unknown cost the “whitepaper” fails to mention. More than that, both vehicles require refuelling in order to reach the Moon; no mention of this fact in made in the GRU Space document or who will pay for it.

Given that SpaceX estimate on-orbit refuelling of a Moon-bound Starship will be on the order of US $180 million – that’s a big chunk of missing data – US $45 million per seat in the case of tourists heading for the “version 1” hotel (designed to house  guests), if the cost is to be passed on, which is not mentioned either; neither is how the cost per flight be met if GRU Space is to somehow “absorb” it. There are also other issues around the use of Starship (e.g. whether or not the HLS version will ever be used for anything beyond two Artemis missions and then junked; whether the “standard” version of Starship will ever be rated to launch humans – eve the HLS version will not be rated for crew launches from Earth and so on). however, I’ll do you a favour a pass on waffling on about them.

Of course, Starship is not the only player in town. There’s Blue Origin, a company far more likely at this point in time to deliver humans to the surface of the Moon than SpaceX. But even they require on-orbit and lunar refuelling options, again increasing the overall cost per guest at a GRU Space hotel.

Similarly, the idea that there will be some kind of “10 fold” decrease” in the cost of launching humans into space, making flights to the 12-person “version 2” of the hotel so much cheaper, actually stand up to scrutiny. Whilst Starship has the potential to reduce the cost of launching inanimate payloads to orbit, this is only if it can operate at scale – multiple launches per day. Frankly, the commercial market as a whole is a long way from requiring that kind of general launch cadence, making the idea questionable.

More to the point, whilst SpaceX has reduced the cost per kilo of launching payloads to orbit on Falcon 9, the cost to do the same with humans – $225 million per 4-person launch – has not shifted downwards at all since 2019, despite the 5-fold increase in the Crew Dragon fleet.. This is because launching humans requires a lot of specialised ground and vehicle systems; thus SpaceX look to reductions in servicing and turning around Falcon 9 booster as a means to offset the overheads involved in servicing and refurbishing individual Crew Dragon craft, not as a means to reduce costs to users. There is absolutely no reason to suspect this would not also be the case with and future human rated version of Starship, were it to appear.

Nor does the failure to accurately present costs end there. no mention is made as to:

• The cost of what would likely be single-use spacesuits for the hotel guests (which could be anywhere from US $10 million to US $228 million, depending on the suit type and manufacturer).
• The cost of developing and deploying suitable life support systems and their back-up for each hotel; the implementation of suitable power generation and storage capabilities and the parallel need for thermal regulation systems.
• The costs involved in ensuring adequate on-sit medical facilities.
• The cost (or number) of staff for each version of the hotel (or in providing them with accommodation, life support, food, etc.).

Perhaps the most glaring example of the naivety present in the “whitepaper” is the claim that GRU Space can recoup all of the outlay involved in establishing the 4-person hotel  – liable to realistically be in excess of at least US $1 billion – by flying just 12 guests to the hotel in the first year.

The only way this potentially comes into the vicinity of being a realistic figure is if the costs of all the essentials mentioned above – power, life support, etc – are ignored, and you look at the claim sideways and in a mirror. With one eye closed and the other squinting, whilst simultaneously reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy in full.

In terms of logical fallacies with the “whitepaper”, these are literally manifold-  places an many as 5 in single statements. I’m not going to list all of them here. But to provide a further example: the whitepaper infers that because NASA requires in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) for the Artemis Moon base, GRU Space is the only logical choice for providing those capabilities because they are “unique”. In reality, there are multiple companies and universities involved in ISRU technology development, all of whom are far better established than a two-man start-up.

There is much more within the “whitepaper” that can, and should be challenged – and which should have been challenged by space media outlets rather than them simply regurgitating the PR without thought or research but no. Like the equally questionable Voyager Station proposal claiming a company will have a spinning space station (to give it artificial gravity) accepting up to 280 guests (at $1.2 million a pop) operating from 2027 – the PR is presented as reportage that has a Field of Dreams inevitability, with not a single question about where the “tens of billions” required to build the station will come from (indeed, as of writing, Above Space has raised exactly … US $4.8 million over 4 years, and much of the dedicated space media which helped hype the idea seem to have quietly brushed it to one side.

As such, I admit to a certain curiosity as to where GRU Space will be in the hype cycle a year from now. As it is, it would appear that two companies originally cited as “backers” for the project have requested their names be removed from the company’s website: Anduril Space and … SpaceX.  If nothing else, having a company run by the king of over-promising and under-delivering ask for its name to be removed from your  website can’t really be a good sign.

Artemis 2 Update

As per my previous Space Sunday article, Sunday, February 8th, 2026 was targeted as the launch date for the launch of the crewed Artemis 2 mission around the Moon and back.

At that time of that article, NASA was running the mission’s massive Space Launch System rocket through a wet dress rehearsal  (WDR) – a final pre-launch test designed to ensure all ground systems  – including those responsible for loading the vehicle’s core tanks with propellants were all operating correctly and to uncover any niggles in processing, etc. that could be ironed-out before an actual launch.

During the preparations for Artemis 1 in 2022, a similar WDR caused NASA much embarrassment and rolling of the mission’s launch vehicle back and forth between the launch pad and the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Centre (exacerbated by bad weather) due to a series of issues relating to the feeds providing propellants and vital gases to the rocket, including the liquid hydrogen propellant feed located on the mobile launch platform at the base of the rocket.

These issues resulted in significant changes and updates to the umbilical system in the years following Artemis 1, and the Artemis 2 WDR was the first opportunity to test them in sequence. These updates name some at NASA take a bullish attitude towards the WDR and the updates made to the launch systems.

However, as propellant loading progressed, sensors within the umbilical propellant feed system reported a helium leak similar to that seen with Artemis 1, possibly as a result of the neighbouring hydrogen umbilical super cooling the seals on the helium feed, causing them to contract and allow helium to escape. The countdown was paused to allow the helium seals to warm up and reset.

This appeared to work, and the countdown reached  T -5:15. at this point the Ground Launch Sequencer – a system designed to monitor all aspects of the vehicle’s preparations ad make sure everything proceeds in the correct sequence – intervened and shut down the test when it registered multiple sensors reporting a sudden and sustained spike in hydrogen leaking from the umbilical system – much as happened with the Artemis 1 WDR.

As a result, the the February launch opportunities were closed out, and operations moved to the early March launch opportunity to allow the problems with the hydrogen feed to be investigated. This means Artemis 2 will not launch until March 7th, earliest, and will likely be preceded by a further WDR. The leaks and delay are liable to cause further negative feedback towards SLS / Orion – and cause NASA a certain degree of embarrassment.

In the meantime, the delay clears Crew 12 for a February 11th launch to the ISS.