A company is now offering hotel rooms on the moon, but the prices are quite high. Behind this is the vision of a founder who wants to conquer space in the future.
A company called GRU Space has publicly announced that it intends to build multiple habitats on the moon. The highlight will be a hotel, which is said to be inspired by the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
The plans sound ambitious. Within the next 6 years, they aim to achieve their high goals or at least organize the first moon missions. However, traveling to the moon and the corresponding hotel room is not cheap.
The journey and the hotel on the moon cost at least 250,000 US dollars
On Monday, January 12, 2026, the company invited interested parties to make a deposit between 250,000 and 1 million dollars to secure a spot for one of the first moon missions. That amounts to about 200,000 euros and more for the travel and the hotel room. And keep in mind, this is just a deposit.
But the story gets even more interesting. The magazine Ars Technica reports that GRU Space had only one employee in December 2025: the founder Skyler Chan.
However, the founder seems to be serious about the matter. He stated in an interview with Ars Technica that the goal is to build a whole infrastructure:
I realized that we needed to create a third pillar: the space tourism industry. We could expand a proven market to the moon and build the first hotel there. And once we have built the hotel on the moon, we can expand our structures, like roads, warehouses, and outposts. And then we can repeat that on Mars. So I made that decision.
Why a hotel at all? Founder Chan’s thoughts go far beyond a hotel. His vision is: with a hotel, you give people a reason to go there, and you need the corresponding infrastructure to support people. However, others could also benefit from the created infrastructure. He himself compares it to the ships that brought the first pioneers to North America:
However, we are convinced that the fundamental problem we must solve to bring humanity to the moon and Mars is the colonization of other worlds. We cannot just leave all people on the first ship that sailed to North America, right? We must build the roads, buildings, and offices in which we live today.
The long-term vision is to extract resources from the moon, Mars, asteroids, and beyond to drive the expansion of humanity into space. This is also reflected in the company’s name: the “GRU” in the company’s name stands for “Galactic Resource Utilization.”
The company has already received its first funding
What’s next for the project? GRU Space has already received initial funding from Y Combinator, a company that funds startups in exchange for a percentage of the company shares.
With the initial funds, GRU Space aims to complete a three-month organizational program. This is intended to help Chan and his company refine their project and provide them with more opportunities for fundraising.
Players have also been identified as a target audience for trips. Some hotels are perfectly tailored to the needs of specific target groups. In Taiwan, a hotel is now fully geared towards gamers. You can read more about this directly on MeinMMO: Hotels discover gamers as a target audience, creating gamer paradises
