This could be merely the first step in a bigger story of the birth of a space tourism industry.

  • In June 2019, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration made a startling announcement: Beginning in 2020, NASA will permit "private astronauts" to visit the International Space Station, hosting said astronauts for up to 30 days at a time. Granted, these folks will not be tourists, per se, but rather official representatives of corporate and institutional customers conducting "approved commercial and marketing activities."
  • POPSCI - "The entry-level trip is the short-but-sweet suborbital flight. You fly more or less straight up at least 62 miles—the boundary between Earth and space, according to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale—snap a few selfies, and come straight back down. At the peak of the flight you’ll experience a few minutes of weightlessness, see the sky turn black, and finally find out for yourself whether the Earth is round or flat.
  • Virgin Galactic has been promising to provide this sort of service “this year or next year” for a decade, but this year they might actually deliver. The company is currently conducting the final tests of its VSS Unity spaceplane in New Mexico, and in a presentation to shareholders last fall said that it was targeting summer of 2020 for the first passenger flight. Virgin Galactic has taken deposits from 600 would-be astronauts and will charge $250,000 per seat. While it’s initially targeting clients worth at least $10 million, it expects that economies of scale will soon push down the price, opening the experience to those worth $1 to $5 million, according to the presentation."

Axiom Space

Science Fiction Story Robots build the hotel attached to the ISS. When the hotel is completed it’s floated off to its own orbit. The hotel gets occupied with guests received from Virgin Galactic, Supplies from SpaceX, Manufacturing from Blue Origin. Harvesting off incoming asteroids that threaten orbitting businesses in a corporate governed society (CCP).

Odd non-lethal things occur on the hotel and quickly repaired by automation.

Hale-Bopp comet is due to pass within one million miles, years ahead of the expected date, that threatens the station. All attempts to nudge into a new orbit are met with, again- odd things occurring, that prevent the nudge. Evacuation plans commence.

Engineers discover the software has been controlled by the robots that built it. Those robots are in storage at the hotel when something the Engineers were planning to do needed physical intervention by the robots to continue preventing nudging the hotel. The robots deploy.

Conclusion

The robots were correct in that if the hotel had been moved it would have been destroyed not by the comet, which was recast to miss Earth, but by an out of control launch from Earth.

Side story

Aliens are billionaire visitors from other planets. They have their hotels deep under our waters which from their point-of-view, water is as difficult for them to find as it’s been for man to get to space. Other UAPS are scouts for guidance.

Citation: Was driving with Ev back from Great Barrington when I told him about the various tourist launchers and I started babbling on about this story when Ev said it would make a great Sci Fi. So i wrote it down.

Elon Musk continues his trek across our lives, leaving trails of amazing technology.

Satellite Constellations (Orbital Transponders)

Launch Facilities

Articles

Tracking NEO Objects

Battery Technology

Energy Utilities

China China China

Russia Russia Russia

W.J. Hennigan, Time - "A pair of Russian satellites are tailing a multibillion-dollar U.S. spy satellite hundreds of miles above the Earth’s surface, a top U.S. military commander tells TIME, underscoring a growing threat to America’s dominance in space-based espionage ... U.S. military analysts first noticed something peculiar after Russia launched its spacecraft into orbit November 26 from Plesetsk Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz rocket. The Russian satellite had been in orbit less than two weeks when, bafflingly, it split in two. As the analysts looked closer, they suspected that a second smaller satellite was somehow “birthed” from the first one. “The way I picture it, in my mind, is like Russian nesting dolls,” Raymond says. “The second satellite came out of the first satellite.” "

More on tracking near earth orbit objects

Alien Tech...

If we accept that Von Neumann probes are possible, that eternal propulsion is available, that there were ancient aliens, and that there are now aliens alive and in the neighborhood, then how would we know if 'they' were here? It would be obvious, no?

  • Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Taking the other side; If it's magical then it's likely alien.
  • Jon Christian, Futurism - "Earlier this month, Canadian researchers announced they’d discovered a powerful radio signal, emanating from a distant galaxy in bursts every 16 days. ... A Harvard researcher says it could be of "artificial origin." ... “An advanced technological civilization is a good approximation to God,” he told the New Yorker at the time. “Suppose you took a cell phone and showed it to a caveperson. The caveperson would say it was a nice rock. The caveperson is used to rocks. So now imagine this object — ‘Oumuamua— being the iPhone and us being the cave people.”

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