A startup is already taking $250,000+ deposits for a luxury Moon hotel.

 

 

A startup is already taking $250,000+ deposits for a luxury Moon hotel.

A tiny startup is inviting ultra-wealthy adventurers to reserve rooms at what it claims could be the first hotel on the Moon. GRU Space, short for Galactic Resource Utilization, has opened online reservations that require an eye-watering deposit of $250,000 to $1 million just to secure a future stay. The company, backed by startup accelerator Y Combinator and staffed by only two full-time employees including founder and recent UC Berkeley graduate Skyler Chan, hopes to welcome its first guests sometime in the 2030s. Its pitch is unabashedly ambitious: send an inflatable structure to the lunar surface in 2029 to test a habitable module and manufacture bricks from Moon dust, then follow up with a larger habitat pod in 2031, to be placed in a protective “lunar pit” to shield visitors from radiation and other hazards.

GRU Space’s long-term vision goes well beyond a boutique off-world getaway. In a white paper, Chan outlines plans to evolve the hotel into a full-fledged Moon base and eventually the backbone of a human colony, likening the company’s role to a spacefaring version of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which once controlled trade and governance across vast stretches of the Canadian wilderness. Concept art on the company’s site even depicts a grand hotel reminiscent of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, suggesting a future in which lunar tourism is as much about spectacle and luxury as survival. The project may sound fanciful, but it taps into a broader shift in spaceflight, where private firms increasingly aim not just to transport people off Earth, but to give them a reason to stay.

References

Adarlo, S. (2026, January 17). Moon hotel now taking reservations. Futurism.

Chan, S. (2026). GRU Space white paper. GRU Space.