2001: A Space Odyssey: Sure we have space tourists, but the Lunar Hilton is two decades overdue. Photo / Getty Images
2001: A Space Odyssey: Sure we have space tourists, but the Lunar Hilton is two decades overdue. Photo / Getty Images
Last month a tourist spent a grand total of 10 minutes (and $40 million) in space.
The launch of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin was a dramatic if short-lived affair.
He was hot on the heels of fellow Billionaire Boys Club member Richard Branson - who spent a paltry 90 minutes gracing the Kármán line. Only five of these minutes were spent in zero-G.
It's a little, well, brief.
Considering it has been sixty years since the first person blasted off into orbit, the Cosmonaut Club is still a very exclusive circle. You could fit the number of people who have been into space in a single Boeing 747.
(There are between 556 and 562 people who have been into space, depending on where you draw the boundaries.)
There are around the same again on the waiting list for Virgin Galactic's US$250000pp tourist flights.
Taller versus longer, equally disappointing? Jeff Bezos of Blue Orogin, left, and Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic. Photo / File
Yet for anyone watching Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins back in the sixties they must be a little disappointed in the direction the Space Race has taken. Even the least optimistic of observers would have predicted by now we'd be spending at least half of our 20 days annual leave on the Moon.
The overpromise and under-delivery of space tourism is a phenomenon pre-dating the Apollo Mission.
Back in 1967 - a full two-years before the Apollo Moon landing - hotelier Barron Hilton was a keynote speaker at the American Astronomical Society conference in Dallas.
The subject of his "Lunar Hilton" speech has often been parodied in pop culture. It is just the kind of 'pie in sub orbit' thinking that sticks around.
It was no surprise that as a Houston-based hotelier, Hilton was connected to many of the driving figures behind the American Space Programme.
Props for the Lunar Hilton in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Photo / Wikimedia Commons
A keen amateur pilot he spent time flying with many of the original NASA pilots out of Texas.
There is even a gallery named after him at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum.
In true form to the American tradition of academic philanthropy he donated generously to the local educational institutions with the condition that they name a wing of a building after him and look after the various personal effects and claptrap which weigh down billionaires.
In the University of Houston Hilton Archives you'll find many items under the 'Lunar Hilton' project.
The Orbital Hilton in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Photo / Wikimedia Commons
But how sincere was he regarding space being the final frontier for his hotel franchise?
"I firmly believe that we are going to have Hiltons in outer space, perhaps even soon enough for me to officiate at the formal opening of the first," he told incredulous attendees in Dallas, back in 1967.
In 1968 the hotel appeared within the first frames of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This led many people to speculate it might have all been a gimmick for the movie, or a PR coup for the hotel chain.
However, there were plans for both a Lunar Hilton on the moon's surface and an Orbital Hilton as a privately-owned space station.
Much of it was extremely forward looking, but from the perspective of a very specific time and place.
The Lunar Hilton: Romantic concept sketches for a moon hotel. Photo / University of Dallas, Hilton Archives
To the American hotelier from 1967 - instant, just-add-water cocktails and freeze-dried meals were necessities for a space hotel. As was the nuclear-reactor fuelled kitchen.
Mock reservation slips were printed (on paper of course) and designs were drawn for a sleeker, more modern interior decor.
Perhaps the strangest prop in the Hilton collection is the space key.
Sleek, metal and with no hard corners - it is a unique, if dated design.
"The idea that we'd have a plastic key card like we do today was - I guess - just way too far out for '67," the Hilton archives' Dr Mark Young told the BBC after one came up for auction.
Auctioned online as "one very rare vintage Lunar Hilton Hotel key and fob" the lot description was for a "promotional item from the late sixties for Hilton Hotels proposed first hotel on the surface of the moon".
A mock up of what a space hotel key would look like, as of 1967. Photo / University of Dallas, Hilton Archives
As well as a Stanley Kubrick film the out of this world hotel appeared in cartoon series The Jetsons.
Perhaps the seed of Barron Hilton's space hotel, the 1962 flick shows holidaymakers check into the "Moonhattan Tilton Hotel". Obviously a thinly guised Manhattan Hilton, Saturday morning cartoons are perhaps the most realistic place to find space hotels.
While $360,000 might seem a steep price for 10 minutes' weightlessness. It is the prize of being able to claim you have been past the 80km boundary which NASA defines as the edge of space.
Business rival Bezos has claimed his space tourism venture is the only qualifying space flight past the internationally defined 100km Kármán boundary of space.
With onanistic undertones not missed by the world press, the billionaires' private space race boiled down into two competing sales pitches:
It was Bezos's "mine's taller", versus Branson "mine's longer".
Having spent two decades hyping up an experience that lasts mere minutes, there's a lot to live up to.
