A holiday destination that is out of this world

Aurora Station. Photo / Artist's impression

It will be a holiday destination that is not just off the beaten track - it will be off any track.

The Aurora Station is designed for well-heeled space tourists and the company behind it, Orion Span, hopes to have it open, in orbit and welcoming guests by 2022.

"We are launching the first-ever affordable luxury space hotel," said Orion Span founder and CEO Frank Bunger, who unveiled the Aurora Station idea yesterday at the Space 2.0 Summit in San Jose, California.

A 12-day stay aboard Aurora Station will start at US$9.5 million (NZ$13.1m).

Members of the public have paid to spend time in space before. From 2001 until 2009, seven citizens took a total of eight trips to the International Space Station (ISS), paying an estimated US$20m to US$40m each time.

Orion Span - some of whose key engineering players helped design and operate the ISS - is building Aurora Station in Houston and developing the software required to run it in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bunger said.

It will be about 13.5m long by 4.5m wide and will accommodate four paying guests and two crew members at an altitude of 320km.

The ISS on average orbits the Earth at 400km.