In 1980, Dennis Hope, an unemployed used car salesman in California, walked into the San Francisco government office and claimed that he wanted to "claim" ownership of the entire moon.
Article by: Curry
Article source: TechFlow TechFlow
In 1980, Dennis Hope, an unemployed used car salesman in California, walked into the San Francisco government office and claimed that he wanted to "claim" ownership of the entire moon.
The staff thought this person was sick.
However, after searching through all the legal provisions, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty only prohibited states from possessing the moon, not individuals. Hope exploited this loophole, writing a letter to the United Nations claiming the moon as his own, but the UN did not reply.
So Hope registered a company called "Lunar Embassy" and started selling lunar land. It cost $20 per acre, and came with a gold-embossed title deed and satellite photos.
Forty-five years later, Hope has sold 600 million acres of lunar land to clients including well-known actors like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and reportedly three former US presidents. How much money did they make?
$12 million.
This business is characterized as "profiteering and insane" in China and is explicitly prohibited. However, in the United States, Hope remains at large, and the land deeds are still being sold.
Now, a 22-year-old says:
Selling land is too low-class; I want to open a hotel on the moon.
The company is called GRU Space, short for Galactic Resource Utilization, and it just opened reservations for its future hotel rooms last week.
Founder Skyler Chan holds dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and graduated last May, a year earlier than the normal academic year.
We looked at his resume, and it was indeed impressive: he got his Air Force pilot's license at 16, wrote vehicle software at Tesla, and built a NASA-funded 3D printer that was sent into space.
The company joined Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's most famous startup incubator; Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox all originated from there.
Behind this is Nvidia's support plan, as well as the backing of investors in Musk's SpaceX and military unicorn Anduril.
Sounds impressive, right?
YC's file clearly states: 2 full-time employees .
Two people have the goal of opening a hotel on the moon within six years.
Although I couldn't afford to stay there, out of curiosity, I looked into their pricing structure.
The application fee is $1,000 and non-refundable. If selected, a deposit of $250,000 or $1 million is required, which can be withdrawn within 30 days; after that, the deposit can only be refunded once the hotel is built. The final room rate "may exceed $10 million."
The timetable is as follows:
Applications will be screened in 2026, a private auction will be held in 2027, the first lunar landing test will take place in 2029, hotel hulls will be deployed in 2031, and the hotel will open for business in 2032.
This model reminds me of Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded by British billionaire Richard Branson.
Branson is the owner of Virgin Group, which deals in aviation, records, Coca-Cola, and many other things. In 2005, he announced his plan to take ordinary people into space and began collecting deposits of $200,000 per person. At the time, he said the first flight would take place in 2007.
Then came 2008, 2009, 2010...
In 2011, a 75-year-old man named Alan Walton couldn't wait any longer and asked for a refund. He said he had already climbed Kilimanjaro, been to the Arctic, and skydived on Mount Everest, and the only thing missing was space travel, but he was too old and really couldn't wait any longer.
In 2014, a Virgin Galactic spacecraft crashed during testing, killing one pilot. A group of customers requested refunds and received them.
In 2021, Branson finally went to space on its own. Its clients breathed a sigh of relief, thinking it was finally their turn.
In 2022, Chapadjiev, an 84-year-old Bulgarian man, received a refund. He had paid in 2007 and waited 15 years, being told every year that he would "fly next year." He said his relatives in Bulgaria kept asking him when he would go to space, and he couldn't answer.
Virgin Galactic tickets are now $450,000, with a $150,000 deposit, $25,000 of which is non-refundable. Commercial flights have indeed started flying, but only for a few minutes at the edge of space before returning.
What GRU Space wants to do is send you to the moon to live for a few days. The difficulty is orders of magnitude different.
Moreover, Virgin Galactic spent 20 years, burned through billions of dollars, and suffered deaths to get to where it is today. GRU Space has only two full-time employees and has given itself six years to develop.
However, I don't think it's a scam.
The founder of GRU, a 22-year-old Berkeley graduate, said in the white paper that he knew it was a huge gamble, and he didn't hide it; he was proud of it. He said that if successful, it would be one of the most influential events in human history.
This sounds arrogant, but the logic is self-consistent.
The Trump administration wants to build a lunar base. NASA's new administrator, Jared Isaacman, is the billionaire who has paid for his own space trip. He has said that "preliminary facilities" will be built by 2030.
Chan was betting that the government wouldn't have time to develop it from scratch and would have to rely on commercial companies. He wanted to be the one being relied upon.
The project's white paper quotes a sentence:
"If the United States has to build a lunar base within ten years, there is no time to invent those strange government-owned devices from scratch."
So that million-dollar deposit wasn't for a hotel room. It was for a racetrack ticket, a bet on the future of US space policy.
Finally, let me mention one detail.
The company is called GRU, and its white paper ends with the statement: "It's time to steal the Moon."
It's time to steal the moon.
Gru in Despicable Me also wanted to steal the moon. In the end, he failed to steal it, but he adopted three orphans and became a good father.
I wonder if Skyler Chan has seen that movie.
It's unknown whether, six years from now, those who paid deposits will stay at the Moon Hotel, or whether they will ultimately choose to get a refund like 84-year-old Chapadjiev.
Anyway, the deposit is refundable after 30 days.
The moon is still there; it's not going anywhere.
