Teaching with Space Hotel Ltd

The real history and science

People pictured living in space long before anyone went. In Edward Everett Hale's story of 1869, settlers make a life on a small brick moon circling the earth. In Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's novel Beyond the Earth, finished in 1917, travelers in orbit grow their own food in glass greenhouses. The first real stations came much later, with the Soviet Salyut 1 in 1971 and the American Skylab in 1973.

The game's central job, keeping oxygen, water, food and power flowing, is the problem every crewed spacecraft has had to solve. Early American capsules carried their oxygen in tanks and used chemicals to soak up the carbon dioxide people breathe out. Skylab's crews lived for up to 84 days with a freezer, an oven, a shower and a wardroom for meals, and doctors studied how weeks without weight changed their bodies.

The game starts from real launch sites, in Florida and at Tanegashima in Japan, and day and night follow the real Sun.

What the game simplifies

• The solar system is built at one-tenth of its real size, so distances and travel times are much shorter than in reality.
• When supplies run out, guests are evacuated and money is lost, but no one dies. Real spaceflight has had fatal accidents, and life support failures can kill.
• Greenhouses and recyclers close part of the supply loop, and supply rockets fill the rest. Skylab's crews ate food brought up from the ground.
• Hotels at the Moon, Mars and Saturn, and a spinning ring that gives guests gravity, are ideas, not things that have been built.
• The people are cartoon figures, and crew needs are reduced to rest, food and company.

Ideas for class

• Stocking the hotel: using the encyclopedia article on life support, students list everything a hotel in orbit must supply each day and mark which items a greenhouse could grow or a recycler could recover on board. They then read Greenhouses in Orbit and compare Tsiolkovsky's closed cycle with the game's partly closed one.
• Then and now: students read Signals from the Brick Moon and the article on Skylab, and make a two-column chart of what Hale imagined about living in orbit and what Skylab's crews actually met, such as heat, food and exercise.
• Why go? Students read We choose to go to the Moon and write a short opening speech for their own space hotel, giving reasons in Kennedy's style; the class discusses which of his reasons fit a business and which do not.

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