The Moon Hotel, Backed by Nvidia and Y Combinator

In 1980, Dennis Hope, an unemployed used car salesman, walked into a government office in San Francisco with a peculiar objective: he wanted to claim ownership of the entire Moon.

The staff thought he was crazy.

But after scouring legal texts, he found that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty only prohibited nations from owning the Moon, and it said nothing about individuals. Hope exploited this loophole, writing a letter to the UN declaring the Moon was his. The UN never replied.

Taking silence for consent, Hope registered a company called the "Lunar Embassy" and began selling lunar real estate.

The price? $20 an acre, complete with a gold-embossed deed and a satellite photograph.

Forty-five years later, Hope has sold 600 million acres of lunar land. His clients include famous actors like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and reportedly three former U.S. presidents. How much money did he make?

$12 million.

China labeled this business as "profiteering and madness" and explicitly banned it. But in the U.S., Hope remains free and continues to sell deeds to this day.

Now, a 22-year-old is saying:

"I’m going to open a hotel on the Moon."

Two employees. Six years. One Moon hotel.

The company is called GRU Space (Galactic Resource Utilization), and it opened reservations for future hotel rooms just last week.

The founder is Skyler Chan (@skyler_chan_). He holds a double degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, having graduated last May, a full year ahead of the standard curriculum.

We looked through his resume, and it is indeed impressive: he got his Air Force pilot license at 16, wrote vehicle software at Tesla, and built a NASA-funded 3D printer that was sent to space.

The company got into @ycombinator, Silicon Valley’s most famous startup incubator; Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox all came out of there. Behind it, there’s also support from Nvidia’s inception program, along with investors associated with Musk’s SpaceX and the defense unicorn Anduril.

Sounds impressive, right?

The YC profile states it clearly: 2 full-time employees. Two people. Planning to open a hotel on the Moon within six years.

Out of curiosity, I looked into their fee structure.

There’s a $1,000 application fee, non-refundable. If selected, you pay a deposit of $250,000 or $1 million. You can back out within 30 days; after that, you have to wait until the hotel is built to get a refund. The final room rate "could exceed $10 million."

The timeline looks like this:

• 2026: Applicant screening.

• 2027: Private auction.

• 2029: First lunar mission.

• 2031: Deployment of hotel modules.

• 2032: Grand Opening.

The Long Road to Space Tourism

This business model evokes memories of Virgin Galactic, the space tourism venture founded by British tycoon Richard Branson.

Branson is the boss of the Virgin Group, doing everything from airlines to records to cola. In 2005, he announced he would take ordinary people to space and started collecting deposits of $200,000 per person. Back then, they said the first flight would be in 2007.

Then came 2008, 2009, 2010...

In 2011, Alan Walton, a 75-year-old adventurer, finally requested a refund. He had climbed Kilimanjaro, visited the North Pole, and skydived over Everest. Space was his final frontier. But he was aging, and he simply couldn't wait any longer.

In 2014, a Virgin Galactic craft crashed during a test flight, resulting in the death of a pilot. A wave of clients demanded, and received refunds.

In 2021, Branson finally went to space himself. Clients breathed a sigh of relief, assuming their turn was imminent.

In 2022, an 84-year-old Bulgarian-American named Chapadjiev asked for a refund. He paid in 2007 and waited 15 years, being told every year "we fly next year." He said his relatives in Bulgaria kept asking him when he was going up, and he couldn't give them an answer.

Virgin Galactic ticket prices have since risen to $450,000. While commercial flights have commenced, they merely hover at the edge of space for a few minutes before returning.

It’s Time to Steal the Moon

GRU Space aims to do something orders of magnitude more difficult: send civilians to the Moon for a multi-day stay.

Virgin Galactic took 20 years, burned billions of dollars, and suffered fatal accidents to achieve suborbital flight. GRU Space has two full-time employees and a six-year runway.

GRU’s founder, the 22-year-old Berkeley graduate, admits in the company whitepaper that this is a massive gamble. He doesn't hide the risk; he takes pride in it, stating that if successful, it will be the most influential event in human history.

It sounds arrogant, but the logic is internally consistent.

The incoming Trump administration has expressed a desire for a lunar base. The new NASA Administrator, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded his own private space mission, has stated that 'preliminary facilities' should be operational by 2030.

Chan is wagering that the government lacks the time to develop these facilities from scratch and will be forced to rely on the commercial sector. He intends to be the vendor they turn to.

The project’s whitepaper quotes a telling line:

"If the U.S. must field a base within the decade, there is no time to invent exotic, bespoke government-only infrastructure from scratch.

Therefore, the $1 million deposit isn't really buying a hotel room. It is buying an admission ticket to the race and a bet on the trajectory of U.S. space policy.

One final detail stands out.

The company is named GRU. The white paper concludes with the phrase: "It's time to steal the Moon."

Gru, the protagonist of Despicable Me, also wanted to steal the Moon. In the movie's finale, he fails to steal it, but he adopts three orphans and becomes a good father.

I don’t know if Skyler Chan has seen that movie.

Nor do I know if, six years from now, those who paid the deposit will be checking into a Moon hotel, or if they will end up like 84-year-old Chapadjiev, eventually opting for a refund.

In any case, the deposit is refundable for 30 days.

And the Moon isn't going anywhere.

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