Technology, Connected - The Tech Startup Trying To Open A Hotel On The Moon

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

A hotel on the Moon sounds like science fiction, but Skyler Chan argues it is really a test case for lunar habitats and off-world surface habitation. His company Gru wants to prove two basic things first: inflatable structures can hold pressure and temperature on the lunar surface, and lunar regolith can be turned into Moon bricks for radiation protection, landing pads, roads, warehouses, habitats, and eventually lunar bases. The conversation follows the economics of getting payloads to the Moon, ISRU, SpaceX, Bigelow-style inflatable modules, the 2029 test mission, the 2032 hotel target, and whether building on the Moon is the first step toward humans living on Mars.--⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--Chapters(00:00) Trailer(02:19) Building a Hotel (06:06) The Logistics(06:47) Economic Considerations (10:03) Merging Technologies(10:59) First Mission(13:15) Changing Perceptions(16:25) The Human Spirit (19:40) Responsibility

Svalichan is a 22-year-old wonderline tearing up the space industry. His company grew, has an ambition to build the first hotel on the moon's surface. Yep, you heard that correct, the first hotel. And that is dividing opinion. He receives hate mail because he wants to build a hotel on the moon. Everywhere he goes, wherever he speaks, he is ridiculed and laughed at. They say it's an impossible dream. He thinks he can do it by 2032, and he believes we must do it.

Because for humanity to go to the stars, to take our civilization beyond the Earth's surface, has to start with habitation on the moon. Can he do it? Should he do it? Will he do it? Find out for yourself. Enjoy the show. I don't want Airbnb on the moon.

I want a hotel on the moon. How do we keep people alive for a long period of time on the moon at Mars? That is the key problem that we need to solve. And if that is the Promethean lo, it's not a technology problem. It's an operational problem. We just need to get the right people, the right resources, and we just rally the world together to make this happen. It is inevitable that humans are going to be all the new place. It is inevitable.

And because it is inevitable that humans will become interplanatory, this technology is necessary to build. Disruptors and curious minds. I'm Jeremy. This is Mark. Be disruptive. Stay curious. And keep thinking on paper. Hotels on the moon, Jeremy.

Do we want them? Do we need them? hell yes such is the human condition it's very unlikely Earth will remain habitable beyond I don't know

next next Wednesday we need to take our culture to space civilization beyond our home planet and today we're speaking to Skyla Chan CEO and founder

of Gru Hu plan to build a hotel on the moon which you can go to in 2032 in theory. Skyla Chan, welcome to thinking on paper. Thank you for thinking on paper with us. You are perhaps the man with the biggest ambition in space tech right now. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me on. Why did you decide to dedicate your life to building a hotel on the

moon? The biggest problem that is stopping humans from living on the moon on Mars is not like, you know, I was inspired about you on under running up. So it's like, it's like, it's like, it's not like the transportation of the rockets. It's actually like, how do we keep people alive for a long period of time on the moon of Mars? Like if you distill it down on 10-col-level, it's off-world surface habitation. That is the key problem that we need to solve. And if that is the Promethean moment, is if we solve off-world surface habitation, well, you can really have millions and trillions and infinite human lives to be born on the moon and Mars in theory. And so that was like the obsession. And that was the excitement was like, okay, like, this is the thing. This is the thing. This

the thing I want to solve. The way we fought about the hotel about, okay, I'm skipping a lot of steps, but I'm just going to answer the question. So hotel on the moon is habitat on the moon, right? What are the things that will hurt you in the moon? Radiation temperature, sorry, pressure, temperature, radiation, MOD, right? And so we've just kind of divided into two products, right, to solve those problems. Number one is we're bringing inflatable from Earth to the moon as the inner bladder. And we want to prove that we can hold temperature and pressure in that lunar environment, which we haven't done yet. The second thing is using Lunareg and our geoclomer process

and turn it out autonomously into bricks, which can be the building blocks for the whole tail and protect you against radiation ammo. If you look at ISRAU as a whole, the whole concept of using resources locally on the moon Mars. Just real quick, just to remind the audience, ISRU Institute resource utilization, so using the stuff on the moon to build stuff to make civilization.

Yeah, yeah. It's like if you sail from your, Europe to North America. Like, you wouldn't keep bringing stuff with you. You would just start figuring out how to use stuff locally. From my viewpoint, it seems like we've got two sides of the aisle that are very polarized. In the community, you've got people who are like, no, like, let's only use resources on the moon and more.

We need to do sintering and melting and not bring anything with us. We've got other people on the other side of the aisle, which like, we cannot do this. This is totally stupid. This is unrealistic. Let's just bring everything with from Earth to Moon. My take is it's not actually binary. It's a false dichotomy. It's going to be a gradual progression in terms of how humans are actually going to eventually go long term.

And so what we think is the actual technology that's going to enable that is honestly the simple solution, right? We're using geo-palomers, which is basically the solution that we're bringing, a chemical solution, we're bringing from Earth to the moon and we're mixing the Looner-Regolith with it in our own automated process that's going to produce these bricks. Keep in mind that humans have never built a product on the planet. moon. And I think this is just like the practical standpoint, but we've got a lot of different theories on how we can do things like we should be melting and sintering and medesal landing pads. But the problem of that is it takes orders of man like more energy than our solution, which by the way, like, not only is energy probably going to be the most like valuable commodity for us

when we go to the moon. But it just does not exist right now. It's a DNA. It does not exist, right? a motorized system that is going to mix these things together. It's a lot more feasible and practical and realistic as a practical step than that. And I would argue that we should just focus on things that are actually going to get us to be able to have a discourse to be now, like the Overton window, we're trying to increase the Overton window, essentially, right? Like building stuff on the moon seems really crazy, but once we build the first brick on the moon, then it's like, oh, like, what else can we do?

Right. What else can we do with this technology? oh, we can build habitats and hotels, oh, we can build moon bases, we can build roads, warehouses, et cetera. Is it the Overton window for people who might not be familiar with the term? Yes. It's essentially the idea that like with data centers in space,

like it was crazy for a bit and then the window widened, so like the sort of like acceptance of a new idea that seemed crazy, like increases. And so we're seeing, in my view, from what's happening, I guess the last month. It seems as though, you know, initially when we launched, it's very provocative, right? It's a one-liner. It catches people's eyes. And then, you know, we've saw some people who have sort of shifted their company

focus towards focusing on the moon instead of Mars or other things. And so, and like Moon base and let's build mass drivers on the moon, which is like, you know, we're all trying to work together. We're all in the same team, and we want to, for team humanity, you know, we want to bring humans to the moon and Mars. 2032, the idea is you have a hotel, a habitat up there that essentially four people can go visit for a period of time, correct? That's the current estimate. Yeah, I'm not, yeah, yeah.

I'm not going to come knock. A lot of people like took the white paper and said, this is exactly what it's going to be. This is, I'm like, I remember like running a buyer team and legal stuff. And I'm like, okay, like, making sure it's like, it's estimated, it's targeted, right? Because the whole point of the white paper is to produce a thing that people. can look at and be like, hmm, this seems like a reasonable line of thinking for case, or maybe it doesn't. It's meant to be a point of discussion. It's not meant to be like the crystal ball of the future, right? How do you deal with the economics as you're planning through all of this stuff?

Right now, the cost per kilogram roughly to send something from Earth to the moon's surface is roughly a million dollars per kilogram. Now, SpaceX on their website has said that they are going to do $100,000 per kilogram. Those are about two main public figures that everyone in the space industry have been talking about and not just to be clear because we've spoken a lot about launch costs to our views that's to the moon that's not to orbit that's to be confused to the moon and those are what's publicly available in terms of like listed prices that people have been talking about so one way one way ticket yeah that's just gets a product a product like a payload to to the moon so what that means is there's there's a couple things here right

to unpack is number one there's the cost of launch and there's the price of launch right and And a lot of people, when they zoom out and they look at this, they look at things. I'm like, oh, like, launch costs are going down, you know, or something like that. And that means, like, my price is going to go. No, no, no, no. You cannot conflate. Like, these are two separate things.

If the cost, if the engineering costs can go down, doesn't necessarily that your price will go down. And I want to make this distinction as well because in our white paper, we've listed projection, just literally Excel spreadsheet math on our cost model. And we put that internal costs. And a lot of news outlets have taken that. And like, this is how much it's going to, This is the price.

This is how much it's going to pay. You cannot complete the two. There are very different things. That's just how much we predict internally it will cost in those parameters that we listed, which is a simulation, to be clear. So when we think about the model for us, we see a couple of things. Number one is there is the following launch price for us, which is very good because the bet of the company is that, yeah, we're emerging out of stealth at this time where it's

going to be economically favorable for us to be building out, because now it's now it's going to be cheaper for us to put stuff on the moon. We think at the group that it's going to be order, maybe more, a magnitude cheaper for us to go to the moon than what it is currently now, which means that, yes, the first payload that we sent, like I said, in the white paper and the first mission, it's roughly 10 kilograms. That's intended to do a couple tests of the, to de-risk the core technology we need to do to show the public that this is capable, this is safe, and we're taking the steps

to get to the hotel, that's a small payout, that's 10 kilograms, right? Later stuff in the mission in our roadmap is like, oh, it's going to be like more than 10 kilograms. It can be 100, it could be a thousand or whatever. And at first you might be like, oh, whoa, like, that's so expensive. Like, that's crazy, you know, like it's a million dollars. But no, like the cost is going to go down, right? That's the bet that we're taking.

So I think that's the important thing when you think of a cost model is it's a lot of fundamental reasoning in where the future is going to go. But you cannot, you really cannot. predict with math, like where things are going to go. You have to see around the corners. And I think Jensen Huang said this in a previous interview that he did, but like real intelligence is trying to see around the corners and figure out like where things are going to lead.

And for us, the core conviction out of all the other conviction bets that we have aggru, I think the biggest takeaway is that it is inevitable that humans are going to be on the moon on Mars. It is inevitable. And because it is inevitable that humans will become interplantery, this technology is necessary to build. I see two companies merging with you historically. So Bigelow, so they built an inflatable module on the space station. And the, the gorilla in the room, that SpaceX have just gone moon before Mars and changed their mission statement. How do those two companies, if at all, play into the design of the hotel and the strategy for the first launch? Well, I mean, we're aware

obviously Bigelow or also where SpaceX, right? In terms of like overlap partnerships or any of that, again, I can't comments on any of those. So I think I'll just leave it that, honestly. But let's talk about this first launch, 10 kilograms, right? Or this first mission, this first payload test. Can you talk us through any of the details and what success might look like? And I think you're doing that in what, 2029 is when you're projected to do that? So this is a fun part, right?

So basically the payload is designed to do two things, right? Number one is we want to make humanity's first brick on the moon. Emphasis on brick, aka product, right? And so the way we do that, it's essentially going to extract lunar regalph, which is topsoe on the moon, bring it into our process in the black box of our payload, and outcomes basically the bricks. Now, what I found is that there is an opportunity for companies who want to put their logo on the moon. printed on our brick or stamped on our bread. Just thinking Lego right off the top of my head.

Yeah, yeah. It's crazy like, by the way, this is something I wasn't expecting until I did the launch and we realized that some people were interested. So that's one half, right? And again, the purpose of that in our view is we want to prove out that we can make this product because this is going to be useful for solving for radiation and impact when we build a durable long-term habitat, which functions as the whole time. The second half of this payload that we want to send them in, is demonstrating the inflatable system that we've developed in-house. They basically inflate on the moon and do two things. A couple other things, but mainly two things.

Hold pressure, right, and maintain temperature. Right. Those are the things. There could be other tests that were real. But the general gist of that is, again, before we can send people to the moon and have them stay in a hotel, we need to prove that we are capable of inflating this thing. which is the inner bladder.

And again, I want to emphasize that. Some people are like, oh, is that the hotel? I'm like, no, of course not. Like, we're not going to bring the whole hotel with us on the first mission. That's not even economically feasible, right? The emphasis is this is just the necessary, like you said, which thank you for explaining the flywheel very well. It's a necessary next step for us to learn things

so that we can then incorporate that in the feedback loop and then build the next step and build the next step and so forth. So the combination of those two things is going to be really exciting because the world has never built a product on the moon, and we're hopefully going to be able to film it and show the rest of the world. And it'll be a very nice unified moment in my, I hope so. I really believe that space is a unifying thing for all of us.

I spoke to a lot of people about this show. I said, I'm speaking to Skyla Chan, they're going to put hotels on the moon. There was a sense that it was trivializing what's possible. How do we change the mentality of people to accept these projects for what they are, not what they perceive them to be. We just prove them wrong.

We just build, right? That's it. And the second thing, the more important thing is I actually don't think that matters. People believe the moon landing is still fake. People think the Earth is flat. Does it matter? Does it affect me? Does it affect the mission of humanity?

No. people are always going to you can't make everyone happy like the truth of the matter is like i think the things that it's just like with ewan too like he's got a lot of haters and uh i was kind of bracing myself before to launch i was like i remember telling my friends like yeah i mean it's there's probably going to be a lot of haters and here we are you know we got a lot of random hate you got hate mail and who cares right like i i i people are like you're doing right mail you actually received hate mail lots of weird shit man any any particular phrase that you could share from Don't share the name, but any particular phrase from your hate mail?

There's one that comes to mind, but it's very provocative, and I think let's just not do that for your... Dude, we should do it. We should do a follow-up and unpack all your hate mail, dude. That would be so much fun. Yeah, it's pretty fun. Is the angle that they think you should be doing something else, or is it that this is just an impossible dream?

You've got people who are like, oh, you're like a complete insert every single, like, curse word you can think of, and then you've got people who are like, this is the most dumb thing. I'm going to have a timer in 23, 2, and it's like the guys who are like, actually, you can't do this? I'm like, brother, like literally said, this is the target. Like, it's just like very clear that the whole point of the launch of the company is just, hey, we should do this thing. Now, like, we're promising these things. And then you've got other people who are like, oh, but we should try to save, you know, the planet and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, you can, that's a, that's a stupid argument.

Like, you can say that, if anything, with anything, right? And so it's honestly kind of nice, you know? There's people who make, some of our team members sent it to me. Like we got YouTube videos. They found like my high school volleyball photos. Don't know what they're doing with that. But some weird stuff, man. If you're listening to this, enjoy living in your mom's basement still.

I just think like, yeah, you know, there's always going to be haters, right? To answer to a original point, like, I acknowledge that. Obviously, this is a very hard thing, but you live once, right? You got to do what you really want to do. I just feel really grateful that every day I get to be doing, like, what honestly, not that this is my childhood dream, but this is like basically the manifestation of what I want to do as a kid. And for me, it's like when I look back, if I think about when I'm 90 years old and what did I wish I did, regret minimization framework like from Bezos, it's, I, if I didn't, if I didn't,

try to put humans on on Mars. I want to tell my grandkids that, oh, look up there, we got people living on Mars and Grandpa was able to work, contribute towards us, you know, whether I later or not, it doesn't matter, but as long as we contribute it, it seems like right now, we're kind trying to push it, the tip of the spearhead, but that that is like the goal is to feel that fulfillment, right? It just happens that the fastest, it seems like the fastest economic wedge to doing this happens to be the hotel. And it just happens that a lot of people, when they hear a hotel, It's provocative, but it's, that's the thing is like making humanitarian intraplanetary, and I want to leave people with this too, is like, it's not a technology problem.

It's an operational problem. We've gone to the moon before. We have a technology with like technology less than like the iPhone. So we have a technology arguably to make this happen. We just need to get the right people, the right resources, and we need to rally the world together to make this happen. And so in my view, the challenge before I did the launch and I was architecting the launch, was like, okay, we got to like capture mine share. We got to get people excited about this because the thing is with space, it's hard for people to like, you know, some new power system comes up, some new communication system comes out.

Like, it doesn't affect the average person. But the moment you say like hotel on the moon, it like grabs the attention, it gets people thinking. And then, yes, you go through the cycles of this is BS, this is fake. But then like, maybe you read the white paper. And then people are like, whoa, like, I can see where this is going. It's obviously early. But now I'm thinking about the idea of humans being on the moon and Mars. And I think that's the important thing is you need to plant seed for that.

So I'm going to give you a topic. And I just want you to riff on it for 30 seconds, interstellar travel possible ever. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Why are you so sure of that? It's humans. The thing about humans is that we always want to go and explore and expand.

It's in our DNA. And I'm a big fan. I believe in the endowmentable human spirit. we're going to find a way to make it happen. In the last six months, is there anything about the space industry that you've changed your mind about? Yes.

I'd say the last six months was a lot of the genesis for what we're doing now. And the biggest thing I realized was, honestly, for us, it's very relevant. Moon hotels are not that crazy. And it's the fastest economic wedge to make it happen. Other things where you can just do things,

I mean, in like, I saw what happened with Philip and StarClaught and, you know, doing day centers. and now everyone's kind of hopped on that wagon. We might be coming on that similar thing where we did this moon hotel thing and we got a lot of people who are doing moon bases now and talking about that.

The world is your oyster. You just got to go build and really say what you really believe in. I think that was the biggest thing in the space industry is that this whole time growing up I thought is so far out. This is going to take forever. And then when I started the company, that's when I realized every day and day and day,

we could just do it. We could just start. We can try to make things happen we can really get together the right people to get excited about this and uh i think the only thing that made me change about the space industry is just i love it even more you know i i everybody is so passionate everybody loves it everyone dreams about this stuff every day and that it's like you're living the dream space is awesome philosophical question do you think that being an interplanetary species absolves us of some of the responsibility of not screwing up the planet we actually have?

It's a good question. I think if we are able to, like, if you draw a line of like when we screw up the planet as like when we make it not habitable for like the majority of the human race, if we're able to go to our planet, terraform it, build it up to the point where it becomes habitable. And then if you look at the utilitarian aspect of like,

okay, has the net good, like, increased with that. If we stop investing resources in maintaining the home planet so that, you know, it's like a 5x leverage to, like, enable more human life on this other planet, I think that's fine. Yeah. Um, if we, you know, if we do injure, like, some people on planet Earth or like, you know, it's not like the best quality of life, but like, we enable a faster move towards like Mars and more humans living on Mars.

and maybe other planets, that that is a good choice, right? Like short-term pain for the long-term game. Yeah. Last question, Jeremy's, one of Jeremy's favorite questions is you have 30 seconds to speak to the politicians of the world

that make the decisions, the business men and women of the world who make the decisions, the 20 most powerful, influential people in the world. What do you tell them? Humans are going to become interpret. planetary it's a matter of when not if the question is do you choose to be a part of human history or do you want to stand the sidelines and the best path forward is you got to solve off-world

service habitation we got to build that base you got to build that hotel excellent i love it thank you thank you for thinking on paper with us where can our listeners read your white paper and learn more about what grew is doing yeah you can uh google www www.giri dot space spacete slash w p the white paper

the white paper I read it I recommend everyone reads it you can learn more about thinking on paper of thinking on paper dot x y z

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so we'll see you in the comment section and until next week where we're speaking about space weather you're like next week's show skylah we're talking about radiation proofing and solar proofing technology so join us for that and until then keep thinking on paper