Work is due to start on the world's first'space hotel' in low Earth orbit in 2025 - and it will come equipped with restaurants, a cinema, spa and rooms for 400 people. Developed by the Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC), the Voyager Station could be operational as early as 2027, with the infrastructure built in orbit around the Earth. The space station will be a large circle and rotate to generate artificial gravity that will be set at a similar level to the gravity found on the surface of the Moon. Voyager Station's hotel will include many of the features you might expect from a cruise ship, including themed restaurants, a health spa and a cinema. It will feature a series of pods attached to the outside of the rotating ring and some of these pods could be sold to the likes of NASA and ESA for space research.

June 1, 2017 --If all had gone according to plan, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would be celebrating its 10th anniversary of capturing stunning portraits of distant galaxies, NASA would be hard at work on its dark energy detector, Virgin Galactic would be running two daily tourist flights to the edge of space for just $50,000 a head, and a Russian company would be doing brisk business with its orbiting luxury space hotel. Of course, that's not how it worked out in reality. Last month, Virgin Galactic made its tenth annual prediction that "next year" it will finally shuttle tourists to space, joining the JWST on the horizon of 2018, and the inaugural mission of NASA's new Space Launch System slipped to 2019. As for that space hotel, don't ask. Planning for the future is part of what it means to be human, but cognitive biases, development challenges, and financing conventions conspire to make accurate predictions next to impossible.