Hilton's bizarre 1967 plan for a space hotel
CNN
It seems like we're beginning to enter an age of space tourism, but even back in 1967, the head of Hilton was planning to build a hotel on the moon.
(CNN) — Two years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the Hilton chain of hotels was already planning to welcome guests in space. "Scarcely a day goes by when someone doesn't ask me, jovially, when the Lunar Hilton is going to be opened. They're joking, of course -- but I don't see it as a joke at all," said Barron Hilton at an American Astronomical Society conference in Dallas on May 2, 1967. Hilton, who was then the president of the family business, proceeded to lay out a detailed plan that included both orbiting and lunar hotels. "By 1967, we'd only been doing jet travel for less than 10 years, so this was really a far-reaching concept," says Mark E. Young, a hospitality industry historian at the University of Houston.More Related News