FOUNDER: SKYLER CHAN
Most space companies obsess over rockets, launch windows, and cheaper kilos to LEO.
Skyler Chan is building for what happens after the rocket lands.
Habitat. Permanence. A future where “going to the moon” isn’t a flags‑and‑footprints stunt, but an operational reality - with humans living, working, and eventually being born off‑world.
His company, GRU Space, is building the first hotel on the moon.
The product wedge looks like tourism. The real ambition is infrastructure: solving durable off‑world surface habitation using local resources. And that idea traces all the way back to a five‑year‑old kid drawing spaceships in 2008.
“It Didn’t Feel Like Enough Just for Me to Go to Space”
Skyler grew up as the archetypal space kid.
He was the quiet one in the back of the classroom reciting space facts, reading astronaut biographies, and memorizing orbital mechanics while his peers were trading baseball cards.
Two books in particular rewired his brain early:
Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth - which introduced him to the Air Cadet program and, by extension, flying.
Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk - which made a different point: technology companies, built around audacious missions, could move history as much as any individual astronaut.
At 12, Skyler begged his parents to let him into the Air Cadets program - a pipeline that, in his mind, was the optimal path to the astronaut corps. They initially refused. He persisted for a year until they relented.
Three years later, he earned a glider pilot scholarship: one of ~320 cadets selected from ~23,000 applicants. Summer 2019, at Comox Air Force Base, was a shock of discipline and risk:
Wake up at 5am.
March to the mess hall.
Spend hours in the heat pushing and flying gliders.
Back to the barracks and into “ground school”: meteorology, air law, flight theory.
There was no engine. No parachute. You had to make the runway.
Midway through the program, reality hit hard. A fellow cadet in the broader program died in a mid‑air collision. Same age. Same dream. Same path.
The officer pulled everyone aside and broke the news.
For Skyler, it was a multi‑layered jolt:
This could have been me.
The current path (Air Force → test pilot → astronaut selection) required enormous personal risk for a statistically tiny chance at going to space once.
He started interrogating his own “why”.
The more he thought, the more one conclusion emerged:
“It didn’t feel as meaningful anymore for just me to go to space.”
“What if instead we could build the systems so everyone could?”
He realized he didn’t just want to reach space. He wanted to change the denominator - to make humanity interplanetary so that millions, over generations, could live beyond Earth.
That shift - from personal achievement to civilizational infrastructure - would quietly drive every decision after.
From Mars Research to “This Is Way Too Slow…Let’s Just Build”
That conviction pushed him into engineering.
Skyler went to UC Berkeley to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) - not as an abstract credential, but as a toolkit for building hardware and software that could survive off‑world.
On campus, the path of least resistance was obvious: join a rocket team, contribute to a CubeSat, write some control code, get nice resume lines.
He did some of that. But the itch to work on habitats wouldn’t go away.
He joined a Mars research lab as a freshman - on paper, a perfect fit. In practice, he hit his tolerance for incrementalism.
Paper after paper. Simulations of Martian conditions. Studies about hypothetical systems.
No one was shipping real hardware to real extraterrestrial environments.
Skyler is self‑described as impatient. The lab made that concrete:
“We were doing ‘Mars’ work, but nothing that was going to be on the moon or Mars anytime soon. I just wanted to build something real.”
So he made his own lane.
He founded Mars Habitat at Berkeley, a student group focused not on rockets or satellites, but surface habitats - the off‑world equivalent of real estate and infrastructure.
There was no NASA competition category. No template. No obvious recruiting pitch.
He tabled on Sproul Plaza next to consulting clubs and big‑tech feeder groups, filtering for the tiny slice of students irrationally drawn to building homes on other planets.
The team that formed was small but unusually high‑leverage. Of the four original core members, three would go on to found YC companies - including Skyler.
The through‑line: people irrational enough to work on Mars real estate for no credit are precisely the ones who later start non‑obvious, hard companies.
Tesla, a 3D Printer in Space, and a Fast‑Track Out of School
While running Mars Habitat at Berkeley, Skyler stacked real‑world experience:
Tesla: He interned on vehicle software, learning how high‑performing engineering teams ship safety‑critical systems at scale.
Virgin Galactic payload: Through a PhD friend, he joined a project to build a 3D printer that would be launched into space.
That printer project became a critical mindset unlock:
It wasn’t a hypothetical study.
It was real hardware, with real constraints, going into a real space environment.
Skyler went beyond the original ask of “help with software,” taking on embedded systems and full‑stack responsibilities.
That summer, balancing Tesla and the space‑bound printer, felt like the first glimpse of the life he actually wanted: building tangible systems that push the frontier.
When he came back to Berkeley, he did the math.
With careful course planning, he had enough credits to graduate a year early.
“If the goal is to build off‑world habitats, another year of lectures wasn’t obviously the highest‑impact use of time.”
He finished early.
It was time to start the company he’d been implicitly designing since Air Cadets.
“GRU Space: A “Hotel” as a Trojan Horse for Infrastructure”
Today, Skyler is the founder of GRU Space, a YC‑backed company with a deceptively simple headline:
“GRU Space is building the first hotel on the moon.”
On its face, that sounds like tourism. A sci‑fi novelty for billionaires.
Underneath the narrative, the thesis is more fundamental - and legible to anyone thinking in infrastructure, not stunts.
The core problem
Humans cannot expand to the moon and Mars in any meaningful, durable way until we solve:
“Off‑world, durable surface habitation.”
Rockets (SpaceX, Blue Origin) are solving transport.
What remains underdeveloped is what happens when you get there:
How do you build habitats that can withstand extreme temperature swings, vacuum, radiation, and regolith?
How do you construct at scale without hauling everything from Earth at $X,000/kg?
Skyler’s view: this is not ultimately a propulsion problem. It is a materials and construction problem at the edge of civil engineering and ISRU (in‑situ resource utilization).
The constraint
You cannot economically build a lunar or Martian built environment by shipping steel and concrete from Earth.
You must use local resources.
That’s embedded in the company’s name. GRU comes from Galactic Resource Utilization - the idea that long‑term habitability depends on treating space as a place with resources, not just a void to cross.
The first product
GRU’s first hardware is a lunar payload with two tightly coupled components:
Regolith‑to‑brick system
Extracts lunar regolith (moondust/topsoil).
Converts it into structural building material - effectively, lunar bricks.
Inflatable habitat segment
An inflatable structure designed to survive lunar surface extremes in temperature and pressure.
Combined with regolith shielding, it becomes the seed of a durable habitat.
Together, these form the construction stack for off‑world surface habitation:
Regolith becomes your concrete.
Inflatable structures become your pressure vessels.
Layer enough of them, and you don’t just have a hotel. You have the starter kit for a settlement.
The “hotel” is a Trojan horse:
It creates a clear, aspirational story the public and media can understand.
It attracts early customers (and partners) willing to pay for a once‑in‑civilization experience.
It pressure‑tests the habitat tech in the harshest real environment.
Underneath, what GRU is actually building is off‑world real estate infrastructure.
Distribution as an Operations Problem, Not a Press Release
On launch, GRU’s story traveled fast.
$0 spent on PR or paid advertising
60+ countries
200+ pieces of earned media
1B+ views across platforms in ~3 weeks
Skyler jokes that it might have been the biggest YC launch of his batch - powered not by a PR agency, but by a deeply resonant narrative:
The moon is a global object. Everyone can see it. It transcends borders and politics.
“First hotel on the moon” is a meme‑level hook that pulls people into a more serious conversation about humanity’s next chapter.
To him, this isn’t just marketing. It’s operations.
❝Making humanity interplanetary isn’t primarily a technology problem anymore. It’s an alignment and will problem.
Space agencies are bounded by national mandates and politics. Component suppliers are invisible to the public. Neither can easily galvanize global mindshare.
A company like GRU can. The GTM, in that sense, is:
Unite the public around a concrete, near‑term vision (stay on the moon).
Translate that attention into support - customers, partners, and eventually regulatory and logistical pathways.
It’s a different kind of distribution: rallying the species.
Wedge, ICP, and Why the First Guests Are (Probably) Billionaires
GRU’s initial customers are clear:
“Ultra‑high‑net‑worth individuals and organizations willing to pay for the most extreme, historically significant experience money can buy.”
Space tourism has already shown early demand:
Blue Origin’s New Shepard program validated willingness to pay for suborbital flights - and then shut it down to refocus on a lunar rocket, leaving demand on the table.
SpaceX’s evolving Mars and moon strategy is moving the Overton window on what’s technically and socially “allowed” in private spaceflight.
For GRU, that means:
Less supply in near‑term tourism → more unmet demand for differentiated experiences.
More institutional focus on the moon → easier to plug a habitat company into an emerging ecosystem.
Skyler is explicit about the sequencing:
The spearhead is small: a handful of people paying extraordinary sums to stay on the moon.
The shaft of the spear is long: once proven, those same systems become templates for:
Research stations
Industrial facilities
Long‑duration habitats for non‑elite populations
“Democratization is the end state.
Ultra‑high‑net‑worth is the necessary first customer.”
It’s the same pattern that played out with aviation: early flights were luxuries; the infrastructure they paid for eventually made cheap, global air travel possible.
A Founder Optimizing for 80‑Year Regret, Not 8‑Year Exit
Ask Skyler where he wants GRU to be in one year and in 60 years, and you get two different but connected time horizons.
In 12 months:
Heads down on flight hardware: the lunar payload that will validate GRU’s regolith‑to‑brick system and inflatable habitat segments on an actual mission.
At age 80:
He frames it as regret minimization.
He’s had enough near‑misses and brushes with risk to take mortality seriously. When he runs the “looking back from 80” simulation, one question dominates:
“How sad would it be if I didn’t die trying to get humans living on the moon and Mars?”
His bar for success is not a specific valuation or acquisition.
It’s this:
- That humanity becomes truly interplanetary - with people not just visiting, but being born and living entire lives on the moon and Mars.
- That GRU’s work materially accelerates that timeline - enabling 10x more human lives to exist across the universe over the lifespan of our species.
This is a deeply utilitarian framing:
More lives lived → more experience of consciousness → net positive.
If building a lunar hotel company that evolves into off‑world infrastructure can bend that curve, dedicating a lifetime to it is not just rational; it’s compulsory.
Why This Matters for VCs and Founders
For most investors, “moon hotel” reads as sci‑fi or PR fluff.
But under the narrative are the ingredients that tend to age well in venture:
Founder‑market obsession: a life arc calibrated around one problem - off‑world habitation - not a random pick from a YC ideas list.
Non‑obvious wedge: tourism as a path to in‑situ resource utilization and habitat tech - a market that, if unlocked, is effectively unbounded.
Earned distribution: global mindshare generated with no budget, in a category where public enthusiasm will shape regulatory, political, and capital flows.
Long‑duration ambition: a company explicitly built for multi‑generational impact, not a quick flip - which aligns with the few funds willing to underwrite frontier, winner‑take‑most outcomes.
For founders, GRU is a reminder that:
The “too crazy” childhood obsession might be the only thing that keeps you grinding through the non‑glamorous work of actually making it real.
Big markets are often hiding in the infrastructure nobody owns yet - the habitat, not the rocket; the off‑world construction stack, not the launch.
In a world of AI‑native SaaS and yet‑another‑workflow tools, Skyler Chan is pointing his life at a different question:
What if our generation is the one that makes “Where were you born?” a non‑trivial question - Earth, moon, or Mars?
GRU Space is his bet that the answer can be “all of the above.”