"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.
"But it got a lot of attention: It was in newspapers for the next several days, and not only in the US but around the world. People wrote letters asking to sign reservations. In some ways it was Barron's greatest PR coup."