The lodges are owned by Alain and Alejandra Maury. Alain used to work in professional observatories, first as a photographic scientist (worked at the Schmidt telescope of the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in France, was photographic scientist at Palomar Observatory between 1984 and 1988 for the second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey), then as an instrument scientist, working on CCD cameras, and telescope software at the Schmidt telescope in OCA. He then worked for two french programs at ESO La Silla, first DeNIS; an infrared sky survey, then EROS2, a microgravitationnal lensing program search for dark matter. He is well known for his work on asteroids and comets ( 115P Maury, 1997 Maury Phinney, he is also co-discoverer of comet 1998X1 ODAS). Alejandra studied tourism in her native Chile, worked in hotels like the Hyatt Regency in Santiago, or the Francisco de Aguirre in La Serena, before finally getting her own, eventhough small, hotel.

At the end of the ESO programs, going back to France (meaning cloudy light polluted skies) was difficult to imagine, so Alain and Alejandra opened the SPACE agency, "San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations", in 2003. They are organizing sky discovery tours for the tourists coming to San Pedro which are becoming increasingly succesful. With Atacama Lodge, they are now able to answer the demands of many amateurs who wanted to come to Chile to observe the southern skies with a correct instrumentation.

Alain continues slowly but surely to observe the sky, he is now installing a 92cm telescope (36 inch) in order to continue his solar system investigations.