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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled revised plans to travel to the Moon and Mars at a space industry conference today, but he ended his talk with a pretty incredible promise: using that same interplanetary rocket system for long distance travel on Earth. Musk showed a demonstration of the idea on stage, claiming that it will allow passengers to take "most long distance trips" in just 30 minutes, and go "anywhere on Earth in under an hour" for around the same price of an economy airline ticket.
Musk proposed using SpaceX's forthcoming mega-rocket (codenamed "Big Fucking Rocket" or BFR for short) to lift a massive spaceship into orbit around the Earth. The ship would then settle down on floating landing pads near major cities. Both the new rocket and spaceship are currently theoretical, though Musk did say that he hopes to begin construction on the rocket in the next six to nine months.
Travelling by HyperLoop is so yesterday.
[Ed. addition follows] See also: The New York Times and Technology Review.
Video of the full presentation at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia is available on YouTube: Making Life Multiplanetary.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday September 30 2017, @02:12PM
There's a definite alarmist slant to that Verge article. I mean yeah, rocket landings currently don't have anywhere remotely near the nearly the safety track record of commercial aircraft, but they've advanced remarkably quickly when you consider that the very first successful landing was less than two years ago.
Add another 5-10 years of landing advancements and track-record building while they develop an entirely new passenger-class rocket, and things will likely look much better.
And then there's gems like: "One of the most striking conclusions to come out of the DOT paper is the effects this type of futuristic travel could have on pilots." When has a SpaceX rocket ever had a pilot? They'd likely have a "captain" on a commercial passenger line, to comfort the passengers if nothing else, but their job would be scheduling, oversight, and maybe occasional crisis management, not handling the in-flight piloting details on a regular basis - I rather doubt a human pilot would have the reflexes to successfully land a rocket anyway, even if they didn't have to pull off a Falcon 9 -style hoverslam maneuver.