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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @06:49PM (1 child)
I think it's more accurate to say that nobody cared about Lockheed's announcement.
Lockheed and Boeing had decades to do what SpaceX promised, and then did - and continues to do. They instead chose to milk the taxpayer for the maximum possible, while producing the bare minimum. On top of that they also chose to mock SpaceX for trying to do something revolutionary. All the way up until SpaceX began launching, recovering, and then relaunching ships Lockheed/Boeing insisted that it was impossible. That, once it became clear it most certainly was, became 'not economically viable' and now they've gone silent having their feet likely embedded a bit too deeply within their mouths. Their CEO [wikipedia.org] (and president and chairperson) is some MBA with 0 technical ability or knowledge. The hallmark of her career is the F-35 - a bunch of massively overbudget, delayed planes, that perform awfully and are expected to cost the taxpayer about $1.5 trillion. The entire company has no vision, no technical leadership, and exists to do little more than take the maximum amount of money possible away from the taxpayer.
If Lockheed gets to Mars it'll cost about $5 trillion, be 40 years overbudget, and the ship will catch on fire once it gets there. The last part being a little joke about the F-35 I expect many might not get. As of late 2016 the F-35's still had this pesky problem of occasionally bursting into flames [defensenews.com] at random times, even including takeoff. It's been happening for years. Lockheed assures us they have it nailed down. They just need a few hundred billion more dollars to make sure. Oh and occasionally the oxygen regulation system also just blows up and pilots get life threatening hypoxia. They still haven't quite figured that one out. That is lockheed in a nutshell.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 30 2017, @08:49PM
Both the F-22 and F-35 have had hypoxia issues:
http://www.airforce-technology.com/news/newsroot-cause-f22-raptor-hypoxia-identified-usaf [airforce-technology.com]
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/air-force-clears-f-35-to-fly-again-with-caveats-after-hypoxia-scares/ [arstechnica.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]