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posted by martyb on Saturday September 30 2017, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-a-small-world dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday September 30 2017, @07:47PM (1 child)

    by tftp (806) on Saturday September 30 2017, @07:47PM (#575357) Homepage

    And perhaps even more importantly is that these launches will be ultra premium at first. The ticket price will be in the tens of thousands of dollars. In the longrun they will likely become cheaper than conventional airfare and ultimately replace it - but that longrun is a long ways away. For the short to midterm the launches will be primarily used by the 1% types and will be regular fliers.

    We should not forget what killed the Concorde: reliability and high ticket price. And that was just an airplane that anyone could use, young and old alike! Consider that plenty of wealthy people are not all that young, and they may not have perfect health. Rocket flights will be dangerous to them. 1-out-of-100 chance of explosion on the pad, or some other calamity, will be dangerous to them as well. Sure, they could send their flunkies instead - but then why rocket, if those will be fine on an airplane? What's the rush? Not that you need to come from NYC to Sydney to sign a contract in person - you can do it now from your chair in wherever you are. Besides, landing pads are in international waters - this means that you have to take an airplane to and from them, and that will waste time.

    There is another issue - greenness, or lack of it, to be exact. Each launch will burn lots of fuel, generate tons of exhaust. Even in case of perfectly clean fuels, they have to be made on dirty factories, and the energy comes from coal or oil. There is no way around it: with our chemical rocket engines, each flight will cost the planet dearly. And for what? To save a couple of hours to a few rich people? But rich people, by and large, are not idiots, they will not pay $100K for a ticket that may kill or injure them. Younger people, who don't mind the risk, just don't have the money. Market size: tens of tickets per day, planet-wise, following the fate of Concorde into cancellation. Those rich people who are really rich will enjoy the flight in their personal jet. Those who are less rich will be just as comfortable in the first class of commercial airliners. Musk is proposing to satisfy the need that is simply not there - TFA says so quite clearly.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @08:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @08:20PM (#575365)

    International territorial waters end 12 nautical miles off shore. You won't be flying out to or from the launch pad, it'll be a short boat trip - as shown in the video.

    I don't think the concorde is really comparable to this. It was just a faster airplane - it had a cruising rate of a bit more than twice that of a conventional plane. That's pleasant, but not really a game changer. With this system you can fly half way around the world, and back, in a matter of a couple of hours. And we haven't even gotten into the journey itself. Passengers will experience weightlessness and when you look outside the windows you'll be able to experience something that, to date, only astronauts have. And speaking of those astronauts. Even those that have spent months in space constantly mention that unbelievable beauty and awe of seeing our planet and space from above. It's actually ended up converting more than 1 to religion, which to me is sufficient evidence that it's something we can't even really imagine. In either case it's most certainly something nobody seems to tire of. And that's just a fringe benefit.