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Elon Musk Proposes City-to-City Travel by Rocket, Right Here On Earth

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

Phoenix666 writes:

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 01 2017, @10:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 01 2017, @10:31AM (#575523)

    Well if these rockets accidentally trigger nuclear war that might slow down global warming for a while.

    Given that "anywhere on earth in under an hour" thing these rockets are more likely to follow ballistic missile trajectories than airliner trajectories...

    p.s. I'd recommend most people to only travel on such stuff when they stop clapping just because it lands/takes off. If you're even more risk averse, wait till it's the norm for passengers to complain about the WiFi etc.