Elon Musk Proposes City-to-City Travel By Rocket, Right Here on Earth (theverge.com)

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. From a report: Musk showed a demonstration of the idea onstage, 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 as 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. In SpaceX's video that illustrates the idea, passengers take a large boat from a dock in New York City to a floating launchpad out in the water. There, they board the same rocket that Musk wants to use to send humans to Mars by 2024. But instead of heading off to another planet once they leave the Earth's atmosphere, the ship separates and breaks off toward another city -- Shanghai. Just 39 minutes and some 7,000 miles later, the ship reenters the atmosphere and touches down on another floating pad, much like the way SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rockets at sea. Other routes proposed in the video include Hong Kong to Singapore in 22 minutes, London to Dubai or New York in 29 minutes, and Los Angeles to Toronto in 24 minutes.

Comments

Pretty Sure

[NicknameUnavailable]

This is just his "fuck you" to Lockheed for coming up with a better looking rocket.

Re:Pretty Sure

[hey!]

Nah. Guys like this have to keep the old mystique burnished; that goes all the way back to Howard Hughes.

Re:Pretty Sure

[Gorobei]

Nah, he's just saddled with a bunch of unviable physical businesses that need huge capital. He can't raise it cheaply in the bond markets, so he needs to talk up the "revolutionary" side of things to keep the equity side going. Maybe he can do another "merger" to move capital between his startups (Tesla and batteries sort of looked like it could make sense, but roofing tiles, rockets, tunnels, hyperloop, etc, are boutique.) He needs hype to raise equity in the core businesses because their financials look grim.

This will not end well.

Re:Pretty Sure

[hey!]

I don't see any evidence of Asperger's; an obsession with big ideas does not in itself put you on the autism spectrum.

My point is that Musk is a kind of celebrity entrepreneur, and the celebrity part of that is something he can turn into real monetary value. I think he's got stuff a lot bigger than this rocket shuttle in the pipeline. I don't think he's aiming to be the 21st century's version of Henry Ford (Tesla), Howard Hughes (SpaceX), or Ferdinand von Zeppelin (Hyperloop). I think he wants to be the 21st century's John D. Rockefeller. I think he wants to be instrumental in the transition to a post-fossil fuel world and it's the development of massively scaled battery technology that history will remember him for.

When the time comes he'll need other investors to feel they have to jump in or be left behind. And for that he has to maintain his mystique as a visionary with a regular stream of out-there ideas. They don't all have to work, or even get very far off the drawing board.

Re:Pretty Sure

[NicknameUnavailable]

I don't see any evidence of Asperger's; an obsession with big ideas does not in itself put you on the autism spectrum.

Asperger's is the only compliment I've given Musk to my knowledge. It's defined by obsession with complex topics, high intellect, lack of social aptitude, and the propinquity to get off on tangents trying to do everything within a field. His media presence has all the Hallmarks of Asperger's - if his obsession were social experimentation and he didn't depend on his image for financing he'd be more like Shkreli, but instead it's sci/tech and his presence is subdued online as a result. If you watch the videos of him during the Trump consulting bit he did the signs are very clear in terms of lack of social aptitude, so he's got all the bases for it covered. It's genuinely not a knock, Asperger's is the next leap in Human cognitive evolution.

Re:Pretty Sure

[torkus]

It's ended so terribly so far at every stage.

Remind me again the last successful new car manufacturer that came about? Or who else is actually selling EVs and making a profit without worrying about gutting their actual source of revenue?

Or who's *making money* on fucking ROCKETS while launching for far, far less than NASA ever could manage?

Or...etc.

If this is how things don't 'end well' then I can only hope my life doesn't end well either.

Re:Pretty Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Asperger's is not associated with high intellect, and isn't typically associated with people who date supermodels. His media presence shows a skill for public image - people are excited about Teslas more than the Leaf largely because of his charisma.

People with Asperger's are mostly a bunch of retards, even worse is "Internet Asperger's" where a bunch of lonely men who like sci-fi self-diagnose to rationalize why they're good at math but don't have girlfriends.

Re:Pretty Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because PV solar is totally a pipe dream and doesn't work at all.

You know that Tesla Energy still has hundreds of thousands of customers with photovoltaic retrofit installs, and not fancy-pants new PV-cells-in-the-shingles roofs, right? And those retrofit installs can also be done with batteries manufactured by Tesla?

Re: Pretty Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm constantly amazed at how naysayers like you persistently move the goalposts to shit on Elon Musk.

Like you've literally been proven wrong over, and over, and over... Eventually you need to admit that you are a total fucking imbecile.

Tom Price already booking flights from DC to NYC

[BenJeremy]

Nothing but the best for the best people.

Wait a minute...

[HexaByte]

Isn't this the same guy who's pushing Solar Power and electric cars to save the environment? Wouldn't those rockets create an awful lot of poisonous gasses? No sir! Just take your time and sail there on a solar/wind powered boat!

Re:Wait a minute...

[c]

What do you think a methane-oxygen burn produces? lead?

Re:Wait a minute...

[avandesande]

The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful

Re:Wait a minute...

[decep]

So does keeping servers powered on 24x7 to host a web site for making "Beowulf Cluster" and "In Soviet Russia" jokes, but you don't see me not complaining.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is being wasted?

Methane and Oxygen? I don't think there is any shortage of either.

Re:Wait a minute...

[theweatherelectric]

So does keeping servers powered on 24x7

That's a damn lie! You take that back. Slashdot doesn't run 24x7 and you know it!

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

So it 98% of the internet but you're still here.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Oswald McWeany]

The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful

The biggest thing wasted is money... How much is a one way ticket? Even with economy of scale you're probably going to be paying thousands for a ticket.

Still... that probably means saving time.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Falcon 9 using kerosene and LOX ? If the article is right and this rocket uses the same engines as Falcon 9, this thing will blow a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Re:Wait a minute...

[ShanghaiBill]

The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful

Elon said it would cost the same as an economy class ticket ... which means it would have to consume about the same amount of fuel per person as a conventional aircraft flight. Otherwise the cost couldn't be so low.

Re:Wait a minute...

[beelsebob]

It does, but the BFR plans to use methylox fuel.

Re:Wait a minute...

[JohnFen]

It produces water and carbon dioxide. Water isn't a big deal, but CO2 is.

Re:Wait a minute...

[phayes]

So you are certain that pushing a column 747 sized of air out of the way all the way from taking off in NYC all the way to landing in Singapore is less wasteful than boosting over the atmosphere then using the atmosphere to slow back down and perform a landing burn? I suspect not.

Musk, on the other hand _has_ performed those calculations and determined that costs should be comparable.

Re: Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

That will still produce large amounts of CO2.

Re:Wait a minute...

[wyHunter]

I thought the global warming aka climate change aka wealth transfer crowd says that water vapor is a very potent greenhouse gas?

Re:Wait a minute...

[Mr D from 63]

It produces water and carbon dioxide. Water isn't a big deal, but CO2 is.

Its OK. Only the rich will be able to fly. Their CO2 emissions are less of a concern than those of joe public.

Re: Wait a minute...

[phayes]

Elon hopes to produce his methane & O2 from Water, CO2 & Solar power -- the same way he plans on doing it on Mars.

Re:Wait a minute...

[AC-x]

Elon has been saying a lot of things recently, doesn't mean it'll all come true.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Solandri]

The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful

Not necessarily. Unfortunately a lot of people advocating environmentalism don't have a clue about opportunity cost. It's incorrect to compare this to a zero base state - if the travel didn't happen at all. The correct comparison is to what would happen if this rocket travel weren't available. i.e. what happens right now? People fly between these locations. So the correct comparison is the monetary and pollution cost of a plane vs. rocket.

I haven't done the math, but I can see where Musk is going with this. The vast majority of the energy used by a plane on these long flights is overcoming friction with the air. A rocket eliminates that frictional energy loss by traveling above the air. In other words, the energy cost to fly on long flights is pretty close to proportional to the distance flown. While the energy cost to achieve a sub-orbital trajectory is very close to fixed (a fraction of escape velocity, with a slight increase in velocity translating into a very large change in distance traveled). So there's a certain distance beyond which the rocket will require less energy than a plane. If you can get the price of the technology down enough, a rocket between destinations greater than that distance will be both cheaper and less polluting than flying. The trip being quicker is just gravy.

Re:Wait a minute...

[hawguy]

So does keeping servers powered on 24x7

That's a damn lie! You take that back. Slashdot doesn't run 24x7 and you know it!

It does, but neither the 24 hours or 7 days are contiguous.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

And a big airplane burns 1 gallon of jet fuel a second while it is in the air. This would be an improvement if they can take a lot of people.

Re:Wait a minute...

[citylivin]

Depends. Which uses more fuel, these prototype rockets or an 8 hour plane flight? I think musk is angling by his price comment, that it will be if nothing else, similar. The point is, it doesn't have to be more wasteful with fuel necessarily. That's what new tech is all about! efficiencies.

Re:Wait a minute...

[rogoshen1]

it is Musk talking about cost, so what he probably 'meant' was that buying the airline that hosts the economy class seat would be in the same ballpark as his rocket-ride.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Oswald McWeany]

I imagine CO2 is also less available for plants to turn back into oxygen when it's in the upper atmosphere than in the lower atmosphere.

Re:Wait a minute...

[nukenerd]

The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful

    It's incorrect to compare this to a zero base state - if the travel didn't happen at all. The correct comparison is to what would happen if this rocket travel weren't available. i.e. what happens right now? People fly between these locations.

Nope. Jevons paradox kicks in. If you can get between London and New York in 25 minutes for no more cost than an airline economy ticket, more people would be doing it than now, negating any savings in fuel consumption. Like aircraft are more efficient than ocean liners in terms of fuel per passenger-mile, but far more people travel by aircraft now than by ship in the 1930's and the total fuel consumed is greater.

Costs of space rockets compared with aircraft is not just about fuel. Rockets structures are more minimal than aircraft so are very highly stressed (to save weight). The amount of inspection, looking for fatigue cracks etc, that re-usable people-carrying rockets would have to undergo will be very expensive.

Re:Wait a minute...

[RNLockwood]

The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful

Oh, I'm certain that the fuel will be obtained from renewable resources.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Kryptonian Jor-El]

Musk has also done the calculations on the Hyperloop and we all know that will never work, yet he still hypes the shit out of it

Re:Wait a minute...

[avandesande]

The BFR hold 240 tons of methane and 860 tons of oxygen. A 747 uses 10 tons of fuel and hour and carries 524 passengers. You can do your own math.

Re:Wait a minute...

[phayes]

You did note that he _isn't_ doing hyperloop himself? Do ya think there _might_ be reasons for it not related to the technical feasibility?

Hyperloop _is_ technically possible. The problem is the NIH & NIMBY from everyone that needs to be in on it every fracking inch of the way.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Rob Riggs]

You don't need a pilot. You don't need in-flight service for a 30 minute flight. You'll need highly skilled baggage handlers. People and their luggage will be charged by weight. You need security guards (we'll call them flight attendants). And you will need an army to protect the rocket technology from falling into foreign hands. And you'll need a hefty insurance policy for when it goes boom.

Re:Wait a minute...

[squiggleslash]

I'm not trying to be mean, but Musk has said a lot of things that have turned out to be hype. Pretty much every claim he's made about the Hyperloop hasn't worked out, and it hasn't even been built yet. It'd be nice to see some experienced aerospace engineers weigh in on this proposal - but, of course, that means waiting for them to do so, which doesn't fit the "Musk just said something! We must tell everyone!" hype loop the media gets itself into...

Re:Wait a minute...

[avandesande]

You are pushing hundreds of tons of oxidizer into space. There is no way around this and this type of flight will never compete with a airplane

Re:Wait a minute...

[edtice1559]

Assuming an equal number of passengers and approximately the same energy pert ton with Methane and Kerosene, the rocket would use 24x the fuel. Since fuel is about 40% of the cost of an airline ticket, it seems reasonable that 24 * 0.4 = 9.6 the cost of an airline ticket even if fuel is the only cost and the company wants to break even. I don't know how many passengers the BFR carries, though. I don't think it will be the propulsion system.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Thelasko]

The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful

The idea is to eventually create the methane fuel via the Sabatier process which converts carbon dioxide and water into methane. This is a necessary capability to refuel on Mars. Using solar energy to power the fuel manufacturing process would essentially make this vehicle solar powered.

Most noxious emissions from combustion are due to:

• A. Oxygen reacting with nitrogen from the atmosphere. Which isn't a problem since rockets don't use air, but instead carry their own oxidizer.

• B. Incomplete combustion. Which can be mitigated with careful engine development.

Once out of the earth's atmosphere, aerodynamic drag goes away. Which also might save some energy.

Please watch the entire talk. It's very informative.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

assuming you meant it uses "10 tons of fuel per hour" and that the methane and fuel amounts are comparable (which is a real stretch) then a 24 hour 747 flight would be equivalent to a BFR completely burning all of its methane. OTOH, if if it didn't really use all of its capacity (after all, this is the Earth-to-Mars rock so even though it won't be burning the entire trip it is reasonable to expect it to require less fuel for a same-planet ride) then the BFR would be comparable to even shorter flights.

So, surprisingly to me, it might actually be comparable. Who knows. But obviously neither of us because your numbers are apples to ostriches -- its like comparing an airsoft gun to a .50 cal BMG based on the number of BBs in the airsoft hopper to the cyclic rate of the machine gun.

Re:Wait a minute...

[ChunderDownunder]

Why doesn't he contract the work out?

I am sure Pyongyang could produce the technology cheaper than the west.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Natalie Portman's grits don't complain either.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes more fuel to put 4 people in LEO (low earth orbit) that it takes to fly a jumbo jet across the Atlantic with 340 passengers. Plus space craft are more expensive to build and maintain, and have a much shorter lifespan than passenger jets. It's going to be a very, very, very long time before it becomes as cheap as normal commercial aircraft flight. Unless, of course, Musk talks the government into more big $$ in subsidies. In the meantime, it's the playground of the wealthy, like Musk.

And yes, Musk also very publicly threatened to, and then did pull out of the Trump administration's industry council because the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

But then, Musk is all about money. Climate change support is just a means of lining his pockets.

Re:Wait a minute...

[ceoyoyo]

That's not necessarily true. Aircraft are expensive, so if you can take one and make twenty flights versus one, that's something.

The IATA figures that fuel was about 19% of the global airline industry's operating expenses in 2016.

Re:Wait a minute...

[ceoyoyo]

The kinds of flights you'd use this on are around 20 hours. So the amount of 747 fuel use is similar to what the BFR holds (200 or so tons; the oxygen isn't fuel and the 747 needs to use that much as well, although it will cost something for the BFR to liquify it).

Presumably if the BFR can put itself into orbit with that much fuel, it can use quite a bit less to do a suborbital hop. The log in the rocket equation kicks in here, in favour of the suborbital BFR.

The BFR is supposed to take 100 people, and at least life support supplies on a multi-month trip to Mars. I wouldn't be surprised if you could pack 1000 people in airline seats into that space for an hour flight. Also, fuel is less than 20% of the cost of operating an airline. You realize quite a bit of savings by being able to use your aircraft to do 15+ flights per day instead of one.

The back of the napkin analysis suggests the idea, at least from a fuel point of view, isn't immediately infeasible.

Re:Wait a minute...

[MachineShedFred]

The question is if this rocket launch creates more pollution per passenger than a current long-haul airliner does.

I have no idea, myself. If this was Slashdot of 10 years ago, there would be someone to crunch the numbers and comment in about 10 minutes. But it's not.

Re:Wait a minute...

[MachineShedFred]

For people with shitloads of money, time is more valuable. They'll happily pay if it's safe.

The same arguments were probably made about jet travel in the late 1940s.

Re:Wait a minute...

[MachineShedFred]

Hyperloop was first mentioned in 2012. Do you expect multi-billion dollar brand new infrastructure that hasn't even been invented yet to just instantaneously appear after a press release of an idea with a slick computer animated video? Especially when it's being developed as a private enterprise and isn't a national effort along the lines of the Manhattan Project, or Gemini / Apollo?

Let's get realistic here. We can't even build a so-called "High Speed Rail" route in 3x that time with buckets of money being thrown at it. Has the California HSR project even finished getting all the right-of-way yet with their $billions, in order to build a train that starts in San Jose and drops you off 100 miles from where you actually want to go?

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice apples and oranges there, food for thought and a real comparison:

THe 747-400 holds a MAXIMUM of about 214 tons of fuel. (Max passengers 524)
The BFR hold a MAXIMUM of 240 tons of methane and 860 tons of oxygen. ("40 cabins, max 6 per cabin" Max Passengers 240)

I'm sure that they will be appropriately and optimally fueled for their specific flights.

Note the 747 must fly for much longer and must overcome more friction with the air, which is a HUGE loss.
The BFR skips the middle of this by going out of most of the atmosphere.

Elon usually doesn't JUST talk out of his ass (though he does sometimes rustle his jimmies a bit hard).

He's done fairly well with his personal crusades into "impenetrable and intrenched" markets by doing the goddamn math first. And these are for his own goals, he personally wants to go to Mars, he personally felt he could jumpstart the EV industry.

I'm not giving him a complete pass but I'd guess he's done at least a back of the envelope calculation to see what looks possible. People were laughing at his over expensive roadster and plans to reuse rockets not that long ago as well. He always seems to have a longterm plan with these things.

Re:Wait a minute...

[WrongMonkey]

NIMBY from everyone that needs to be in on it every fracking inch of the way.

That's all taken care of. Musk already got VERBAL GOVERNMENT APPROVAL to build a Hyperloop from New York to DC. LOL.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/2...

Re: Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a kid, I had a series of books about fuels and the future. One talked about this in almost the same terms you used and had a series of pictures of a rocket making intercontinental travel in under an hour. The rocket even looked something like Muskâ(TM)s.

The only difference really was that the rocket was supposed to be for troop transport. Being able to land troops anywhere in the world in an hour is a military wet dream.

Iâ(TM)ll believe that this plan is commercially viable only after I see it in military use.

Re: Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

And they've already calculated trajectories to Los Angeles.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

So there's a certain distance beyond which the rocket will require less energy than a plane.

Except, a big plane can hold 300 or so passengers, while current rockets only hold 10 or so.
So unless the rockets get a radical redesign (to look more like a plane), the per-person energy for a rocket is 30x higher than for a plane.

Re: Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, rocketry is all about weight - depending on the thrust of the motors and how well they can be throttled, you can adjust the fuel usage to maintain a thrust-to-weight ratio above 1.0 and you beat gravity. The less weight, the less fuel you need to carry, which makes for less weight still.

Just because the rocket can carry that much fuel, doesnâ(TM)t mean it has to. Just the same as a jet airliner doesnâ(TM)t take off with a brimmed fuel tank if it doesnâ(TM)t have to.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

...ahh I see, 24 hours, 7 days a year!?\interrobang

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Elon has been saying a lot of things recently, doesn't mean it'll all come true.

Who said anything about anything coming true? The statement simply involves math. Fuel costs etc.

Re:Wait a minute...

[rew]

I've been looking at the energy-balance of this project. Comparing it with the energy consumption of a transatlantic flight is the key insight!

An airplane has a "best glide" ratio of about 1:20. (that's optimistic by about 10%, but we're calculating order-of-magnitude here). This means that for traveling 200km, you need the energy to lift the whole thing 10km vertically. So, doing New York to London, 5500 km, you consume energy to bring the whole plane up 275 km into the air, or g.h = 2.7 MJ/kg. In practice this is a bit optimistic: during takeoff and landing the plane is not flying in best-glide configuration or at best-glide speed. Also in cruise, you want to expend some extra energy to get to the destination faster. At the optimum speed for best energy consumption, adding a tiny bit of extra speed will not influence fuel consumption much but it WILL get you to the destination faster. Less wages for the pilots and other crew, less write off on the plane. So that makes economic sense.

Now, it'd be nice if you could just go up (less than) 275km and come down anywhere on earth that you want. But to do that you have to reach orbital speed of almost 8km/s. This adds some energy requirements to the trip: 1/2 v^2 =.5*8*8*10^6 = 32MJ/kg..... I'm ignoring the amount of energy required to leave the atmosphere (100km up, about 1MJ/kg).

So.... in terms of required energy to make a trip like that, you're going to need about 10 times more than for a transatlantic trip. Because the energy requirements of the spaceship idea don't change (much) for how far you want to go, this gets 2x or even almost 4x better if you want to go to exactly the opposite side of the earth (20000km).

Now, if you are transporting 440 people in a 220 tonne 747-800, you're taking along half a tonne of airplane for each person aboard. If you can improve on that ratio, things may start to look promising for the rocket idea.

But probably not for the short haul Los Angeles to Toronto stretches but only for the long haul: more than 13000km trips.

And one more thing. Everybody likes to talk about the 30 minute flight time for this rocket thing. Or the say the 2 hour flight time from Houston Texas to Tallahassee Florida. But the hassle at the airport is slowing you down. Be there an hour before departure to check in your luggage, half an hour drive to the airport, half an hour waiting for your luggage to appear at the destination, so you're easily wasting 2 hours around a 2 hour flight. Even with a "short boat trip to the floating platform", this is not going to be less for a rocket trip. If you reduce the flight time to 30 minutes the "overhead percentage" will increase.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

No combustion is perfect and there is a lot of combustion going on in a rocket engine. Wile the bulk of the exhaust gases will constist of carbon dioxide and water vapour, there will most definitely be some carbon monoxide, soot, some organic gases and a lot of nitrogen dioxide.

Re:Wait a minute...

[phayes]

I don't consider claims by, ahem, CNN journalists to be sufficient proof that the sun rises in the esat.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Water vapor is a green house gas.

Re:Wait a minute...

[avandesande]

1000 people on a rocket? Right! I want some of whatever you are smoking....

Re:Wait a minute...

[RockDoctor]

I don't know how many passengers the BFR carries

Payload to LEO is 63,800 kg, so if you allow 100kg for each passenger plus baggage, around 640 passengers. A bit less since you'd need some life support - air movement, maybe CO2 scrubbing/ O2 replenishment, booze trollys.

Note those weights are passenger PLUS baggage. To reach "anywhere on Earth in an hour" (neglecting the journey to and from the launch/ landing pads), you'll cover around 2*(6371+1000)*pi = 46313 km with a burn time of 162 seconds. So the cruise will need a speed of 13.4km/sec and the average acceleration will be not less than 83.5 m/s/s (8.5g). You can play around a bit with the exact numbers (lower payloads and longer burn times), but your passengers are going to be taking in the region of 8g. That's "fighter pilot blacking out" territory, not your average business traveller.

I'm used to extensive safety training training for work travel - helicopter underwater escape, fire-fighting, etc - but I think that 90-odd percent of my colleagues would not manage repeat trips at 8g.

I think Musk is spinning a line for PR of some sort.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be good if some of it were truth...

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it can hold that much methane doesn't mean it's going to for a short ballistic run around the globe.

This is never going to happen.

[HBI]

There is no way that this craft could be made safe enough for people to trust it. First accident, and no one wants to use it anymore.

There is also no way the launch cost and infrastructure required could be made affordable for city to city travel. Even a Concorde turned out to be unaffordable over the long term, and that was quite a bit simpler than this scheme.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfff.... it already happened. In the year 3000 there are already transport tubes in New New York. You just get in, say something like "Take me to Planet Express", and you're taken there within a matter of seconds.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the guy who's never built a rocket...

Re:This is never going to happen.

[NicknameUnavailable]

Pretty sure safety isn't the issue. We don't allow supersonic flights because they're obnoxious - a rocket isn't much different in that regard. At best this drops it to a 30 minute flight plus 2 hours commuting each way away from civilization to get somewhere they are allowed to take off and land from.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus add an extra hour or two for the TSA groping and backscatter nude photography delays

Re:This is never going to happen.

[JoshuaZ]

Airplanes have crashes on occasion and people still take them. If something is cheap enough and quick enough, people will do it once it becomes routine. Furthermore, like airplanes, one gets more safety as one runs it more since one has more data about what minor things have gone wrong or things have almost gone wrong, and since all the rockets are reusable one is getting much better data than one would for disposable rockets since one can inspect the craft after.

The real issue is going to be cost; in that regard, they will need around 900 tons of propellant (they don't need to fill up the rocket for a sub-orbital lob, so the necessarily velocity is a lot lower, around 4.5 km/s as opposed to around 9 km/s to get to low Earth orbit), so if they can (like an airplane) make fuel be the bulk of the cost for day-to-day operations, one is looking at a plausible price range. The only thing that seems to be potentially hurting them price wise is the desire to manufacture their own methane which makes sense if one wants a carbon neutral production (Musk cares a lot about global warming) and gives them practice with infrastructure they'll need on Mars, but that could massively increase the cost of fuel.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[JohnFen]

Plus the 2 hour time buffer you need for TSA purposes.

Seriously, in most of the flights that I've taken since the turn of the century, the actual time in flight hasn't been where most of the time required for travel is.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

"but that could massively increase the cost of fuel."

It could also drastically lower the cost of developing the tech to do this on Mars at scale.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

The same exact thing was said about steam trains when they started going faster than the animal drawn conveyances of the day.

My god man! At speeds over 75MPH all the air will be sucked out of the cabins and everyone will suffocate!

Thanks for being _that guy_...

Re: This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

The supersonic part is in the upper atmosphere, and takeoff and landing is out at sea. This mitigates most noise issues.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[NicknameUnavailable]

The supersonic part is in the upper atmosphere, and takeoff and landing is out at sea. This mitigates most noise issues.

What a great idea, so instead of a 12 hour flight you have a 1 hour drive to the port with parking, another 2 hour TSA patdown, another 2 hours to catch the cruise ship and sail out, a 30 minute flight, another hour to get back to shore, another 3 hours to get a car to your destination - so the 12 hour flight is radically reduced to 8.5 hours - this WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

So the first U.S. terminal will be in San Francisco. Good to know...

Re: This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

Sucks to be you... In my flights around Europe, the Middle East & South America security is rarely more than 10 minutes. Waiting for baggage generally takes more time except for the security theater in the USA.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[NicknameUnavailable]

It's not theater, the TSA exist to protect us from the arab CIA puppet groups.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[GameboyRMH]

For a wealthy executive, that is 3.5 hours of hookers & blow time saved :-P

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

Using _today's_ solar power infrastructure it would massively increase the cost of producing his CM4+02 from H20+CO2. How can you be certain that this will also be the case in the future?

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phantomfive]

There is no way that this craft could be made safe enough for people to trust it. First accident, and no one wants to use it anymore.

Every form of travel ever had the 'first accident.' There are accidents all the time with airplanes. Somehow we still manage to get on them.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[hawguy]

Pretty sure safety isn't the issue. We don't allow supersonic flights because they're obnoxious - a rocket isn't much different in that regard. At best this drops it to a 30 minute flight plus 2 hours commuting each way away from civilization to get somewhere they are allowed to take off and land from.

Safety is an issue, their rocket will need to approach airline levels of safety before it'll become popular, the Falcon 9 is no where near that. It has a perfect 10/10 record for 2017 (so far), a commuter aircraft may do 10 trips a *day* for a decade with no significant incidents. 2016's record was less impressive -- out of 9 launches, there was one on-pad loss of payload, and 3 landing failures. How many people would fly in an airplane if they had a nearly 50% chance of dying?

In any case, even adding a few hours of travel time would make the trip worthwhile, I'd rather ride 2 hours in a comfortable ferry, fly for 30 minutes, then ride another 2 hours on a ferry than spend 15 hours in a plane. And the wealthy won't even have the 2 hour ferry ride to the rocket terminal, they'll take a 20 minute helicopter flight.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[crypticedge]

No, it is theater. There's been hundreds of tests against it, and they've found that in excess of 90% of the time the TSA will not catch a bad actor.

Basically, the TSA exists to make the paranoid feel better about themselves, at the expense of the rest of the nation.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[swillden]

There is no way that this craft could be made safe enough for people to trust it. First accident, and no one wants to use it anymore.

The same was said of commercial air travel.

There is also no way the launch cost and infrastructure required could be made affordable for city to city travel.

Assuming the equipment and infrastructure can be built to support extreme re-usability (which is a tall order, but there's no reason in principle that it should be impossible), the real question is fuel costs. In another post on this thread JoshuaZ estimated that each sub-orbital launch would require about 900 tons of methane propellant. At current industrial prices of about $4 per 1000 cubic feet, that's about $140K. Assuming 200 passengers, that's $700 per passenger just for fuel -- one way. The same again for the return journey, so a round trip would cost $1400 in fuel, plus all of amortized equipment and infrastructure costs, plus operational costs. With those numbers it's hard to see how a round trip spaceplane ticket to Shanghai could be less than about $2500, so "price of a current economy ticket" is pretty optimistic.

Still, if you could offer 30 minute trips NYC to Shanghai, you could easily fill a few such per day. Probably even at twice that price. $5K is in the neighborhood of a business-class ticket on that route.

Even a Concorde turned out to be unaffordable over the long term, and that was quite a bit simpler than this scheme.

The Concorde's problems were that it didn't carry enough people, wasn't allowed to fly over land and didn't have the legs for long over-water routes. Musk's scheme would have roughly twice the passenger capacity and fewer route limitations since much of its flight would be above most of the atmosphere where there's no problem with disturbing people on the ground, and it would clearly be able to reach the other side of the globe. Concorde's route limitations were really what killed it; it could fly so few routes that only seven aircraft were operated. With so few aircraft in production/operation, there was no economy of scale in production or maintenance, making the planes incredibly expensive to operate.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[JoshuaZ]

Um, I'm not certain. Notice that I said "could massively increase the cost" not that it would do so.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[haruchai]

No, it is theater. There's been hundreds of tests against it, and they've found that in excess of 90% of the time the TSA will not catch a bad actor.

Basically, the TSA exists to make the paranoid feel better about themselves, at the expense of the rest of the nation.

And to give you a legally-sanctioned handjob to make the trip more memorable

Re:This is never going to happen.

[hawguy]

Airplanes have crashes on occasion and people still take them. If something is cheap enough and quick enough, people will do it once it becomes routine. Furthermore, like airplanes, one gets more safety as one runs it more since one has more data about what minor things have gone wrong or things have almost gone wrong, and since all the rockets are reusable one is getting much better data than one would for disposable rockets since one can inspect the craft after.

Plenty of people are still afraid of flying even though airplanes are one of the safest forms of travel possible -- in 2016 there were 2 accidents per million departures.

The Falcon 9 has a perfect launch record in 2017 (13 out of 13 successful launches), and a perfect landing record (10 out of 10 attempts - 3 launches intentionally did not land). But in 2016, 4 out of 9 trips had failures (1 exploded on the launch pad, 3 failed on landing).

It's going to take a lot more trips and a more than a decade from now to even have enough data to come up with reasonable accident statistics -- the Falcon Heavy has not even launched yet, so it remains to be seen how reliable it will be. The Space Shuttle was 10 years into its program until the fatal flaw in the o-ring cold temperature performance was discovered.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[WrongMonkey]

The old "they laughed at Einstein" fallacy. Thanks for being _that guy_ ...

Re: This is never going to happen.

[taustin]

The supersonic part is in the upper atmosphere, and takeoff and landing is out at sea. This mitigates most noise issues.

But not the legal issues.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[NicknameUnavailable]

Pretty sure they're more in line with Rosevelt's "all you have to do to fix the job market is bury a bunch of cash and tell people to start digging" - paranoid people hate the TSA.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[NicknameUnavailable]

For a wealthy executive, that's 11.5 hours of flight without wiretaps while over international waters missed.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[D.McG.]

I don't see Musk hiring the TSA at his spaceports.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

It's not a fallacy when it's true.

Do you doubt that airplanes were considered deathtraps 100 years ago? Do you assert that the general opinion on rockets cannot change now that they are passing from expendable to reusable? Do you have anything intelligent to say on the matter or are you just here to snipe?

Re:This is never going to happen.

[D.McG.]

I don't see Musk hiring the TSA at his spaceports. The TSA certainly would not be in other countries. Any lines for competent screening (95% failure rate, what a joke) would be for the one and only launch that hour. Usually, delays with the TSA are due to dozens of gates all utilizing one funnel point for screening.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

But why even say it when you have little/no certitude that it is the case? That unfounded assertion is the only reason I replied.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[HornWumpus]

Is there some secret way you tip?

Also opportunity. Combo checkpoint/nudie bar. Of course in the interest of inclusivity, the other side has male strippers/TSA agents. You choose, of course to get into the girl side you will have to say you identify as a woman, fold a dollar bill into a bow and put it in you hair.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

The O-Ring temperature specs were always known and engineers warned the management that it was too cold to fly and not to launch that day but the warning was overridden. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_Colloquium1012.html

Re:This is never going to happen.

[mea_culpa]

Transportation advances have never been without human sacrifice. If we are done as a species in advancing transportation then fine, we should stop now. I think this approach is depressing as hell. I'd much rather keep pressing forward.

Anyhow, I'm more concerned with rocket lag. At least you could pop an ambien on the plane and prepare yourself for your destination.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

A hundred years ago, so long as you weren't within 500 yards of the Red Barron (or similar), airplanes were not considered deathtraps.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[WrongMonkey]

A fallacy is always a fallacy. You are dismissing criticism of a proposed concept simply by saying that previous ideas were also criticized.

Airship, flying cars, jet packs were all consider impractical and unsafe. Decades later they are still impractical and unsafe.

Do you have anything intelligent to say on the matter or are you just here to snipe?

Of course I'm just here to snipe. The entire proposal has all the rigor and detail of an Alpha Centauri Secret Project cut scene. Nothing intelligent can be said about it.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I fly to Japan, from my house to my hotel in Tokyo it is usually 20 to 22 hours. Only 14 hours in the air and the other 6 to 8 are associated with ground transport and waiting. You conveniently left out ground transport to make you comparison look better.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[WrongMonkey]

That's the one real advantage. A ballistic missile is hijacker proof, so maybe you don't need security.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[hawguy]

The O-Ring temperature specs were always known and engineers warned the management that it was too cold to fly and not to launch that day but the warning was overridden. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/l...

The problem is that there was no evidence that the O-Rings would definitely fail at launch temperatures, so management chose to ignore the warnings. Saying "It has never been tested at that temperature and is only certified down to 40 degrees" is a lot different than saying "We've done exhaustive testing and concluded that the O-Rings are going to fail to seal at 35 degrees or below"

So yes, the engineers said that they thought the O-Rings would fail, but they didn't have conclusive proof that could have convinced management to scrub the launch. Clearly the wrong decision was made, but after 10 years of successful launches, management felt emboldened to push the limits.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus the 2 hour time buffer you need for TSA purposes.

Seriously, in most of the flights that I've taken since the turn of the century, the actual time in flight hasn't been where most of the time required for travel is.

Short flights are not where this tech will be useful. Most of my flights are 10+ hours (CA to Europe). I'd be delighted if that were (safely/cheaply) reduced to < 1hr.

Different strokes for different folks.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[nukenerd]

There is no way that this craft could be made safe enough for people to trust it. First accident, and no one wants to use it anymore.

Every form of travel ever had the 'first accident.' There are accidents all the time with airplanes. Somehow we still manage to get on them.

But at the time of the first accidents involving trains, planes, cars etc the media and other authorities tended to cover things up and there were no live TV reports. Back then it was considered bad form not to keep a stiff upper lip, and everyone wanted to put a brave face on things. It was a cultural thing. The worse ever railway accident in the UK (Quintinshill, 217 dead) was not revealed to the wider public for years afterwards. Not so today; now the media revels in presenting gory accident details, and the 'Elf and Safety people go apeshit, on top of the fact that everyone (including people not actually involved) sues everyone else over the accident in the aftermath.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

Reread the first like of my reply, it's important.

It's only your unsupported claim that it's a fallacy.

Do you doubt that airplanes were considered deathtraps 100 years ago? Do you assert that the general opinion on rockets cannot change now that they are passing from expendable to reusable?

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

The same exact thing was said about supersonic flight when they started going faster than whatever flaccid buttock receptacle you flying car sitters were drooling about in

"The supersonics are comingas surely as tomorrow. You will be flying one version or another by 1980 and be trying to remember what the great debate was all about." Najeeb Halaby (1970)

Re: This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that it was about nationalizing private industry too.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

shut up you twat.

Hugs and kisses,

Juan Epstein

Re:This is never going to happen.

[JoshuaZ]

Because it could happen and isn't at all unlikely. Yes, it is possible that clean power costs will go down enough so that the difference isn't that large, and given Musk's other projects (especially Solar City), that's certainly on his own agenda, but it has to go down a lot for this to work. As a rule of thumb, every time one converts a form of energy to another form, you lose some usable energy, so there's an inherent inefficiency in converting electricity to methane since one is converting electric energy to chemical potential energy. No, we're not "certain" about this, but this is one of the most obvious possible problems, and has been one under discussion since Musk first proposed the Raptor engine. If we were to only talk about things where we were certain there would be no ability to talk about pretty much anything; discussion of likely issues will by nature deal with likely scenarios not absolutely certain scenarios.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[WrongMonkey]

The first line of your reply is only important because it demonstrates that you don't understand what a fallacy is.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Air France Flight 4590 was the first Concorde crash, no? And one crash was what it took to collapse a program that never made financial sense, but managed to stay in service for decades, no?

OP has a point. You missed it. Tritely.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

So then it suffices for _you_ to label something a fallacy for it to _be_ one? In your mind maybe but not in this world. The Einstein fallacy is only applicable when the statements made are false.

Now answer the questions:
Do you doubt that airplanes were considered deathtraps 100 years ago? Do you assert that the general opinion on rockets cannot change now that they are passing from expendable to reusable?

Re:This is never going to happen.

[jittles]

There is no way that this craft could be made safe enough for people to trust it.

Ehhh... it's not exactly rocket science, you know.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Airplanes were death traps 100 years ago but they were still overwhelmingly less risky than forseeable rockets

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Myrdos]

They can make it safe enough by making you wait four hours to get through security instead of only two. Your total trip time might be the same as an aircraft, at least for shorter flights, but will be much safer.

Also, you would experience zero-g in this thing. People go bananas for zero-g.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[HBI]

Failure mode. If the Concorde had a catastrophic failure, true, it was likely that all aboard were toast, but engine failures, loss of fuel, etc were all theoretically survivable without losing the entire craft. Any suborbital spacecraft has some pretty shitty options in terms of failure.

The reliability of spacecraft over time doesn't warm the heart about avoiding that fatal loss of life event where people are then unwilling to use the craft. Before someone brings up the Soyuz program... it was/is less reliable than the Shuttle, which itself was demonstrated unreliable over time.

Bottom line: being atop a huge stack of combustible materials where over 90% of the mass is volatile fuel is not a safe thing and cannot be made safe, by any reasonable standard. I might ride it because I am ok with chopper flights in war zones and the like, and haven't minded much being shot at in the past. But will my mother? Would I consider it reasonable to bring a child on such a craft? My wife? No.

As a side note, the Concordes also pushed the envelope in terms of takeoff speed because of design decisions, and this is what caused the only fatal crash of the airplane, essentially.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[ceoyoyo]

You don't take this thing for a 1 hour commuter flight. You take it on the 20 hour + runs halfway across the planet. Trust me, sitting in a comfy airport for a couple of hours waiting for your flight is much more pleasant than being shoved into an airline seat for 24 hours.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to say, the "fatal flaw" in the O-ring wasn't "discovered" at that late stage, it was known about. Given the practice at NASA at the time of just disregarding engineering constraints, some accident was certain to happen, that's just what failed first. They then continued to use the orbiter outside of spec (the heat shield was designed under the assumption that it would be inspected in orbit every time before re-entry) and there was yet another accident. Do we even call them accidents at that point?

Re:This is never going to happen.

[swillden]

Meh. Very few airline crashes from altitude have any survivors either.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

People said the same things about aircraft. Now literally millions of people fly every day.

The minute you say never about things like this, you are wrong.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[MachineShedFred]

4.5 hours featuring a pleasant boat ride and a bit of microgravity is still better than 15+ hours folded up in coach on your standard airline with a tiny bag of peanuts.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why most people don't drive a car. Every single day someone gets killed in one of those things. Besides, they would need to build roads to every place that people wanted to go. Think about the cost of building a road all the way from Miami to Los Angeles, or Seattle to New York City, or Fairbanks to Atlanta. Whose paying for that? Not me, that's who. I'm not even going to bring up the cost of fueling stations. Nope never going to happen.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[thejynxed]

We have massive herds of cattle and large landfills producing copious amounts of methane gas daily, yet he wants to convert electricity into methane. Mayhap he isn't aware of the various methane reclamation projects starting to pop up in and around landfills and the large ag gigs, because otherwise he's going to spend a lot of money to create a resource (and wasting a lot of generated electricity) there is already an abundance of otherwise.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[rew]

> With so few aircraft in production/operation, there was no economy of
> scale in production or maintenance, making the planes incredibly
> expensive to operate.
That is probably not true. As soon as you need 1 full-time engineer to maintain a plane, you'll need two for two planes. It's like the one woman one baby in 9 months trick. You can't hire nine women to make a baby in one month. But "maintaining planes" operates at a scale where this does work.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

Really? So When Boeing decided to drop it's first and only major SST project in 1971 without even finishing any prototypes, it was because intelligent people were saying "The supersonics are comingas surely as tomorrow"...

Or maybe it was just idiots like you.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

The entire crew of 4590 were friends of a close friend (Concorde cabin crew was a small and tight-knit group) you twit.

Concorde came perishingly close to catastrophy from blown tires on takeoff puncturing fuel tanks previously but the danger had been blown off by the BEA (French FAA). They never forced armoring the fuel tanks until after 4590 and even then it was shown by further studies to be insufficient.

It wasn't one crash but the knowledge (and inability to ignore it with the spotlight that was shining on the program) that Concorde needed more than a band-aid to fly safely to continue flying.

But one wouldn't expect an idiotic AC like you to understand anything that complicated.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

TFA is about a man who had never built a rocket a few years ago too.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

If he flies into/out of the USA he doesn't have a choice.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

I'm sure that if you make him aware of it and are able to produce the needed quantities and purity of CH4 that he will gladly purchase it from you.

Do come back and let us know how that went when you're able to do so.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[phayes]

You don't wait for certainty of failure to postpone a launch, you postpone it as soon as the possibility becomes worrisome. The flight engineers were the experts and knew that they had had o-ring problems in the past. Management was very rightly condemned for ignoring the recommendation of the experts and killing everyone on Challenger.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh go back to watching the Kardashians and let the (mostly) adults talk will you?

Re:This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be more worried about passangers with weak hearts croaking en masse, rather than the craft failing.

Re:This is never going to happen.

[swillden]

> With so few aircraft in production/operation, there was no economy of > scale in production or maintenance, making the planes incredibly > expensive to operate. That is probably not true. As soon as you need 1 full-time engineer to maintain a plane, you'll need two for two planes. It's like the one woman one baby in 9 months trick. You can't hire nine women to make a baby in one month. But "maintaining planes" operates at a scale where this does work.

It's not about mechanics/engineers as much as it is about parts, though there are economies of scale to be had in manpower as well. This is why all of the low-cost airlines are careful to keep the number of models of aircraft they fly very small... most often a single model. Southwest Airlines, for example, flies nothing but Boeing 737s. Ryanair goes a step further and flies nothing but a single variant of a single model, the Boeing 737-800.

In the case of the Concorde, everything was unique. No other aircraft in the world used its engines, any airframe parts, not even interior components like seats. Nothing was available off the shelf, everything had to be custom fabricated. There was no pool of trained Concorde engineers or mechanics to draw on; every one of them had to be trained. The small fleet size meant small staff size, sure, but that just increases the level of redundancy required, to deal with situations when staff are unavailable -- or more than the normal number of breakdowns occur, and the Concorde was a notoriously unreliable aircraft, because of its novelty and small production runs. Craft produced in larger numbers are refined over time and become better and more reliable. Not so for the Concorde.

Re: This is never going to happen.

[PlaynBass]

He could set up a hyperloop to the launch ship terminal. No reason that TSA would be required if security prechecks are done enroute. You /. techies are such sissy Luddites!

Re: This is never going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hijacker proof? all u need is to disable the landing procedure and u get a rocket flying into a populated city. I guess humans don't make for the best warheads but this thing hits a skyscraper, how is this not worse then 9/11?

Im sure other countries would love seeing

[coolmoe2]

Launch signatures like that headed for their cities. What could possibly go wrong.

Well this is one way to test anti missile tech

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[JohnFen]

The "launch signature" for this would be very different than that of missiles. It would be trivial to tell the difference.

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[Anonymous Coward]

and how trivial would it be to mask your missile launches to appear to be these?

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[Anonymous Coward]

This might be used to provide economic pressure on countries with which we have missile-tech-anxiety. Basically no flights to or from your nation would maybe force some hands to shake.

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[JohnFen]

As I understand it, that would be very difficult. Your missiles would have to accelerate and fly more slowly, giving much more time for defenses to do a "friend-or-foe" determination and making them easier to shoot down.

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[Anonymous Coward]

You go ahead and let us know how it worked

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[Anonymous Coward]

We now know what (the other) "Rocket Man" is working - a new quick shuttle service from Pyongyang to Washington DC!

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[The Raven]

Silly nitpick, there are so many better ones to use. We have aircraft transponders and flight schedules for exactly this reason. Adding rockets to that would be a minor change. Hell, other than adding a new icon for 'rocket' to the aircraft controller's display, not much would change technically.

Efficiency, price, safety... plausible issues. 'OMG, they are nuking us' is not.

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[Anonymous Coward]

Ol' husky Musky can't stop shitposting all of his weed fever dreams. And yet we still gobble up with gusto his mental dingleberries, every single time.

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[Anonymous Coward]

    Wouldn't the enemy countries just attach 'aircraft transponders' to their nukes, in order to pose as an incoming transport rocket, and not get intercepted?

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the lack of a prefiled flight plan.

Re:Im sure other countries would love seeing

[Anonymous Coward]

Grams couldn't make it to Thanksgiving. She was mistaken for a MIRV and intercepted by laser defenses.

So long as they're not using solid fuel

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if this takes off and they're using the wrong propellants, we could have a real problem:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090414-rockets-ozone.html
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/q0298a.shtml

Fortunately, it looks like the Falcon 9 uses kerosene and LOX... But I wouldn't put it past Boeing to try to compete by using SRBs while also conveniently endangering us all! Or there will be some other unexpected consequence like excess water buildup in the upper atmosphere enhancing greenhouse effect or dampening the magnetic field...

Re:So long as they're not using solid fuel

[D.McG.]

It's not based on Falcon 9's engines. The propellant for this new architecture is Liquid Methane (CH4) and Liquid Oxygen. The byproducts are CO2 and H2O. The rocket can fly carbon-neutral if the CH4 is synthesized from CO2 taken from the air. Sure, there are cheaper ways to refine CH4 from natural gas, but there is a path to not use fossil fuels.

Re:Tom Price already booking flights from DC to NY

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing

Flight and passenger prep

[Crashmarik]

Will eat up all the time savings. Instead of sitting in a plane flying to your destination, you will be spending time putting on a pressure suit and sitting in a rocket being readied for takeoff.

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the enormous cost of travelling by rocket. A plane ticket to the other side of the world is maybe $1000-$1500 round trip and will still get you there the same day. It's not remotely worth the extra cost just to save a few hours.

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes 15 hours to fly from New York to Shanghai. Your argument is that it will take 15 hours to put on a flight suit?

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[unrtst]

Not to mention the enormous cost of travelling by rocket. A plane ticket to the other side of the world is maybe $1000-$1500 round trip and will still get you there the same day. It's not remotely worth the extra cost just to save a few hours.

Summary and article say it'll be "around the same price as an economy airline ticket". I find that not only difficult, but nearly impossible to believe.

Currently, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch costs an average of $57 million (from some random article I found).
A 747-400 costs about $39 - $44 per mile for airborne operating cost, and it's about 6700 miles from NYC to Tokyo, so that would be around $300,000.

Seems like they have a REALLY REALLY long way to go in reducing operating costs if they're going to hit that goal of an economy airline ticket.

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[Crashmarik]

It takes 15 hours to fly from New York to Shanghai. Your argument is that it will take 15 hours to put on a flight suit?

No and I get the feeling talking to someone who can't parse this sentence "You will be spending time putting on a pressure suit and sitting in a rocket being readied for takeoff" isn't worth the effort.

Re: Flight and passenger prep

[Anonymous Coward]

Frequent fliers can wear their own flight suits to the boarding site....how will g forces affect the passengers?

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[Megane]

I think that "around the same price as an economy airline ticket" would be foolish. Concorde proved that people will pay extra for that extra speed. Or at least they did back in the '90s before the internet became big and enabled teleconferencing. But this would be faster enough to still be worth more than going by regular jet plane.

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[phayes]

Today's $57 million F9 launch is still not recovering the second stage nor the fairing, just the 1st stage that has a predicted life of at few dozen launches at best.

At the end of the year they will start using a debugged F9 that they hope will be good for a few hundred launches.

The BFR will be 100% reusable, both the 1st and the 2nd stages and they hope to have the same lifespan (tens of thousands of launches with re-engining when necessary) just as airliners do today.

Yes, they have a REALLY REALLY long way to go. At present they are just about the only ones with a plan to get there and a track record of actually making progress.

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[starless]

Summary and article say it'll be "around the same price as an economy airline ticket". I find that not only difficult, but nearly impossible to believe.

I believe the full quote is:
"about the same as full fare economy",
which almost nobody pays.

Re: Flight and passenger prep

[HornWumpus]

Lots of couples looking to get their zero gee pins.

Plan for it, partitions can be cheap and lite, claim they are puke barriers. They will limit spread of bodily fluids. Make the cabin 'hose outable'.

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, a large part of current Falcon 9 launches is the second stage... this obviously wouldn't have one. What we really don't know is just how reusable his rockets are... but his is portraying them as extremely reusable and that may be a fair assessment time will tell. And what the amortized cost of a stage one currently is.

A Falcon 9 sized rocket with Raptor engines would only need about $50k worth of methanol + LOX. Which is actually a lot cheaper than the fuel Falcon 9 currently uses probably like half the price. Which leaves 150k for profit and maintenance per flight and that is only if you are comparing fuel cost of an airline flight to total cost of the rocket launch, sounds difficult but perhaps not impossible.

Musk has been quoted as saying 70% of the cost was making a first stage... if you relaunch the hole thing like 100 times before retiring it the cost of the first stage is amortized to something like 62 million*0.7/100 = about $430k but that is if you threw the whole thing away at 100 launches... chances are he knows they can just replace the engines for much less than that cost. Honestly it really depends on how long his engines last... as the rest can probably just keep going like regular airplanes, with things repaired and replaced as needed.

I think perhaps to reach that level of automation and reliability... you have to automate the refurbishment to a very large degree as well as minimize the ammount of parts that actually need replacement after a flight and keep it to just inspections.

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[Ichijo]

And the ferry ride.

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[petes_PoV]

It takes 15 hours to fly from New York to Shanghai. Your argument is that it will take 15 hours to put on a flight suit?

The time it takes for the flight is irrelevant when taken out of context.

What is important for business users is the reduction in "productive" time due to travel. If a worker could be as productive on a flight as they were in their office, then they could travel by blimp and it wouldn't matter. And would the lost productive time ever make up for the extra cost of the journey taking minutes instead of hours, if there wasn't any internet or comms in general, available on the rocket?

Plus, if there is only 1 rocket a day, then you have the inconvenience of having to schedule your time around that. Whereas many (aircraft) flights a day to the same destination adds flexibility, which has its own value.

But whatever the outcome is, it all pales to nothing if the time in the air (or space) is only a small proportion of the overall journey. I used to live about 20 miles from London's Heathrow airport - the biggest passenger hub in the UK and one of the largest int he world. However it still took 22 hours from closing my front door to sitting down on the plane. Since 9/11 that is now 3 hours, sometimes longer. Add to that passport control at the destination, baggage reclaim, customs and security clearance then travel to the centre to your destination city and you can't get anywhere international in less than 6 hours.

Re:Flight and passenger prep

[asavage]

While Elon's pricing is probably not that realistic but you are still comparing the costs of building the rocket from scratch to reusing a plane. He currently isn't really giving much at all of a discount for using a refurbished 1st stage rocket. The cost of the fuel for a Falcon 9 launch is only $200,000. The cost for a launch is going to come way down if it can be designed to fly 100s or 1000s of launches with minimal maintenance and full recovery of both stages.

At what cost to the environment?

[Anonymous Coward]

If airplanes cause lots of carbon pollution by burning fossil fuels, rockets will be far worse. Why would you support polluting the Earth more so you can travel long distances in an hour instead of several hours? Air travel isn't unreasonably slow and we keep being told that air travel already is polluting the atmosphere. Why would we want to release even more pollution? The left will support this, though, because Elon Musk is behind the idea and he tells the Democrats what they want to hear about socialism and universal basic incomes.

Re: At what cost to the environment?

[Anonymous Coward]

He is Just a businessman trying to stay in the Newspapers. A salesguy.

Re:At what cost to the environment?

[phayes]

Airliners push a column of air out of the way all the way from take-off to landing. Boosting over the atmosphere then using it to slow back down and performing a landing burn will likely pollute the environment much less. If Elon starts producing his Methane from solar power as he mentioned it'll actually be carbon neutral.

This reminds me

[vadim_t]

I have been wondering one related thing: It seems that the Falcon 9 is built just around the maximum size they can manage to move by road.

Now that the rocket has become reusable, could they work around the transport issue by launching the empty rocket from the manufacturing plant and having it land right at the launch pad?

If this is actually viable it could be huge -- build wherever it's most comfortable to build, launch wherever it's most comfortable to launch. I imagine satellites are far easier to ship than the entire rocket, so this might even work to change the launch site to avoid bad weather.

Re:This reminds me

[aicrules]

That's thinking with portals...er reusable rockets.

Re:This reminds me

[crypticedge]

Currently, it still has to be carried from the build facility to the launch pad by one of these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:This reminds me

[vadim_t]

They get carried over public roads as well: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oNTuSm3...

I remember reading somewhere that the Falcon 9 is just about as big as it can be to still make this possible.

Re:This reminds me

[jeti]

They won't be allowed to launch a rocket over land for a long time. Noise is also a big issue.

Re:This reminds me

[Eloking]

I have been wondering one related thing: It seems that the Falcon 9 is built just around the maximum size they can manage to move by road.

Now that the rocket has become reusable, could they work around the transport issue by launching the empty rocket from the manufacturing plant and having it land right at the launch pad?

If this is actually viable it could be huge -- build wherever it's most comfortable to build, launch wherever it's most comfortable to launch. I imagine satellites are far easier to ship than the entire rocket, so this might even work to change the launch site to avoid bad weather.

Even if the cost of launch planned by SpaceX is way lower than the alternative, I'm pretty sure it'll be more than any shipping company. Degradation cost of the rocket not included.

Re:This reminds me

[jae471]

That's a Saturn V/STS/SLS crawler-transporter. It's not used for Falcon.

The Falcon 9 is moved from factory to launch site using a much more basic/standard trucking rig, on the highway (See Core Spotting for pics of it on the road.) When it gets to the launch site, it's placed on the transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) and mated to the second stage (which is also road-transported) and payload. The TEL moves it from the horizontal integration facility (HIF) to the actual pad.

SLC-39A The current sat image of SLC shows the TEL in a horizontal position at the pad (with no rocket on it). The HIF is just outside the ring around the pad. The track between the two is visible, as is the old rotating service structure from the Shuttle days.

Re:This reminds me

[green1]

If they could launch from the manufacturing plant, they wouldn't need a separate launch pad. What you're proposing is co-locating the 2, and then mysteriously launching to a different site before your real launch. Why not just skip the second step?

If you don't want to transport before launch, build at a launch pad.

Re:This reminds me

[vadim_t]

Because for many orbits, it's easier to launch stuff from the equator.

However, a rocket with no cargo on it and no need to attain orbit can probably launch from anywhere, land in a more optimal location, refuel, attach a satellite, and then launch for real.

The question of course is whether the ability to locate the factory anywhere in the world (eg, next to some useful heavy industry), and not having having size limits due to not having to move the rocket from the factory to the launch pad by land is enough of a benefit to make it worth it.

Re:This reminds me

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is not the noise. I live near to and used to work at KSC; you get used to it. (Although launches are loud, they are not as loud as you would think.) Rocket launches are over water in case the thing crashes (Imagine a few hundred tons of LOX coming down on a city center.) This is why they built airports outside of town. As aircraft safety improved, people became less afraid of plane falling on them, so the cities grew around the airports. The same will happen with rockets once launches and landings become as safe.

TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so now it will only take 8 1/2 hours to get from New York to London. 4 hours in security in New York. 1/2 hour of flight time, and then 4 hours in immigration/customs in London.

So exactly when is Musk going to tackle todays real problems and go after the bureaucrats?

Re:TSA

[phayes]

Elon plans on leaving the burocrats behind when he gets to mars.

Re: TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Both the boring company and the hyperloop are exercises in bureaucracy wrangling.

Re:TSA

[burtosis]

Elon plans on leaving the burocrats behind when he gets to mars.

If musk was smart he would round them all up and send them on the first of 2 escape ships - free of charge. I really would worship him if he can pull that one off.

Re:TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Just put them all on Ark B.

Re:TSA

[Megane]

A plan for that has already been written.

Re:TSA

[phayes]

How would that be smart? Ah I see, you define "smart" to mean that people do what you want them to, not what would actually be better for them.

Re:TSA

[burtosis]

Quite frankly I think if musk shipped them all off world simultaneously it would be better for the people. Also, provided they actually survive the landing, the burocrats would quickly find they need to do meaningful work efficiently and quickly or they would die - they couldn't just do nothing and claim it was work. I see this as an all around win.

Do it

[31415926535897]

This looks to me like it would be one of the coolest ways to die.

Re:Do it

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks to me like it would be one of the coolest ways to die.

Ballistic trajectory resulting in horrible impact like Wile E Coyote, only without the cartoon physics.

You have a messed up definition of cool, but I'm sure you could build a catapult or jump off a roof and achieve the same results.

Cost of fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone have an idea how much propellant such a trip would use and how much it could therefore cost in fuel?

Re: Cost of fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about 200k for kerolox for the f9, so a few million max

Re:Cost of fuel?

[careysub]

Probably less than you think. An airliner flying 20,000 km uses about 400 kg of fuel per passenger. The payload fraction of the launcher can run as high as 6.5% (Space Shuttle, taking the whole vehicle as payload). The unfueled weight of airliner is about 400 kg/passenger, let us assume that as the payload; and the fuel + oxidizer weight is usually 90% of the weight of booster, and the fraction of that F+O weight that is actually kerosene is 1/3.56. So the RP-1 (kerosene) weight per passenger would be something like (400/0.065)*0.9/3.56 = 1550 kg, or about 4 times what a regular airliner. Now, currently about 20% of airline costs are fuel, labor costs are larger. So if they can save big on labor costs (you are "spam in can", no flight crew at all) then maybe they can hold the extra cost to 40% or so of the whole service cost. I don't see it competing with economy fares though.

Re: Cost of fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

methane is cheaper than kerosene

Re:Cost of fuel?

[asavage]

The BFR is also using methane/O2 as fuel. I don't know the costs of liquid O2 but methane is way cheaper than airplane fuel.

Elon is attention-whoring

[Rick Schumann]

He's just trying to get in the headlines. No way this would be practical.

Re:Elon is attention-whoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Every week we hear something about something he's said - no matter how ridiculous.

And that's the thing - he needs to keep his name out there. Self-promotion is the game.

And it works. He got a pretty low rate for the junk bonds he issued for Tesla. (And soon after the price sank.)

There's this cult of personality around him that I haven't seen since the late Steve Jobs. Kinda creepy too.

Re:Elon is attention-whoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't people say that when he said he was going to create reusable rockets that land vertically?

While it may not be for short flights, it could well be for long flights.

I like those odds!

[supernova87a]

I guess the question is, are your meetings/trips really so important and your time so limited that you feel like rolling the dice of a 1-in-10-"ish" chance of not making it to your meeting... forever?

Maybe for Elon Musk, since he views every passing minute as another tick of the clock of his limited time here on Earth. But maybe for the rest of us mere mortals, planes are still ok enough....

Re:I like those odds!

[phayes]

You mean like they said 100 years ago about heavier than air travel? Yeah because it's certain that THAT never happened, did it...

Re:I like those odds!

[HornWumpus]

When they were saying it, they were right. Things change, duh.

Re:I like those odds!

[phayes]

Yeah but that's _always_ true.

Is it your opinion that Space-X has a a 10% failure (Loss of payload) mode? That even with reusable rockets that they will will always have a 10% failure mode?

The first is already provably incorrect giving little confidence in your opinion on the second.

Re:I like those odds!

[HornWumpus]

It is my opinion that failure rates way below 10% are too high for passenger transport. The safest, most proven rocket, on the planet, (Soyouz IIRC) isn't safe enough for routine passenger use.

That will very likely change. The more launches SpaceX gets the better their confidence will become.

Having a backup (parachute and heat shield) on the capsule could potentially make rocket flight safer than current jets. But weight could be a deal breaker. Still, marketing, if it cut the capacity from 4 to 2, and doubled the cost, I still think they'd sell more tickets. Might change once they had 10,000 flights.

For now, they'ed be booked out years ahead, on just tourists, zero g porn productions (amature and professional) etc. Like barnstormers selling hops on surplus airplanes in the 1920s.

The first crash would be the inflection point, they didn't have ubiquitous video and 24 hour news cycles when the Comets crashed.

Re:I like those odds!

[rew]

People are notably bad at correctly estimating risks.

If, once in a lifetime, you take a 1/100 risk of dying, that's an acceptable risk. Most of us had one of those moments: "phew that could've gone horribly wrong". But if you take such risks every day on your way to work, you're not going to last a year (about half a year on average and contrary to my statement there is about a 13% chance you will survive the whole first year).

To make a sensible decision about "risky" events, you need to overestimate the risk of doing it once.
Even if spaceX would manage to get a 99% success rate, that remaining 1% would make it a fun thing to do "once in a lifetime", but foolish as an every day commute to work.

Re:I like those odds!

[phayes]

Luckily, Space-X isn't planning on stopping at 1% per flight reliability but making BFR at least as safe as airliners are today.

You'll note that most people don't have a problem with that.

Re:I like those odds!

[phayes]

The Comet program didn't have a problem when the first one went down.

It wasn't until multiple failures that were taking years to understand that they had major problems -- and even these groundings and purchase cancellations didn't stop all jet air travel, it just caused de Haviland to loose ground against it's competitors.

Space-X has also had it's share of failures, but even it's most elusive problem, the pad explosion leading to the loss of ATMOS 6 was understood within a month to be caused by a helium loading procedure change avoided on future launches by returning to previous lauding protocol for existing stages and completely understood and avoided for all new build launchers by modifying COPV construction within six months.

News propagation isn't the only thing that has gotten faster...

Re:I like those odds!

[HornWumpus]

Coincidently, I'm planning on fucking two chicks at one time...Jessica Alba and Jennifer Lawrence. Two more on deck in case one of the primaries gets a cramp or something.

Re:I like those odds!

[phayes]

Given Musk's well known success at transforming his plans into reality and your complete lack of same, Alba and Lawrence will be flying suborbital in a few years and you'll still be alone.

Re:I like those odds!

[HornWumpus]

Invest your entire retirement with him. Go for it. You can't lose.

Re:I like those odds!

[phayes]

Can't, because https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/2...

If one could, it'd be better to invest in the company that will be undercutting all the competition yet still making money in 5 years rather than than investing in those future money losers ULA, Ariane Espace, ATK, etc.

Good of you to show you know so little about Space-X yet still feel qualified to denigrate it.

Physical Fitness

[Dripdry]

Given how fit one needs to be to survive the G-Forces (named from "Gee whiz, everything's going black!") inherent in a launch like this I'd suspect many people wouldn't get health clearance to make these kinds of trips.

Re:Physical Fitness

[c]

Or, unfortunately, health clearance to ride a roller coaster.

Re:Physical Fitness

[Anonymous Coward]

Given how fit one needs to be to survive the G-Forces (named from "Gee whiz, everything's going black!") inherent in a launch like this I'd suspect many people wouldn't get health clearance to make these kinds of trips.

Two G's for few minutes. Not a big deal.

Re: Physical Fitness

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you explain that in more detail? Thanks

Re:Physical Fitness

[HornWumpus]

30 minutes of zero g, for an 80 year old man, in a private compartment with his 22 year old girlfriend. Died smiling.

Re:Physical Fitness

[rew]

The shuttle was throttled back to stay below 3G. This would do something similar.

Looking up the specs for Falcon 9 FT... It seems it gets about 770 tonnes of thrust for a mass of 550 tonnes. About 1.4G, or the same as what you get when an airplane accelerates at 1G across the runway.

For me 4G is uncomfortable, but manageable, 6G "lets get out of here". (seated, not reclined). recline the seats and most people will tolerate 2G or 3G for 2-3 minutes that it takes to get well on your way to orbit.

ICBM

[Anonymous Coward]

So... How do I tell the difference between a passenger rocket and an ICBM with a nuclear payload?

Re:ICBM

[careysub]

Kind of like how you can tell a regularly schedule international flight from an attacking bomber?

Re:ICBM

[HornWumpus]

Don't schedule flights over Crimea, check.

Re:ICBM

[Anonymous Coward]

This was in issue for Pearl Harbor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#First_wave_composition

This is idiotic

[JohnFen]

I seriously can't imagine a method of inter-city travel that would be worse for the global environment.

Re:This is idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the bright side - we can compensate for its huge carbon footprint by buying more electric cars from Tesla.

Re:This is idiotic

[phayes]

Yeah, because pushing an airliner sized column of air out of the way from takeoff to landing with kerosene powered jet engines is soooo much better than boosting over the atmosphere, coasting, performing a retro-burn, braking passively and performing a landing burn. You _know_ this do you? Post your calculations so we can laugh a little more...

Re:This is idiotic

[JohnFen]

Post your calculations so we can laugh a little more...

Why are you asking me to support an assertion that I never made?

Re:This is idiotic

[crypticedge]

But your statement was so definitive that it implied you had an informed opinion. Sorry for assuming you knew what you were talking about.

Re:This is idiotic

[phayes]

Precisely.

I got more laughs anyway when he couldn't figure out why I called him out on pretending to know more than he does.

What was the Samual Clemens aphorism? A wise fool knows that is better to be thought a fool and stay quiet than it is to speak and remove all doubt.

Re:This is idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see this as a good way to resolve intercontinental flight as opposed to intercity flight. You would still have major airlines servicing their routes through hubs, but those long 16-20 hour flights with connections could be much simplified if a passenger could schedule a 30 minute intercontinental launch followed with a 2 hour flight to their final destination.

Build an orbiting terminal and you would then have a hub in the sky, with all the scale benefits that are involved there. It could be a potential boon to orbital development, since it becomes more economically viable to build facilities to support passengers as they transfer their launch vehicles to the appropriate landing vehicle.

Eventually, when you have enough work force in orbit, you can expand and capture near earth asteroids for raw materials, or build a Moon base. Then you could potentially see a portion of the traffic going away from the planet, but still using the orbital facility as a hub. This will grow, and people will make use of it.

Re:This is idiotic

[ElizabethGreene]

I seriously can't imagine a method of inter-city travel that would be worse for the global environment.

I respectfully disagree. We have had far worse options in the past.

A GNR Stirling 4-2-2 locomotive required 60 pounds of coal per mile at 60 Miles per hour. Ignoring the infrastructure requirements, that is 220 tons of coal to go from Shanghai to New York. It's difficult to argue that is a cleaner alternative to ~500 tons of supercooled methane for the same journey on a BFR.

The fuel economy isn't as good as a 777-ER's 30 pounds per mile for the same trip, but it's not off by an order of magnitude either.

Re:This is idiotic

[Actually, I do RTFA]

For a regular Falcon9, just getting launched (no landing burn) is 220 metric tons of CO2. Given that it has a weight capacity of 11 metric tons we can guess it can carry maybe 100 people (That would give up 220kg for the person, life support, luggage, retro fuel etc.) So, at 2.2 tons of CO2 per passenger, that is 10% more than an airplane at 1.8-1.95 tones of CO2 per passenger on intercontinental flights. And you have to add for the retro-burn and landing burn.

I also think that 220kg per passenger (counting their share of the weight of the ship) is silly optimistic. A 747 seems to require more than 1000kg per passenger under the most extreme circumstances (being used to evacuate people in an emergency).

Re:This is idiotic

[phayes]

Finally, an intelligent answer!

Do note however that you used F9 (Kerosene) & not BFR (Methane) & that though BFR is bigger it has a much better mass fraction than F9.

Not sure we even have enough numbers to do even a good BOE & that Space-X may change things yet again as the idea & implementation mature.

Re:This is idiotic

[JohnFen]

You were saying that I made a claim that I never made, and demanding that I support it. I'm sorry that it's so hard for you to understand things.

Re:This is idiotic

[JohnFen]

Indeed, you are correct. I was wrong.

Re:This is idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

So it is 10% more CO2 to get to orbit. Good thing you only need half of the delta-v for a suborbital flight to the other side of the globe. Oh, and you can produce the methane and oxygen you need from atmospheric CO2, water, and solar energy. Now it is carbon neutral.

Flying taxis

[erapert]

So these rocket taxis... do they count as flying cars?
Also, is life insurance part of the ticket price?

Prior Art

[Tablizer]

NK already has them, but they only sell one-way tickets.

Re:Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the "Kimmie Express".

Re:Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats OK nobody wants to return to NK.

Re:Prior Art

[SCVonSteroids]

Funny, but it makes you wonder; is anyone actually strapped to any of those rockets? ... it's really not that far-fetched?

Re:Prior Art

[Tablizer]

They would truly be a "rocket man"

But the Baggage Fees...

[careysub]

But the baggage fees with be insane!

This is stupid

[kfh227]

I love it though. If he does 10 things like this and 1 thing works and is safe, it would be HUGE!

Thank god someone with billions is trying to crate disruptive technologies. I think he knows that he might end up loosing money overall but I don't think having just $1 billion 10 years from now is going to bother him.

Noooo

[CustomBuild]

Donâ(TM)t over complicate the process. Hyper loop is a perfectly good solution.

Already exists but not cheap!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's known by the acronym "ICBM"

fantasy

[k6mfw]

Illustration that shows the same type of aerodynamic shaped spaceship on Pad 39, docked to ISS, and sitting on surface of Mars looks so 1950s like Chesley Bonestell paintings from the day. Nice paintings but those don't take into account the Rocket Equation. Yes, Musk demonstrated reusable rockets (with a big boost of govt money) but this Mars fantasy is a huge distraction. For past 50 years they've said we will be on (sending humans) to Mars.

Re:fantasy

[Megane]

I think the real problem with humans on Mars will turn out to be the effects of space on the human body, as we are starting to learn with ISS. Even with good solar-ion engines to speed up the trip, we may still need centrifugal crew quarters.

Re:fantasy

[slew]

Illustration that shows the same type of aerodynamic shaped spaceship on Pad 39, docked to ISS, and sitting on surface of Mars looks so 1950s like Chesley Bonestell paintings from the day. Nice paintings but those don't take into account the Rocket Equation. Yes, Musk demonstrated reusable rockets (with a big boost of govt money) but this Mars fantasy is a huge distraction. For past 50 years they've said we will be on (sending humans) to Mars.

There are limitations evaluating space transit only using the "rocket equation" since it only takes into consideration the momentum changes due to mass leaving a rocket (direct transit). Interplanetary missions generally include additional momentum changes due to sling-shot trajectories to achieve the necessary delta v to move from one solar orbital distance to another. If you want to take a long time, that's enough, but probably with humans we want to minimize the time and that means more delta v and a complicated trajectories needed to enter a reasonable orbit (e.g., and decelerate when we get there).

Also, the bigger problem with Mars is landing once we get there. We don't have the technology to land anything large (-ish) yet. The problem on Mars is the thin atmosphere. Better retro-rockets technology (more advanced than landing back on earth) will probably be required to get this all to work.

Not saying that it's easy (or within our current human technology level), but to cast this as somehow violating the "rocket equation" isn't a correct argument. I put that right up there with how people claimed that all the air would get sucked out of a train moving faster than 40mph...

Re:fantasy

[k6mfw]

Also, the bigger problem with Mars is landing once we get there. We don't have the technology to land anything large (-ish) yet.

what we should ask is what are people going to do there. Starting a colony sounds great for storybooks, unlike back in the days there is not much worthwhile like gold, copper, lumber, furs to bring back to the old world.

I put that right up there with how people claimed that all the air would get sucked out of a train moving faster than 40mph...

I was referring to if the Mars vehicle is what is shown in that picture, there simply is not enough fuel. Now Musk may have a secret spaceship... kind of like the USAF has a secret spaceplane to save the world (old movie plot used in Maroon, Armageddon). Regarding the train, those educated knew the air would not be sucked out.

I generally see Mars as a non-starter, another fantasy but give a great speech to get more guvmint money. I don't see a huge landrush to the Gobi Desert even though it is a thousand times easier to settle on Mars.

Someone getting eccentric?

[lylefile]

Sounds kind of like the Spruce Goose. What shall we call it? The Steel Steed?

He's not "proposing" the idea

[hawk]

He is not "proposing" this idea--he's suggesting he can implement it.

The notion of suborbital/ballistic transport has been downright common for decades. The question isn't whether you could launch such a thing, or how long it would take, but rather the cost of propelling such a thing (and the willingness of anyplace to have an incoming object like this).

hawk

Re:He's not "proposing" the idea

[Baron_Yam]

>and the willingness of anyplace to have an incoming object like this

Given that pretty much the only thing with a similar flight profile is a nuclear-tipped ICBM... yeah, I can see a fair amount of resistance to the idea of filling the sky with suborbital transports with end points located in your highest value civilian targets.

If the flight path has to end somewhere a detonation (of any kind) is essentially harmless and thus pointless... you're going to be far enough away from populated areas to make the flight itself pointless.

Re:He's not "proposing" the idea

[phayes]

You're forgetting that there was always a major (technical) choke point: How do you cheaply land and then relaunch. The Space plane proposals in particular died here. Skylon claims that with a few more billions of £ of development money they will be able to but still haven't left the lab.

Elon has proven that he can consistently land his boosters on a barge. He thinks he can improve that to landing back on the launchpad supports and is betting the BFR development on it.

Re:He's not "proposing" the idea

[hawk]

I didn't "forget"; that's the "cost" part I referred to!

Re:He's not "proposing" the idea

[Anonymous Coward]

He hasn't done it enough times to say it's consistent. I'd want more than half a dozen successful trials (after some crashes) before I'd want to try it. Even if he does it a 999 times and then one blows up then the implied 1/1000 risk of being rapidly disassembled wouldn't really appeal. Put it another way, if you go to and from work 250 times a year (500 trips), then you would stand a pretty good chance of not making it to your third year at work on those odds, and your team would be in constant recruitment just due to attrition.

Re:He's not "proposing" the idea

[Thelasko]

The notion of suborbital/ballistic transport has been downright common for decades.

Yup! There have been lots of attempts
X-30
X-43
X-51

This just takes a slightly different approach. Rather than making a "space plane" that breaths air and lands like a plane, it takes a spaceship and lands it like a helicopter.

Re:He's not "proposing" the idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. Given that flying half way round the world takes nearly 24 hours on normal flights. If you added 2 hours travel (maybe half hour to 45 minutes on a plane with the rest just unloading and loading the passengers from plane to rocket), to get somewhere unpopulated and the same the other end, max flight time in the rocket, lets say 2 hours, that would cut the journey down to 6 hours.

And of course the flights would be planned in advance, so they could also be tracked from start to finish so they don't get mixed up with an ICBM.

Re:He's not "proposing" the idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, perhaps the USA or Russia won't want suborbital spacecraft landing in major cities. But there will be somebody that allows it.

These launches will be scheduled in advance. And the destination country could be allowed to inspect the vehicle before launch. Also, if a 20 hour flight can be completed in 1 hour, that leaves a lot of time for getting to/from a remote launch and/or landing destination (even in another country or in international waters) and still being much quicker.

Airports aren't in the middle of big cities, tho they typically are close to them. No reason spaceports couldn't be a little farther away.

Lastly, mutually assured destruction still works. Having suborbital flights that you can't distinguish from nuke doesn't really matter if you couldn't shoot down an ICBM anyways. I guess you wouldn't get the maximum of 30 minutes warning that it was coming. But SBLMs have very short warning periods for costal targets already. Personally I'd still be more worried about nukes coming in shipping containers from unknown origins.

PH of exhaust

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps space x knows the solution but most current rockets spew acid out the back. Not something Los Angeles and London will tolerate

Re:PH of exhaust

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's just solid rockets. Methane/LOX rockets produce carbon dioxide and water.

Re:PH of exhaust

[HornWumpus]

When did they build one of those?

Kerosene/LOX is common, H2/O2, I've even heard talk of Propane/LOX (granted it was Hank), Methane/LOX? Who?

Re:PH of exhaust

[SkyratesPlayer]

Methane/LOX is the propellant of choice if you want to be able to: 1. store it until later. (LH2 is a pain.) 2. produce it on Mars for a return trip. (H2O (water) + C02 atmosphere = O2 and CH4.)

Re:PH of exhaust

[HornWumpus]

Propane is easier to store at higher temperatures and lower pressures. /Hank

Re: PH of exhaust

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called the Raptor Engine:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine_family)

I gather other companies are working on them too.

Welcome to the greenhouse

[lylefile]

Don't you worry your pretty little heads about it. Daddy will take care of all those nasty gasses. And here I thought diesel fumes were bad!

Re:Welcome to the greenhouse

[phayes]

How is it any worse than pushing a airliner sized column of air out the way from takeoff to landing? Or is your little head too pretty to think about that?

Re:Welcome to the greenhouse

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn some physics please.

Re:Welcome to the greenhouse

[nukenerd]

How is it any worse than pushing a airliner sized column of air out the way from takeoff to landing?

That's the third time you've said that.

Re:Welcome to the greenhouse

[phayes]

Sorry, I'd only have said it once but there were lots of people making the same incorrect assumption (that air travel is somehow free of pollution).

Re:Welcome to the greenhouse

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done the math. Have you?

We can land troops anywhere on earth in 40 minutes

[Anonymous Coward]

Suck on that

simple ballistic trajectory

[Anonymous Coward]

as explained in several science fiction works. It is not like this is unknown to anyone that read science fiction back in the day. The math for this is well-established.

It is coming up with the funding to build the thing and then being safe enough that humans want to use it.

Probably best used for Scientific missions ..

[Anonymous Coward]

to the Artic and Antartic ..

Re:We can land troops anywhere on earth in 40 minu

[wyHunter]

Why do you think the research is going on?

Re:We can land troops anywhere on earth in 40 minu

[aicrules]

A whopping 200 of them at once...not exactly an invasion force. But perhaps useful for special ops.

Re:We can land troops anywhere on earth in 40 minu

[Anonymous Coward]

But perhaps useful for special ops.

Not exactly the stealthiest of insertions.

Hubris

[Anonymous Coward]

No one needs to move their meat-bag from point A to point B anymore. What's the point?

The only way TESLA can make it happen...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is with battery powered BFRs

Environmental Concerns

[HockeyPuck]

The fuel/exhaust that a rocket uses and produces isn't exactly the cleanest or safest stuff on earth. I can't imagine people putting up with this stuff being produced on a daily (hourly) basis just outside of their city.

Re:Environmental Concerns

[starless]

The fuel/exhaust that a rocket uses and produces isn't exactly the cleanest or safest stuff on earth.

Methane and oxygen should be pretty clean...
(well, some sources of methane are not so nice, but I doubt he'll use those).
And I believe the production should be based on solar-power produced electricity.

Re:Environmental Concerns

[haruchai]

The fuel/exhaust that a rocket uses and produces isn't exactly the cleanest or safest stuff on earth. I can't imagine people putting up with this stuff being produced on a daily (hourly) basis just outside of their city.

The plan is for the BFR to use methalox fuel

From Reddit -
Methalox (which is shorthand for Methane + Liquid Oxygen) is a superior propellant choice to Kerolox (Kerosene + LOX) for several reasons. Most importantly, it offers higher specific impulse, does not "coke" (ie, deposit unburnt carbon chains everywhere, fouling up your engine), and has similar (80-85%) density to Kerolox. Hydrolox (Hydrogen + LOX) offers better Isp and less coking still, but it has other downsides such as a super low boiling temperature and causes hydrogen embrittlement.

Re:Environmental Concerns

[Areyoukiddingme]

The fuel/exhaust that a rocket uses and produces isn't exactly the cleanest or safest stuff on earth.

This rocket is fueled with methane, burning in Raptor engines. Combustion of methane and liquid oxygen produces primarily carbon dioxide and water.

CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H20

Burning is never perfect, so there are some oddball species in there, but burning in a Raptor engine is pretty damn close to perfect or it wouldn't work as well as it does. Its exhaust is better than the exhaust from your furnace, even if you have a high efficiency furnace, because the fuel has been purified to a higher standard than what you typically get from a natural gas line. The rocket exhaust is far better than your furnace if you have an older furnace, and way way better than the exhaust from your tailpipe (and the tailpipes of all of your 3 million neighbors).

A couple of points...

[DarthVain]

30min trip, 3 hour security...

Also only for the extremely rich I'd reckon.

Though it does remind me of that Simpsons episode...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Ronald Regan and Hypersonic Planes

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Hypersonic planes, with sub orbital trajectories reaching anywhere in the world in 45 minutes, have been printed so often in Popular Mechanics, even Ronald Regan talked about it.

Rate at which Musk is going, that mag is going to change its name to Popular Muskonics.

Just went JFK to SAN

[kencurry]

If you can afford direct flights in business class, good hotels, taxi or Uber instead of public trans, can get TSA or global traveller etc., long distance travel isn't that bad. If you can't afford that stuff, then travel does kind of suck and cutting it short as possible sounds good. But in that case you won't be able to afford it either.

Elon Musk

[Anonymous Coward]

Continues to fill his mouth with hallucinogenic drugs before he opens it to speak. At this point, I give exactly zero credence to anything that comes spilling out of his pie hole as a result. The dude is a joke.

Hyperloop now?

[nukenerd]

So now it's rockets. What happened to Hyperloop?

Re:Hyperloop now?

[ElizabethGreene]

He gave away Hyperloop because he didn't have time to work on it. It's a lot of work disrupting 3 industries at once.

Will this rocket be silent?

[petes_PoV]

Even a Concorde turned out to be unaffordable over the long term, and that was quite a bit simpler than this scheme.

Concorde never had the success to parallel its technological progress due to environmental and noise limitations.

I cannot see a rocket being allowed to take off (or land) anywhere close to a city, nor to fly near one, either. Since they aren't known for their maneuverability, once you set one off in a given direction, it's difficult to perform a 90 turn to comply with noise ordinances.

fucking stoopid

[Anonymous Coward]

SO,
It seems todays theme is how many people can jump on the bandwagon to fuck the planet..
so the rules have changed..
If your service extends to several people, sure pollute the area, its fine as long as YOU pay for the immediate impact, but fuck the long term aspects..
We wont b around, why the hell would I want to help proport someone or something I cant, touch, feel, or reason with..
Milleneal thinking..
If it exists outside of me, my presence, or being, fuck it..
what is it, he whom dies wit the most toys???
this shit angers so many,

Will someone shut him up?

[Chas]

Seriously.

While he comes out with lots of enchanting ideas. When you do a bit of checking for feasibility, it's all hot air...
And he runs his mouth CONSTANTLY.

Sub-orbital

[Anonymous Coward]

Huge difference in delta-v between orbital & sub-orbital. You'd need to say the minimum payload fraction would be 6.5%.

Stop being right PKD!

[jandrese]

This is one part of The Man in the High Castle that I didn't think was going to come true. Granted, in the book this travel is mostly restricted to the super-elites in society, but it still seemed so impractical.

I have to wonder what kind of world it would be where ICBMs are an economically viable form of transport but SSTs are not.

Never Get Past FAA Safety Regs

[Anonymous Coward]

FAA regs for ballistic missile human flight is what is putting SpaceX and every other US based launch system on the ground even the SLS.

Might as well re-engineer a Hindenburg: Iron Sky!

Ha ha
 

Better than this?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about if we teleport from city to city by smoking more weed? If we can dream it, then it must be possible. So, let's get higher than Elon and dream it. Heck, come on all you nay-sayers and join the doper generation and dream on.... dream on... DREAM ON...

you're an idiot

[HBI]

I shouldn't even respond but it's true. You have no fucking idea what you are talking about. Steam trains aren't rockets. Rockets aren't safe and will never be.

Re:you're an idiot

[phayes]

You're right, you shouldn't have responded.

Steam trains in the 1830s when pronouncements like the one I gave were the epitome of modern technology. They were far from safe with derailments and boiler explosions fairly common.

And yet technology overcame these handicaps. What exactly make you an expert eh mr high and mighty? Is it that you're a better student of history than I am? No, clearly not or you'd have recognized that the complaint against stem locomotives was entirely on point and not exaggerated.

Does it boil down to you being a cranky fart too quick to confuse your own ignorance of a subject with that of someone you have never met? Could be...

The Pilots will all be AI

[neoRUR]

So we have nothing to worry about in that area..

Someone has got to get Elon Musk

[Anonymous Coward]

back on his ADD meds before he seriously hurts himself or others.

Elon I love you man, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to include the trip out to the floating pad , prep for launch, etc in your figures. Today I can take an hour flight but spend 4 hours in an airport. Reduce time people spend in an airport - much easier place to start.

A few things to consider

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, what Mush proposes can be done. A few thing to consider. First rockets are very noisy things, these things won't be landing at O'Hare. Although landing in the midlle of Illinois and hypertubing to Chicago would work. Secondly rockets need to accelerate at levels the general public would be uncomfortable with. Finally most people do not do well with zero gee, which would happen during the coast part of the flight.

G force?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is a fat lady from Ohio going to withstand 3 G's of force, tripling her body weight to over 500 kg? And then 100's of people crammed together in zero g is going to be a puke fest horror show.

Oops

[Anonymous Coward]

"This rocket is really headed towards the Mars colony. Sorry."

Carbon Footprint?

[pubwvj]

"will allow passengers to take "most long-distance trips" in just 30 minutes"

And just how large will the pollution effect be?

Are any parts of the flight at excessive G ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or how about zero G ?

It'd be great having half the passengers having heart attacks or seizures going up, and the rest projectile vomiting coming down.

Seriously, has Musk lost his fucking mind ?

There's a reason astronauts do all that conditioning training.

Oh, Elon...

[bwcbwc]

Why don't you work on the REAL problems with long distance transportation? Even if the flight takes just 30 minutes, it'll still take you 2 hours to check-in and get through security and another hour to claim your luggage.

Re:Oh, Elon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed! For many flights, the time spent in the airport exceeds the time spent in the air by far.

Here's my (partially tongue-in-cheek) idea: When I enter an airport, strap me to a dollie and knock me unconscious. Wheel me through the airport and into the airplane. I won't take up much room as I'm standing upright. Turbulence is basically irrelevant except for the pilot as everyone will be sedated. As is hospitality. When I land, wake me up. Total perceived trip time: 15 minutes.

So he can read Heinlein...

[Anonymous Coward]

Semi-ballistics were used by Heinlein in "Friday" and who knows who he borrowed the idea from?
Heinlein Genius! Musk Yawn...
 

He's a genius but....

[MerlTurkin]

....his time lines are really off. Man on Mars by 2024? NOPE. Way too much to do yet. Logistically there's no way we're there in 2024 as well. I love his ambition but he's off with his time lines.

City-to-city transport by rocket...

[hinckeljn]

Nahhh! Can't anybody play this game anymore?

Yo mama!

[Anonymous Coward]

Rockets are extremely uncomfortable ways to travel.

So long as...

[Anonymous Coward]

So long as Musk can guarantee the rocket won't explode if it tips over then I'm in!

Musk reminded me words of one well-known Russian

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure if Musk is subscribed, but anyway... :)
Something similar was said on Nov 12, 2016.

This so so sexist

[Anonymous Coward]

It will take me literally like the entire morning to recover from reading this. 22 year old girls are PEOPLE not toys for people to have star trek sex with!!
This hurt me like a bullet made of words. Think about it