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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.
Well this is one way to test anti missile tech
The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
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.
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.
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_...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Airship, flying cars, jet packs were all consider impractical and unsafe. Decades later they are still impractical and unsafe.
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.
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.