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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.
This is just his "fuck you" to Lockheed for coming up with a better looking rocket.
Nothing but the best for the best people.
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!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Well this is one way to test anti missile tech
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.
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.
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?
This looks to me like it would be one of the coolest ways to die.
He is Just a businessman trying to stay in the Newspapers. A salesguy.
He's just trying to get in the headlines. No way this would be practical.
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....
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.
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I seriously can't imagine a method of inter-city travel that would be worse for the global environment.
So these rocket taxis... do they count as flying cars?
Also, is life insurance part of the ticket price?
NK already has them, but they only sell one-way tickets.
Table-ized A.I.
But the baggage fees with be insane!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Kind of like how you can tell a regularly schedule international flight from an attacking bomber?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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.
Donâ(TM)t over complicate the process. Hyper loop is a perfectly good solution.
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.
mfwright@batnet.com
Sounds kind of like the Spruce Goose. What shall we call it? The Steel Steed?
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
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!
Suck on that
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.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Why do you think the research is going on?
A whopping 200 of them at once...not exactly an invasion force. But perhaps useful for special ops.
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
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.
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/...
Rate at which Musk is going, that mag is going to change its name to Popular Muskonics.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
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?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Don't schedule flights over Crimea, check.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.)
So now it's rockets. What happened to Hyperloop?
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
Propane is easier to store at higher temperatures and lower pressures. /Hank
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
So we have nothing to worry about in that area..
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.
"will allow passengers to take "most long-distance trips" in just 30 minutes"
And just how large will the pollution effect be?
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.
We are the 198 proof..
....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.
Nahhh! Can't anybody play this game anymore?