Elon Musk Proposes City-to-City Travel By Rocket, Right Here on Earth (theverge.com) 318
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.
Tom Price already booking flights from DC to NYC (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing but the best for the best people.
Wait a minute... (Score:2)
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What do you think a methane-oxygen burn produces? lead?
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
So does keeping servers powered on 24x7
That's a damn lie! You take that back. Slashdot doesn't run 24x7 [twitter.com] and you know it!
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Funny)
So does keeping servers powered on 24x7
That's a damn lie! You take that back. Slashdot doesn't run 24x7 [twitter.com] and you know it!
It does, but neither the 24 hours or 7 days are contiguous.
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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... (Score:4, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Elon has been saying a lot of things recently, doesn't mean it'll all come true.
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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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. Unfortunately a lot of people advocating environmentalism don't have a clue about opportunity cost [wikipedia.org]. 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... (Score:4, Informative)
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... (Score:5, Informative)
The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful
The idea is to eventually create the methane fuel via the Sabatier process [wikipedia.org] 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:
Once out of the earth's atmosphere, aerodynamic drag goes away. Which also might save some energy.
Please watch the entire talk. [youtube.com] It's very informative.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It produces water and carbon dioxide. Water isn't a big deal, but CO2 is.
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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.
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It does, but the BFR plans to use methylox fuel.
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Elon hopes to produce his methane & O2 from Water, CO2 & Solar power -- the same way he plans on doing it on Mars.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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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 fe
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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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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
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For a wealthy executive, that is 3.5 hours of hookers & blow time saved :-P
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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 t
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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?
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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.
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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 no
Re:This is never going to happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
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_...
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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. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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 passen
Im sure other countries would love seeing (Score:5, Interesting)
Well this is one way to test anti missile tech
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The "launch signature" for this would be very different than that of missiles. It would be trivial to tell the difference.
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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.
Flight and passenger prep (Score:3)
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.
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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
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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 wa
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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.
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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.
This reminds me (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Currently, it still has to be carried from the build facility to the launch pad by one of these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They get carried over public roads as well: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oNTuSm3... [ytimg.com]
I remember reading somewhere that the Falcon 9 is just about as big as it can be to still make this possible.
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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 [nasaspaceflight.com] 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 [google.com] The current sat image of S
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Do it (Score:2)
This looks to me like it would be one of the coolest ways to die.
Elon is attention-whoring (Score:3)
I like those odds! (Score:2)
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....
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You mean like they said 100 years ago about heavier than air travel? Yeah because it's certain that THAT never happened, did it...
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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.
Physical Fitness (Score:2)
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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Or, unfortunately, health clearance to ride a roller coaster.
This is idiotic (Score:2)
I seriously can't imagine a method of inter-city travel that would be worse for the global environment.
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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...
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Post your calculations so we can laugh a little more...
Why are you asking me to support an assertion that I never made?
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But your statement was so definitive that it implied you had an informed opinion. Sorry for assuming you knew what you were talking about.
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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.
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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 (cou
Flying taxis (Score:2)
Also, is life insurance part of the ticket price?
Prior Art (Score:5, Funny)
NK already has them, but they only sell one-way tickets.
But the Baggage Fees... (Score:2)
But the baggage fees with be insane!
This is stupid (Score:2)
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.
fantasy (Score:2)
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He's not "proposing" the idea (Score:5, Informative)
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
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>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 th
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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.
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The notion of suborbital/ballistic transport has been downright common for decades.
Yup! There have been lots of attempts
X-30 [wikipedia.org]
X-43 [wikipedia.org]
X-51 [wikipedia.org]
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.
Environmental Concerns (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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 temperat
A couple of points... (Score:2)
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/... [wikipedia.org]
Ronald Regan and Hypersonic Planes (Score:2)
Rate at which Musk is going, that mag is going to change its name to Popular Muskonics.
Just went JFK to SAN (Score:3)
Hyperloop now? (Score:3)
So now it's rockets. What happened to Hyperloop?
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Nah. Guys like this have to keep the old mystique burnished; that goes all the way back to Howard Hughes.
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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 2
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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 g
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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.
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Kind of like how you can tell a regularly schedule international flight from an attacking bomber?
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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.
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Elon plans on leaving the burocrats behind when he gets to mars.
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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.
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Re:Cost of fuel? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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?