Musk is a barrel of fun. He has had some rad plans for LA too.
That would be handy at times, but during a vacation, I want to soak up some time. I don’t mind a reasonable wait from start to finish. If someone needed a transport due to medical emergency, the whiz-bang method would be appropriate.
The way the world is going these days, I’m not sure there are that many places I’d be excited enough to go to such that I’d board a rocket to do it.
Sure would make the flight US -> India a whole lot more bearable. Right now, the best you can do, the shortest version of that trip, is JFK - Delhi, at about 14 hours.
There's nothing really science-fictiony about this. This can be done with his BFR rocket, now under development/testing, using probably the second stage only. Spacex would need to build launch/landing/maintenance facilities at each destination, but that's about it.
I don't know if the economics would support it though. If it takes 1000 passengers to be profitable, that's a few 787s worth of passengers at a time. Probably only New York, LA, San Fran, London, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, and a couple of Indian cities may be profitable.
I don’t understand the part about 1,000 people. He’s talking about the current Democrat presidential candidate field?
How would you vet who can handle a ballistic trajectory with 4-5g’s on re-entry? It’s too impractical — if you vetted a million people to ride, and half got Clearance, that pool of 500K maybe pays 10K for the trip each, but how many use BFR weekly?
If that’s even 10k — doubtful — that’s only 10 flights a week, so you’re not even scheduling daily NY-Tokyo.
So if you’re not daily, then Mr. Saito is taking the JapanAir polar route non-stop instead.
It takes 88 minutes for low Earth orbit. So 44 minutes to get to the opposite side of Earth. Any faster means you could go into another orbit around the sun. The Soviets actually did that with a probe meant for the moon. They renamed it ‘the dream’ and it now is in an orbit between Earth and Mars.
By my calculations, going half-way around the world in 20 minutes would require accelerating at ~11 g’s for 10 minutes, and then decelerating at ~11 g’s for ten minutes.
Not gonna get many takers (or survivors).
Would like to see the estimated G forces due to acceleration/deceleration. Would it be too much for the ordinary passenger?
Maximum hop range is 6000 NM.