Gwynne Shotwell: SpaceX's Plan to Fly You Across the Globe in 30 Minutes [video] (opens in new tab)

20 minutes of discomfort to save 12+ hours of flight time? Sounds worth it to me.

Don’t underestimate the discomfort of spending a dozen hours in economy class. I’d take the rocket ride every day and twice on Sunday over that, and I’m not terribly fond of crazy rides.

I'm guessing C-levels are going to start getting into shape if they have 20+ less hours on planes during their day.

You seem to underestimate how annoying modern air travel is, at least in America. One has to stand in at least 3 different lines (baggage, security, boarding) before getting on the plane. Whether in the terminal or on the aircraft, the seating feels like it was designed to be as uncomfortable as possible.

I imagine that there will be people willing to travel via rocket just because of the 3+ G's. And I'd take a 30 minute roller coaster ride over a 10 hr first class flight any time, all the time. Less time spent flying > comfort while flying. One immediate benefit is that one doesn't have to take a week or more off of work for intercontinental travel. Weekend jaunts to Pattaya or the Alps are possible when you aren't spending 20+ hours in transit.

I wonder if 3G's while lying on your back on a gel cushion isn't a lot easier to take than 3G's standing on your feet?

> a full 360 degrees of pitch/roll

Can't this be somewhat alleviated with some sort of free 360 deg. rotating suspension of the passenger cabin? So that the G forces are at least pointing "down".

This may be a stupid question, but could people be put under for 30 minutes and just be woken up at landing?

If John Glenn could do a Shuttle flight at 77, I suspect you're overstating the difficulties here. People voluntarily subject themselves to 3+ Gs and 360 degrees pitch/roll at amusement parks daily, with fairly minimal levels of physical fitness being required.

Perhaps, but maybe the model ends up being only a handful of BFR ports on each continent. Would you fly 1 hour to Mojave so you could rocket to SE Asia and fly another 1 hour to Singapore? Sign me up!

Floating platforms do, in fact, feature prominently in their point-to-point travel concept video. No clue what they'd do for travel to, say, Denver or Paris.

I'd expect a city like Atlanta to be served by an off-shore landing zone, with high speed rail (hyperloop!) as the connection.

Boeing (later United Aircraft) used to operate their own airline (later United Airlines). They also bought Pratt & Whitney, Hamilton Standard, Chance Vought, National Air Transport, and Pacific Air Transport. They were vertically integrated across the airline industry by the end of the 1920s.

This all culminated in the Air Mail Act of 1934 [1] which prohibited airlines and airplane manufacturers from operating under the same corporate umbrella.

It will be interesting to see where this ends up with SpaceX integrating the consumer facing airline operation with rocket manufacturing. Something commercial airlines are not able to do.

>> safety issues as well.

And vomit. 4+G on launch. Freefall during cruise. 5+ G on reentry. Give me the first class ticket on a BA flight any day.

SpaceX already are in the transportation business...they launch payloads into space today. Boeing and Airbus are manufacturers of those payloads and aircraft and whatever else, but they don't routinely operate them.

More speculation here, I don't have any knowledge on the matter, but...

If the flight time drops from 12 hours to 30 minutes, and prices are in the same ballpark of $2,000, then there would be more demand.

The execs could all be in Shanghai for the board meeting and some of them could be back in NYC for dinner.

The same way you tell the difference between commercial scheduled airline flights incoming kamikaze pilots?

Heavy regulation and requiring all flights to be registered with NORAD with high precision, probably.

Presumably you see where they take off and where they are headed for its pretty straight forward. Current ICBM's seem to have "relatively" minor down range maneuverability so once you're ballistic you can plot a big circle of where you can land. Is that near a spaceport? cool. Is it near a missile silo? better check into it.

Bombers are the same way, there is nothing that prevents building a nuclear bomber in the shell of a 747 and calling it a cargo plane on its transponder.

Same way you differentiate between an airplane and an alien spaceship. One is common, the other is so absurdly rare its not even worth considering.

You just build second strike capabilities and call it a day. If {Russia, U.S.} gets off a first strike, then {U.S., Russia} can still get off a second strike, therefore neither will strike first.

Well, that's one option. Russia will need an early warning network to rival the American one either way, and given that and proper flight path registration... maybe there would be no confusion. Maybe.

Something like a rocket version of ADS-B that feeds to a central data collection point, from which nation-states that are nuclear powers (permanent UN security council members, for the most part) can receive a read-only data stream of rocket traffic.

Would require rockets with speed/altitude limit uncrippled GPS.

The ICBMs are usually not 9m wide, made of carbon fiber, carrying transponders, and making a gliding reentry.

Not too huge. This person[1] did some math and found that a BFR trip across the world should take 40% to 240% as much carbon as a regular plane flight. For short trips this would be worse, though, because a plane's range goes up almost linearly with fuel use while a rocket's goes up much faster than linearly.

Rockets that use solid boosters like the Space Shuttle, SLS, or Atlas V do a good amount of ozone damage as they go up but the ozone damage from cryogenic propellants of the sort that a BFR uses is pretty small.

[1]https://www.quora.com/Elon-Musk-suggested-that-the-SpaceX-BF...

Most people replies are focusing on carbon footprint, but it might also be worth considering noise (e.g. how does the sound of a rocket launching off the coast of California affect whales?) and any atmospheric perturbations caused by the rocket. Launches damage the ionosphere, which hasn't been an issue in the past because as far as we know the damage doesn't have a huge impact, and the ionosphere usually is back to normal within a few hours (or even less depending on trajectory and some other factors). If launches are happening every hour in the same area, that might cause some problems with things like radios.

Depends on how many. Flying airplanes is around 1-2% of our total CO2 footprint. Of course, for an individual, doing 1 intercontinental flight with a full plane is equivalent to months if not a year of driving a car to work every day, but in total, not many people fly.

Depending on the efficiency of the rocket and the reduced number of people doing this, the numbers shouldn't be that much higher.

Pretty similar to the environmental impact of jumbo jets. A 777-200LR burns around 145.5 tonnes of jet fuel to transport around 300 people 15,800 km. That's 31 grams of fuel per passenger-km, about 86% of the fuel is Carbon so that's roughly 27 grams of Carbon emissions per passenger-km. A BFR/BFS contains about 3,240 tonnes of propellant and allegedly will be able to transport around 850 passengers up to 20,000 km. The oxidizer to fuel ratio of the Raptor engine is currently unknown but it's likely it's around 3:1, meaning that 1/4 of the total propellant is Methane while 3/4 is liquid Oxygen, giving 810 of Methane per trip, give or take. Methane is 75% Carbon so a BFR flight should produce roughly 608 tonnes of Carbon emissions, or 36 grams per passenger-km (30% more than a conventional flight, seemingly).

However, it's possible to generate Methane fairly easily using solar power, so such launches have the potential to be nominally carbon neutral with some investment.

The BFR runs on a mix of liquid oxygen and methane, according to Wikipedia.

Ignoring obvious scalability problems, wouldn’t it be possible to manufacture that with a pretty decent environmental footprint from various carbon neutral bio sources?

It will eventually be very low, much lower than planes. The same technology that is being developed to make propellant on Mars can be used on Earth to extract CO2 from the air and/or sea water. A few squared km of solar panels on floating structures can produce enough propellant for one BFR trip a day.

The same propellant (methane) can also be used on planes, eventually, so BFR will bring many technologies advances independently of the outcome of the project.

There would be neither the time nor the inclination for food service. A non-trivial percentage of passengers will be dealing with nausea during the thankfully brief 0g float.

The entire flight would be around 30min. Short airline flights don't serve meals already.

He's not promising it. Despite the optimistic language, its a somewhat-realistic dream that he'd like to do and plans to work on. At least that seems obvious to me.

As far as timelines go, Gwynne Shotwell is in an entirely different class than Elon Musk. If you haven't watched the video, you should, there's some interesting tension going on between her and Elon.

If she says it'll happen in the next X years, I'll put it at a >75% chance of being accurate. If Elon said something like that, i'd put it at 33% chance.

> it's a petty attempt at one-upmanship

Gwynne Shotwell is SpaceX's President [1]. She and Elon are on the same team.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell

It was an attempt at humor. Take a deep breath and try to do something useful today.

> "it's a petty attempt at one-upmanship"

I think it was just a light-hearted joke.

Employee #7 at SpaceX didn't you hear? Relax, they're on the same team.

You will never meet anyone from another solar system. Even if we assume such life exists (it might or might not - either is extraordinary), there is every reason to believe it is far away. It would be extraordinary again if that life is close enough to earth that the round trip of a radio transmission is within a human lifetime. There are just a few hundred (I wasn't able to find an exact number) starts within 25 light years - 50 year round trip time for a radio signal. We know of hundreds of earth like planets, but only by a definition that includes mars which is pretty much dead.