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Saturday, September 30, 2017

SpaceX May Offer Rocket Rides on Earth

Anywhere on Earth in under an hour 

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX (among other things), recently gave a talk about making life multiplanetary. He discussed SpaceX's plan to go to Mars twice in 2022. He admits that the timeline is "aspirational", but then says that 5 years is a long time.

To get to Mars they are planning on building a giant rocket, one that Elon refers to as BFR during the talk (I'll assume this stands for Big Falcon Rocket). The design has 31 Raptor engines with a payload capacity of 150 tons.

Near the end of his talk (@38:30), he says, "If you've built a ship that is capable of going to Mars, what if you take that same ship and go from one place to another on Earth? We looked at that and the results are quite interesting."

The video then cuts to people being ferried out to a floating launch pad and entering a giant rocket. The rocket launches and hits a top speed of 27,000 kph; which is really fast and made me think people might be leaving rocket like this:

If there is one thing the CEO of Tesla knows, it's smooth acceleration, so I am sure the trip would be fine and not leave you rubber-faced :)

The video continues and shows that the BFR could fly from New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes. The video lists of other possible trips with “most long-distance trips less than 30 minutes” and “anywhere on Earth in under an hour.”

Elon Musk's full speech is below and it includes footage from their successful rocket landings and what terraforming Mars might look like.


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