Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has been developing a huge spacecraft designed to help colonize Mars, but it can also be used much closer to home. At a space conference in Australia held on September 29, Musk revealed that the company is looking forward to applying the technology to move people from one part of the blue planet to another in an insanely small figure of the time.
Musk quoted “The results are quite fascinating” as a video played a simulation of people boarding a rocket in New York that blasted off into space and back down to land in Shanghai. The best thing about taking off to space is the lack of friction. Once you are out of the atmosphere, riding the rocket will be as smooth as silk as the outer Earth doesn’t have any weather. Most journeys with this new Rocket will take less than 30 minutes, and none will ever take longer than an hour.
Musk also revealed in his Instagram post just after the presentation that the cost per seat would be the same as any full far economy in an aircraft. Musk also introduced the idea at the end of the presentation about SpaceX’s plans to land cargo ships on Mars in 2022. This will be followed by spaceships carrying people by the year 2024. These missions will utilize a giant reusable rocketship which is currently being developed by the company and is named BFR or the Big Falcon Rocket. The first BFR will be under construction by the middle of next year.
This same rocket can be used to zoom people from one city to another on Earth with travel speed as fast as 17,000 mph.
Musk hasn’t yet revealed any specific dates for these super fast journeys to become a reality but it’s on the page. Apart from Elon Musk, another billionaire, Richard Branson is also working on developing a perfect “Rocketplane” to transport people between cities on Earth via the use of Space. Branson is pursuing his space ambitions via Virgin Galactic and has forecast that a trip from New York to Sydney can one day be taken under 30 minutes.
Musk is also working on the idea of “hyperloop” network which can carry commuters from New York to Washington in about 29 minutes.
New York to London in less than an hour with Elon Musk’s latest rocket
