People will soon be able to fly from city to city within minutes, rocket and car entrepreneur Elon Musk says.
Mr Musk made the promise at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia.
A promotional video says the London-New York journey would take 29 minutes.
Mr Musk told the audience he aimed to start sending people to Mars in 2024. His SpaceX company would begin building the necessary ships to support the mission next year.
He says he is refocusing SpaceX to work on just one type of vehicle - known as the BFR - which could do all of the firm's current work and interplanetary travel.
Mr Musk first laid out his Mars travel ambitions at the IAC in 2016. Twelve months on, he returned with more detail.
His BFR, although still massive, is now a little smaller at 106m in height and 9m in width.
The major difference compared with the original version, however, was cost, the South African-born American said.
The route to affordability, he explained, was in refocusing all of the company's efforts into the one system - and then using that to meet all its customers' needs. This means the BFR would launch satellites and service the space station - as SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule do now - but also take people to the Moon and Mars, and do what is termed "point to point" travel on Earth.
"Most of what people consider to be long-distance trips could be completed in less than half-an-hour," he told the Adelaide audience.
As well as being the CEO and chief designer at SpaceX, Mr Musk also founded the Tesla electric car company and is chairman of SolarCity which specialises in renewables technologies, such as high-storage batteries.
Key to his thinking is the concept of reusability. Space activity is currently expensive only because it is disposable, he says. There is no reason, he claims, why rocket systems cannot be made to operate like airliners where the most significant ongoing cost is the fuel in the tanks.
His Falcon 9 rocket is partially reusable; the BFR would be totally reusable. The same vehicle would fly time and time again.
Mr Musk recognises that his ambitious timelines sometimes slip. When he put up a slide in Adelaide stating that the first cargo (no humans aboard) versions of BFR would go to Mars in 2022, he said: "That's not a typo, although it is aspirational."
A promotional video says the London-New York journey would take 29 minutes.
Mr Musk told the audience he aimed to start sending people to Mars in 2024. His SpaceX company would begin building the necessary ships to support the mission next year.
He says he is refocusing SpaceX to work on just one type of vehicle - known as the BFR - which could do all of the firm's current work and interplanetary travel.
Mr Musk first laid out his Mars travel ambitions at the IAC in 2016. Twelve months on, he returned with more detail.
His BFR, although still massive, is now a little smaller at 106m in height and 9m in width.
The major difference compared with the original version, however, was cost, the South African-born American said.
The route to affordability, he explained, was in refocusing all of the company's efforts into the one system - and then using that to meet all its customers' needs. This means the BFR would launch satellites and service the space station - as SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule do now - but also take people to the Moon and Mars, and do what is termed "point to point" travel on Earth.
"Most of what people consider to be long-distance trips could be completed in less than half-an-hour," he told the Adelaide audience.
As well as being the CEO and chief designer at SpaceX, Mr Musk also founded the Tesla electric car company and is chairman of SolarCity which specialises in renewables technologies, such as high-storage batteries.
Key to his thinking is the concept of reusability. Space activity is currently expensive only because it is disposable, he says. There is no reason, he claims, why rocket systems cannot be made to operate like airliners where the most significant ongoing cost is the fuel in the tanks.
His Falcon 9 rocket is partially reusable; the BFR would be totally reusable. The same vehicle would fly time and time again.
Mr Musk recognises that his ambitious timelines sometimes slip. When he put up a slide in Adelaide stating that the first cargo (no humans aboard) versions of BFR would go to Mars in 2022, he said: "That's not a typo, although it is aspirational."
Rockets will make people fly from city to city in minutes
Reviewed by Doctor Smile
on
October 01, 2017
Rating:
Reviewed by Doctor Smile
on
October 01, 2017
Rating:
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