You wake up in New York at 9am and you just found out there is a major networking event in London in five hours.
Imagine if you could hop on a plane at noon and make it there on time.
We're landing in about one minute, thank you.
That would be impossible right now by plane but not by rocket.
Elon Musk's greatest ambition is to use Starship to build a city on Mars, which I talked about in
the previous video. And while working on that plan, he thought about another use for the spacecraft.
Maybe there is some market for really fast transport of stuff around the world.
That was musk in 2016 and the market has now expanded to moving not just cargo but crew. If you
build a ship that's capable of going to Mars, what if you take that same ship and go from one place
to another on Earth? SpaceX wants to take people from place to place on the planet, making most
long-distance trips in less than 30 minutes
and going anywhere around the world in under an hour.
While passenger planes travel up to 575 miles per hour, Starship will go nearly 17,000 miles mph.
And instead of flying above the clouds, it'll fly above the Earth. The great thing about going to
space is there's no friction so, once you're out of the atmosphere, it will be smooth the silk, no
turbulence, nothing. But that doesn't necessarily mean your ride will be very comfortable.
It will feel sort of like Disney's Space Mountain roller coaster which means you'll
need some sort of restraint mechanism. And if you feel a little queasy, there won't be any
toilets or other amenities like a kitchen galley in order for Starship to carry a lot more people.
If it were making a trip to Mars, there would have to be cabins and common areas because it would
take months to get there and that would limit the number of passengers to 100, whereas Earth to Earth
travel allows Starship to hold 1, 000 passengers. In order to board the spacecraft, you would need to
take a boat to the site of the rocket launch which is on a floating platform called a spaceport. After
going beyond earth, it re-enters the atmosphere and arrives at a floating spaceport in another city.
Since Starship is fully reusable, the price of a ticket will be drastically reduced
but that doesn't mean it will be cheap. We don't yet know how much a trip will cost but
a CNBC reporter quoted SpaceX's president and COO Gwynne Shotwell saying at an event in 2019 that it
will be cheaper than a first-class ticket but a little more than economy. Shotwell has also said
previously that it would be less than a business class fare. So it's still unclear what the price
will be but here's an example of round-trip plan tickets from London's Heathrow Airport
to New York's JFK about a month from now. An average economy ticket is around $400,
for business class it's $4,000 and for first-class about $5,000. Besides the
price, there's another big consideration SpaceX will need to address. Rockets are really noisy.
That's the sound of one raptor engine that powers starship. There are currently 31 of these planned
for the Super Heavy booster which lifts Starship into orbit while another six are located on
Starship itself. However, Musk has said Starship could actually make trips under 6,200 miles
without the need for the booster and instead, the spacecraft would fly with an additional
two to four engines but because it would still have an impact on residents, the spaceport will
be located 20 miles offshore which means getting there could take more time than the actual flight.
As a comparison, the journey from New York's Grand Central Terminal to JFK Airport is about
14 miles. Musk has suggested a Hyperloop transit system traveling hundreds of miles per hour could
ferry people to the spaceports really quickly. And while SpaceX works out all its plans, the airline
industry is also trying to cut down on travel time. Supersonic planes which travel faster than the
speed of sound could be returning. The Concorde stopped flying in 2003 following spiraling
maintenance costs. A company called Boom Supersonic is now developing the Overture which would cut
flight times by plane in half. So a trip from New York to London would be 3 hours and 15 minutes.
It would be the price of a business class ticket and the aim is to have commercial flights by 2030.
It's unclear if SpaceX's Earth to Earth plans will be scaled up to take off before then
but Musk says test flights could start as early as 2022 or 2023 and eventually, it will be real.
When it is, it could change how we live and even where we live.
Although we might have to wait a while, the future of air travel could be in space. Thanks so much
for watching, I'm Cindy Pom. So if you could afford a trip on Starship, would you use it to
go to another city? Could you stomach the ride? I'd love to hear what you have to say, you can
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I hope to do a lot more stories on topics that I find super interesting and important. See you soon.