SpaceX BFR [video]
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Looks like fun. I'd love to see the in-flight safety video!
"Make sure there's nothing in your pockets because we'll be hitting 3 Gees. If anything goes wrong, we're all probably toast."
I think this was just an interesting idea thrown out at the end of a talk that had much more interesting stuff, such as redirecting all of SpaceX's resources away from Falcon to build the BFR, and putting humans on Mars by a 2024 'aspirational goal'
That is, the idea is that you build a high-speed airline with spaceports all over the world, refueled by huge solar arrays refining Ox and CH4 out of the air. Then it turns out your airliners, by virtue of the fact they are orbiters, can also launch satellites and go to Mars and other interplanetary destinations (where similar spaceport situations can be built).
The key to the whole thing is to make the second stage an orbiter big enough to do re-entry so the whole system is re-usable. Re-usable second stages are a giant pain, but if the secret is to get big, and that means you're kind of "accidentally" running an airliner, then perhaps SpaceX has found the right business model for commercial space flight in such high volume that things like going to Mars and asteroids and so forth are sort of on the cost order of chartering a private flight -- well within the reach of many organizations.
I'm not sure if the BFR ship would have any emergency survivability. It looks to me like the sort of thing where the flight goes well or everybody dies. In which case, yes, no need for cabin crew!
(And to be clear, I have nothing against "goes well or everybody dies" as long as the probability of "goes well" is sufficiently high.)
I think if you take off and you immediately find that one of the rocket motors isn't gimballing correctly, or something else looks off with the engines, it might be prudent to abort before building up a lot of velocity. (not to mention aborting before something explodes) It's certainly easier.
I imagine the most problematic abort in something like a NY to London flight would be if multiple engines fail several hundred miles out. All kinds of velocity in the wrong direction if you want to fly back, not enough thrust to maintain the proper trajectory towards the target. I think there are bound to be some scenarios where you can do a limping, powered landing (the vehicle probably only needs one or two working engines) but you have to do it downrange.
Aborts also leave you with too much fuel on board, probably way too much fuel. You could burn it off with the engines, although you'd want to actually use it to reach your origin or destination if possible.
If you abort early, you can still reach the origin. If you abort late, you can still reach the destination on the remaining engines. So the pertinent question is: do these two regimes overlap, or is there a gap, and how big? I don't have the answers, and you may be right that there is one.
1) Problem during launch. There's been one successful use of a launch escape system in rocketry history[1], and such a system has never been developed for a shuttle type craft.
2) Problem after entering orbit. Cutting your orbital flight short isn't going to change the fact that you still have to survive re-entry stresses and have a working vertical landing system.
[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_escape_system#Usage)
I'm not sure if you're aware, but this is a feature of the latest version of SpaceX's capsules. I'm sure it would exist for their larger vehicles.
edit: although I'm just not sure what you'd do during an abort with all that fuel that larger vehicle holds...
The fact that the BFR ship serves as both second stage and capsule combined, whereas the Dragon 2 is just a capsule with a separate second stage to put it into orbit, makes the problem a lot harder. I bet that the system for the BFR will consist of "don't explode."
Oh, that's interesting. What makes you say so?
https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/07/19/propulsive-landings-ni...
The reason seems to be a combination of NASA not being interested in propulsive landing (and they're funding most of Dragon 2) and deciding to go all-out on BFR instead of refining Dragon 2 further.
I like how SpaceX innovates, but I think this is a "too soon", bad product idea because it will be too expensive at first, and supersonic jets would be a better competitor.
Although I have to admit I really like the disruptive way of "showing the way to the future" communication ad. But to be frank, I wonder if people at SpaceX are not full of zeal sometimes. One bigger problem for SpaceX might be "how to sell space to consumers, or make money with space?".
Maybe that is the reason NASA existed as a government agency, because there is no real, direct ROE with space exploration. In the end SpaceX might make money with wealthy people who can afford going to mars or the moon, but I doubt that many people would be interested if there is no financial gain (or maybe for the hell of it). Innovation from NASA research was shared or benefited the military.
I want SpaceX to endure and succeed but I really wonder about the money/market sides of it. It requires a lot of vision, which goes beyond the reality of capitalism.
However, if you're designing for space and can allocate the R&D costs to space business units, you end up potentially developing something that has better marginal costs to transport people across the earth.
Basically, the R&D of building this is astronomically higher than the supersonic jet. But the (theoretical) promise is the marginal cost isn't that different. However, if you're already doing the R&D for other purposes, then you find yourself owning a system that's (potentially) better for global travel.
In principle yes a supersonic airliner could be cheaper, but the noise pollution issue alone is one of those external factors that is a real killer. Now it’s quite possible this use of the BFR might run into issues like that of its own, but they’re likely to be different issues at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_Sonic_Boom_Demonstratio...
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-begins-work-to-build...
Not ear popping kind of loud, but VERY loud nonetheless, and you feel it too if you’re close enough. (Really recommend a viewing at the LC39 observation gantry, it’s awesome!) I was watching that video and kept thinking that platform isn’t far enough from inhabited land that people won’t go apeshit over how loud it is.
I want this future, and boy do I want to see a rocket launch again, but waking up to that nice sound of rocket fuel burning at 6.30am? Yeah, maybe no. :o)
Also the light – a launch is very bright! During the daytime this wouldn't be such a big deal I guess, but a dawn/dusk/night launch would be very noticeable, even from 10 miles out.
I'd actually worry about crowding skies above the planet. A rocket flying with suborbital speed has arguably less means to avoid collision if the possibility is detected in flight. Also rockets will need to pass heights where lots of satellites, orbital debris and even charged particles can present some danger to flying objects.
By a hell of a lot – concorde is an order of magnitude slower than the spacex solution claims to be, only ~2000km/h
Also, you can design flight paths so they never intersect unlike aircraft that need to deal with weather.
They're currently unavailable at any price. If you make a really wild speculation based on taking the price of the most expensive airliner Airbus or Boeing sells and extrapolating from there how much a supersonic one might cost, it's not obvious that the airliner is cheaper.
Concorde shaved about three hours off the trip between NYC and Paris or London. It burned ungodly amounts of fuel (two tons of fuel just taxiing to the runway), cost a ton, didn't have enough range for Pacific routes, couldn't fly transcontinental routes because of the sonic boom, and after all of that it only saved a few hours.
Of course, Concorde is old technology and it could be done a lot better now. But you'd still be saving a limited amount of time (roughly a factor of 2), burn more fuel, and be more limited in range compared to a traditional airliner.
BFR would have enough range to connect any two points on Earth. It would have no restrictions on overflight (although it would most definitely have restrictions on where it could launch and land). And it would save 10-20 hours over a direct subsonic flight.
Cost? Well, I don't know. Elon says it'll be pretty cheap, but I'm skeptical. However, given how much more capable it would be than a supersonic airliner, it might be worth a much greater cost. Part of the problem with Concorde is that it just didn't save that much time.
Land on Mars is for the taking at the moment. What people will pay to live there is not known yet, but will be in the millions for some.
With airplanes this is solved, by the big infrastructure ( cities sometimes have even 2-3 airports ).
Where I live ( Berlin ) with a flight to NYC would look like :
1. City center -> TXL - 20m
2. Check-in / security - 30m ( no joke, the airport is small )
3. Flight - 9h 15m
4. Check-out / luggage - 50m
5. EWR -> City center - 50m
------------- TOTAL ---- 11h 25m
Plus you get all the benefits of paying for a Virgin Galactic trip
"Without tunnels, we will be in traffic hell forever" -Elon Musk
For a very high profile requirement - say, some kind of huge emergency - you could land the BFR anywhere there's a solid surface the size of a soccer field. Zero infrastructure required.
Getting it out of there again would be difficult, but you could have a team of experts and a whole lot of material resources literally drop down from the sky anywhere on Earth in a matter of hours. Most of that duration would be spent loading the human and material cargo into the rocket.
We have no way of doing that currently.
P.S.: And if the emergency is big enough, you could drop the whole thing into the ocean near the shore and just jettison the passengers and cargo shortly before impact.
Rapid intervention anywhere on Earth. Literally.
Another issue is noise. I don't see rockets happening that close to shore in large cities. A long pad-to-city commute, with ship trip included, would be another inconvenience.
However, in practice a rocket could be designed to fly in much more severe weather than is allowed for most launches today, it just takes designing it to do so. Because of the huge cost of rockets today designing a rocket to fly through adverse weather would add additional additional manufacturing cost onto each launch, which is not a good tradeoff. But if you can ammortize that over many flights, then it's not a big deal.
Think about ICBMs and SLBMs. Do you think there is someone sitting in a Minuteman bunker looking at the weather, ready to tell the launch officers just after they've turned their keys "sorry fellas, I've overriden your orders, we can't launch today, the weather is too crummy, oh well, better wait until tomorrow, if there is one"? No, missiles are designed to launch on a moment's notice, and be capable of successfully hitting their targets even if the local weather is terrible. Their designed to be able to launch through thunderstorms and experience only a small percentage of losses in the most unusual conditions. Similarly, any orbital rocket can be designed to be able to launch through most typical severe weather events, with only a small percentage of conditions (compared to today) requiring a scrub because it would endanger mission success.
The degree to which SpaceX will do such a thing is unknown, but it's within the realm of possibility.
Also, it should be noted that a major reason weather has a historical role in disrupting launches is because one of the best locations for launches in the US (Florida: Easterly coast, as close to the equator as possible) is also one of the few places on Earth with the most thunderstorm activity (roughly one out of five days in Florida has a thunderstorm). The vast majority of other locations on Earth don't experience nearly the same level of launch-risk inducing severe weather.
Another way to say this is that suborbital flight requires sufficiently less Delta v that you can afford to have engine diversity.
This cracked me up! :o)
I can sort of see a Monty Python-esque sketch or something in front of me know. Hilarious, thanks for the laugh!
First, instead of people, a great first market for this would be cargo. It would enable same-day delivery of goods anywhere in the world. Surely there's a market for that. I know for a lot of tech gear, when you need it, you need it right now. Factoring in the cost of a business-class ticket (per kilo), isn't anywhere near being a show-stopper.
Second, time-to-load could be a real factor, especially if you have to reach city center, then load into a boat, then go to the pad, then load in the rocket, then wait for fuel loading, etc. A better way to do this would be to use hyperloops in a spider fashion from the launch pad out to several of the burbs around the city. I could see the hyperloops ending underwater near the pad, with a nice mall and places for people to wait until their rocket was in position for flight. God help us, you'd still have the TSA nonsense.
Third, it just shows a barge, but this would be an entire "thing" -- launchers, rockets, fueling stations, malls, security, and so forth. Maybe cargo is a pretty good way to get started. Adding people just makes the complexity worse.
Fourth, before you do cargo, you could do a few high-profile people shots every month, for folks with lots of money who want to be remembered as some of the first folks to ever travel sub-orbitally. Hell if you'd want an accident in those days, though. Public relations will be a bear. It reminds me of the early days of flight, when most folks had a deep and profound fear of the machine. Do you want to get on to the top of a huge stick of dynamite? I do, and most HN'ers might, but a few YouTube explosions that kill people could shut the entire thing down (or worse, delay it for decades)
Musk & SpaceX are talking a lot about time and cost, but safety is obviously a lot more important. Based on data I found on the internet (so it must be true!) the loss rate for rockets is 20k - 165k higher than the fatal crash rate for airplanes over the past 20 years.
Loss rate for manned rocket launches [1]: 0.79%
Loss rate for unmanned rocket launches [1]: 6.68%
Rate of airplane crashes with at least one fatality [2]: < 0.00004%
Even if SpaceX is able to make manned space flight 10x safer, I'm not sure I'd trade 19 of the 20 hours I spent traveling from LA to South Africa this summer for a 1/1,300 chance of blowing up during launch.
Rocket failures for crewed rocket launches are extremely rare, occurring once every couple decades. It's hard to improve on that because low flight rates make data very hard to come by. Airplanes fail much more often in absolute terms, giving you a lot more data to work with (especially when combined with near-misses) allowing you bring the relative failure rate very low.
Increase flight rates by 5 orders of magnitude, and you may be able to increase reliability by, say, 4 orders of magnitude.
That's true, but the person you're replying to spent most of their comment directly addressing that fact.
Take a look at this report on Boeing crash history: http://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/company/about_b... In particular, take a look at page 17 (slide 16) which shows the crash rate over time. We have gone from about 40 hull losses per million departures in the 50's to about 0.6 to 1 (depending on how you count) per million departures today.
Mercury + Gemini + Apollo had a 0% death rate in-flight. Not that they didn't come very close.
The shuttle had numerous design flaws. The use of solid fuel. A booster that was assembled in seven different sections, fastened, and sealed with rubber o-rings. Go-fever. Foam insulation that was known to fall off and strike the orbiter during launch.
Not that space flight isn't dangerous. My point is we can do a lot better with proper designs and attitudes. SpaceX also gets to examine and improve their stages in a way that has never been possible now that they come back in one piece.
Early passenger planes were pretty dangerous to, but they got around the above problem by a) being much faster than trains, making the risk worth it, b) having clear military applications, the military being less worried about losing the occasional aircrew.
I don't really see how SpaceX gets around that chicken and egg problem.
Remember, this point-to-point idea was basically an after-thought. It's decades away, but the rocket will be launching within the next 3-5 years. So they'll have decades to get it right, and the manufacturing line and much of the infrastructure will be paid for.
But you're right about demand. The biggest economic problem is that it's too big. Each BFR needs 1000 passengers. To be economic, it needs to fly multiple times per day, so each BFR needs to fly like a million people every year. Look around to how many people fly long-haul, and you saturate the existing market VERY quickly.
BUT the world is getting richer. Soon (50-80 years?), there will be 5-10 billion middle class folk in the world, an order of magnitude more than now. And if the time for travel can be cut short like this, then you should have some demand induction taking place. So maybe it'd start making economic sense.
There is a fundamental advantage for BFR versus existing aircraft: SpaceX is able to make Falcon 9s and probably BFRs for about the same cost (a little less, actually) per unit dry mass as a 737 or 777 or A380. But a BFR can do trips that'd last 15 hours in a 777 or A380 in less than 1 hour. That means you can do 10 times as many trips, cutting your amortization time and crew hours by an order of magnitude. But that depends on having enough demand, which is pretty questionable except in the long-term.
Honestly, that's kind of why the BFR idea kind of worries me. It feels like SpaceX analysed the need for orbital space-flights, and realized there was unlikely to ever be the kind demand that would provide the economies of scale needed to do what they want. On the otherhand, there's undeniably a large demand for terrestrial travel, so they came up with a way to use rockets for that purpose. It feels like something to show investors, rather than a workable plan.
But hopefully I'm wrong. Economics aside, its certainly cool, and it would be nice to have an application for terrestrial missiles other than nuclear annihilation.
"with so few flights" is the operative phrase there.
Current launch market is about 60-100/year.
This is why SpaceX invented its constellation: not only does it allow them to make a lot more money than just doing a few dozen launches per year, but it allows them to generate their own demand for launches to justify these crazy Mars rockets. The constellation is for about 12,000 satellites replaced every 4 years or so. Initially 500kg, but Mueller (rocket guy) recently hinted they could get much larger (so let's say 50-100 tons). Therefore, they'll be able to self-generate between 30 and 3000 annual BFR launches on their own. This point to point thing is another add-on market, could be even larger from a launch volume perspective (but, interestingly, smaller from a addressable-market revenue perspective than the constellation). With 3000 flights per year and margin to spare (and the benefit of post-inspection of the rocket in case of a near-miss), you should be about 100-1000x as reliable as today's crewed rockets just to start. Now add point-to-point, and you can do 50,000 BFR flights per year...
The US Armed Forces would pay a LOT of money to move 100+ tons of personnel and materiel anywhere on earth with a flat landing spot in under 60 minutes.
You could have tanks on the ground that were fully operational in under 3 hours (probably half that if they left the BFR packed and fueled for takeoff at all times), or a disaster recovery base set up within 24 hours of the winds dying down (to pick a more topical example.)
But who knows. The idea of a big capsule coming down in a war zone and a bunch of tanks and marines rolling out certainly seems pretty cool, and I'm sure Musk and his lobbyists will at least try and convince the DoD that its something worth throwing a lot of $$ at.
To put it another way, it seems likely that the safety will increase by that much. Before airplanes, hang gliders were one of the most popular ways to fly, along with balloons. Gliders were incredibly unsafe, because pilots were expected to control the glider by shifting their body weight. This made stalls fatal, since you couldn't recover.
Consistently, my colleagues have made remarks along the lines of "I'll take the 1,000th flight after I know it's safe enough". I grew up with cars and airliners so I'm not sure what the process of convincing the public of BFR's safety will actually look like or how long it will take. For all I know, they'll give out the first 100 rides for free or at huge discounts, making all of these thoughts moot.
Cheers.
I wonder how you constructed that comparison such that it seemed meaningful. I'm pretty sure the lesson when you look at the data would be "fly on a man-rated Soyuz, not a Space Shuttle."
135 missions, 2 lost.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a6611/us-space-shuttle...
(Soyuz capsules have had one or two pretty hard landings that I'm aware of. That's a failure mode that the newer capsules probably won't have.)
So if we say 3 x 134 on Soyuz, there are 402 person-trips and 6 x 135 on Shuttle it is 810 person-trips. There were 4 Soyuz fatalities and 14 on the shuttle. So Soyuz fatality rate is about 1/100 and the shuttle is 1/56. So maybe it is closer to a factor 2 of difference.
The fatal mission rate is nearly identical (both have 2 fatal missions each).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_manned_space_m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_manned_space_mi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_missions
It's a valid concern, but it's only a matter of time before each new technology is perfected and made safe.
The exact same debates took place when Stephenson built his locomotive.
No idea. But the fastest flight (non stop) from NYC to Shanghai right now is almost 15 hours. This promises 39 minutes.
Would you rather fly 15 hours with a laptop than 39 minutes without?
If Musk is proposing this idea then I assume it won't be too expensive, even for rich people. So it should cost significantly less than what private jet trip costs them (because the BFR is not so private after all).
Of course, the faster time to destination should also balance things out, but I have a feeling a trip would be more like 2h with the boat trips and waiting time included, because as others have said, I doubt the launchpad will be that close to shore.
http://australianaviation.com.au/2014/05/gulfstream-offers-l...
https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/
What's a NYC to SHA full fare one way, about $800? I wonder if he is also getting into the fuel business? So if this rocket holds 200 people, that only gives him $160k in revenue. Fuel for the smaller Falcon is more than that per launch. Or is this baseless hype?
So we're looking at more like $400-$600k revenue per launch. And honestly, if prices came in at 50% more than traditional airlines, you're looking at a hell of a great deal to cut your travel time dramatically.
Something that many 20-somethings have already perfected over many iterations.
A built-in tablet that turns on automatically in each seat might solve this problem. But then someone will have to offer wireless internet in space.
We should focus on making the Holodeck, not rockets.
Since he's focusing on that, why don't you go ahead and focus on making the holodeck. Thanks!
Once reliability is proven one could even start thinking about nuclear powered rockets and get those CO2 emissions to zero. I'm sure it is on Elon Musk's mind and Mueller has even mentioned looking into nuclear rockets. Solar system travel could really use nuclear rockets to get reasonable travel travel times.
As for the very HN-ish "why don't you just go make XYZ?" retort, obviously it's because, like most of us (and unlike Elon Musk), I don't have the necessary truckloads of $100 bills necessary to make that happen. I'll get back to you after my windfall from selling PayPal...
Technology does not just progress by magic or money. People must do the hard work. The world is awash in capital at this moment with negative interest rates in some places. Physical resources (or money) is not the limitation for getting most new things done in the world at the moment. It is the complicated process of getting people working together, taking a million false steps, and not giving up before finally figuring out how to reach a goal.
Curiously, what was the 28K spent on? Maybe 12K for rent, tops for 1995. He even lived in the office. Someone chime in?
I would be really curious how much works has gone into neutral fuels. pretty sure lox and such can be made neutrally with solar powered chillers but what is his other fuel? a hydrogen type would be similar would it not?
But that says absolutely nothing about doing that on Earth vs all the other much cheaper alternatives.
Original comment:
Carbon footprint is just one way of measuring the impact on climate, but that's only because CO2 is the biggest pollutant. However, methane (CH4) is much much much better in trapping heat. 19 times more potent over a 5 year period, or 4 times more over a 100 year period (source: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-ca...).
This is despite having the same number of carbon. So technically the "carbon footprint" is zero if, as Elon said, you're extracting carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere, but if you change it to CH4, you're worsening by a big factor the impact on climate. Maybe over thousands of years that factor goes down to 1x but still...
All this is assuming you extract CH4 from atmosphere, which is extremely unlikely for economical reasons, as others have pointed out.
That said, I think those are the two primary issues. Airplanes, cars and trains can break on you, but they generally won't explode.
Your head would be happy but your heart might disagree. If a good chunk of the passengers gets moved to the ER, happy but with heart issues I think it won't be very popular.
:).
That is ignoring safety, and other pros and cons such as Falcon Heavy didn't fly yet, Space-X doesn't have a passenger module, frequency and economic scale of passenger operation, different flight profile from LEO, lack of regulatory framework, and so on
They've already solved the hardest problem: landing a rocket upright
Back of the envelope calculation more or less confirming that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15362976
A terrible idea, as the risk of accidental nuclear war is far too high. There's no way to tell if an ICBM launch is conventional or nuclear.
Also, you can just generate that fuel from the air and make it carbon neutral if that was really the issue.
If it becomes that common, it will be well within the major power's ability to block 1.5% of the sunlight that hits the Earth by posting sunshades at L1.
Surely burning a country's worth of rocket fuel every time you want to travel long distance is not sustainable?
It doesn't take that many airliner flights to match that power output.
It can be stressful not to have any idea of what is happening outside, but you can simply alleviate that with external cameras and screens on board.
Pan Am once offered tickets to the Moon.
Model S: 70k
Model 3: 35k
Air Force launches with SpaceX are less than half the price of ULA launches. [2]
Can you clarify how you believe Musk's companies haven't delivered?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-10/tesla-s-s...
[2] https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/16/us-air-force-spacex-ula-...
From their site "Initial trial installations are complete and undergoing evaluation, customer installations are about to start and will ramp up through 2017."
https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
Seems like it needs an update, 2017 is almost over...
But of course, the opposite is true: Being, Lockheed, GM, Ford, etc. enjoy a lot of help from the government (money and regulation) and use a bunch of dirty tactics against Musk's companies. And despite this, SpaceX and Tesla did things the incumbents were incapable of doing. In some cases things that were said to be impossible rather than just uneconomical.
I think at least the "usually" in your post is unwarranted.
Falcon 9: ~100 million
Land anywhere flat after the troops have jumped, refuel and recover later.
Like the deck of an aircraft carrier? A specialized glider-reentry vehicle would allow the delivery of armored vehicles. It would also allow safer deployment of the rocket.
I hope Elon the best, but I wonder if that is happening here. SpaceX is going to sell Internet, do fast air travel, do space tourism, . . . . Same with Tesla: we aren't just a car company, we're a battery company! There is a hyperloop and a digging company and solar rooftops. I think it's true there are many opportunities, and history has had its conglomerates like GE, but there is risk in losing your focus.
Still, I'm thrilled he is pushing us forward!
If you can launch rockets capable of re-entry and reuse and need to finance building rockets to go to Mars, you can build rockets for cross-continental travel.
It's not like SpaceX is building a smartphone. They're building in their core competencies.
It's pretty clear that SpaceX is in the reusable rocket business. By your logic, Boeing didn't have focus, because they built seaplanes, flying boats, fighters, cargo planes, and passenger planes. (This is what they did, in the order that they did it.) They apparently had at least 5 business models. Whoops. I guess they didn't have a business model!
I mean, I guess the answer is pretty clear: the US Military will be the first customer for the BFR, before any transportation companies get it .. they already hold technology in reserve for their war-fighting abilities, so .. its going to be interesting to see what the MIC version of this is going to be .. assuming they don't already have it. (Some people think they do ..)
The capability you need to go suborbital from one side of the Earth to the other is essentially the same as what's needed to go into orbit. (Thus all the ICBMs that got repurposed as orbital launchers.) Any vehicle that can't reach orbit probably can't do what BFR could do.
Hoping for the former, but if I were a civil servant I’d want to assume the latter and plan for surprise imagination.
'SAM-PRAS is a unique market-leading solution used by counter-terrorism agencies to identify potential MANPADS launch points within range of flight paths.'
I don't work for or have any association with this company BTW, just aware of their software.
Ease.
It is likely quite difficult to get an RPG without getting eyes on you, then driving to an airport with an RPG, then lining up a shot and hoping to hit a plane moving at 100+ MPH.
Or you can take a truck and drive it through a crowded mall.
It's so unlikely to work, that it would just be a means of getting yourself arrested. If rifles and RPGs were any good at bringing down planes, armies wouldn't need specialized AA. (They are pretty effective against landing helicopters, however.) Don't get me wrong. If you hit it at the right time and place, it would be destroyed. That's not nearly as easy as one might think.
Specialized AA weapons are another story, however. Then the problem becomes getting your hands on one.
The Tom Clancy-esque plot might involve a modern sniper rifle fired from a custom made gyro-stabilized platform. The low rent version might involve some drones supplying realtime crosswind data. Alternatively, there might be a guided 0.50 cal bullet. http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/29/us/us-military-self-guided-bul...
-ELO 1982 "Here is the news"
what about making one of those the new airforce one?
Urgent signing and cancelling of business deals in person, or delivery of high tech expertise or knowledgable staff.
Have you ever taken any long-haul flight? I guess some people don't mind, but I find it excruciating.
Few people have to be somewhere in an hour. But lots of people would love to.
Today the biggest problem with, specifically, trans-pacific flights is that you burn an entire day in travel, both ways. That means if you want to take a weekend to go somewhere, you can't, because 2 days minus 2 days is zero days, you have no time to actually spend doing anything. And that's aside from the recovery time of that much air travel. Short duration trips are then only reasonable if you can cram in some very high priority activity, which is very limiting. For shorter trip times it becomes feasible to squeeze in short trips on a more regular basis. I had a coworker who lived in the Seattle area and flew down to LA every weekend to visit his wife for several months. That's only feasible if you can cram travel into Friday/Sunday evenings. That sort of thing will become possible with a service like BFREE.
Most importantly, you don't burn entire days in travel, you simply add travel as a component into those days. These flights are expected to be in the $10k range, so basically anyone who makes more than about $4m a year will have a straight up logical cost/benefit reason to use BFREE for long distance flights instead of air travel, because it means they get the majority of that whole day back, instead of burning it flying.
Um, let me think about that for, no, wait. I'll take the hour, please.
Why is the Concorde not in service anymore? Simple: it was a very little market, over-polluting for over-privileged and we do not need that to enhance traveling, we already tried! How would this BFR be different?
They will build this rocket anyway, the will have to make it reusable anyway. All they did is consider using it as a transporter for people on earth.
Its just one way the can potentially make money with this technology. Does not hurt to try. No reason to shit on the idea and claim its some absurd fantasy.
Indeed it doesn't hurt to try!
"Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that."