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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Two little issues: safety and ticket costs. Also, your average overweight tourist isn't going to be very happy at several G's.

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Extrapolating very naively from SpaceX prices[1] for Falcon Heavy to low earth orbit suggests a ticket price of about $150,000, at $1500 per kg

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

[1]http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

You don't need to reach orbital speed, only ballistic trajectory. So i guess fuel consumption is less than low earth orbit trips.

"About the same as full fare economy" So in the low thousands. Incredible if true.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/

Impressive if they achieve that. The price point they need to reach though for this to be feasible is business class. As suggested by the NY<->Shanghai route in the video, the major use for this would be distant business meetings that either have to be week long trips or video conferences. Instead they could be overnight or even day trips. Businesses have more buying power as well compared to consumers.

If they can maintain all ticket prices below $10,000 that would probably work. It would still be 2-3x what businesses normally pay, but they would arrive 10x faster, so it may be worth it at least for some. Musk just needs enough customers to make the business sustainable and so he can afford to build more such rockets and then keep dropping the price.

Business class isn't low enough. This thing has A380 passenger capacity and you can't fill an A380 with business class, there aren't enough rich people. You need economy.

Elon mentioned on stagram that cost would be about the same as an economy ticket on a current airliner.

I trust SpaceX to figure this out.

They've already solved the hardest problem: landing a rocket upright

Fuel cost is a constant for rocketry, there is nothing to figure out there, and people tend to go through a whole bunch of checks before they are allowed to be flown on a rocket to stop them from developing some critical issue in a place where there is no way to get help or be helped. You can't do emergency medical stuff while accelerating and decelerating in a rocket and this one is doing either one almost all the time.

Ah the total trip time is at most an hour. People have been stuck longer inside NYC subway. Also on most trans-atlantic flight emegency medical diversion can easily take more than an hour.

Yes, but you're at 1G during that time. Big difference.

Hey, I'm a bit overweight and I would be very much happy with the G's :).

That said, I think those are the two primary issues. Airplanes, cars and trains can break on you, but they generally won't explode.

> Hey, I'm a bit overweight and I would be very much happy with the G's :).

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.

Well, you just ruined my day. But probably saved my life, so thanks. :(.

:).

My thought also, how will landing feel?

The Raptor engine can throttle lower than the current Merlin they use in Falcon 9. This means they should be able to make a much softer/slower landing

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