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Comment by KoftaBob | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who wants to travel to/from the US to Europe in 3.5 hours instead of 7-8 hours, and other similar length trips.

Similar to the history of regular air travel, it will be the wealthy that indulge in the convenience of those time savings at first, and then as economies of scale and efficiency improve, it can become the norm.

There's a reason why the term "jet-setters" came about in the 50s-60s to mean wealthy people. Nowadays flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up.

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> Similar to the history of regular air travel, it will be the wealthy that indulge in the convenience of those time savings at first

That was the theory behind Concorde half a century ago.

Flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up because the industry learned from the lack of demand for Concorde and optimised for fuel efficiency instead of speed

I think supersonic flight will never become the norm. Boom Overture would, if Boom succeeds, be more fuel efficient than the Concorde but definitely not more fuel efficient than a modern subsonic airliner. And subsonic jets are 'fast enough' for most people who don't have cash burning a hole in their pocket.

It really depends on the price, if it's 2 x subsonic-econ then I think they have a real winner (I would personally pay that, its like doing premium economy), but if its 5x or 10x maybe not

I am afraid the ordinary people are hitting on physical realities though. The jet fuel required will never be cheap enough for them to fly supersonic jets. Maybe rocket travel yes, though, because you can scale that way more than the jet.

> Maybe rocket travel yes, though, because you can scale that way more than the jet.

What?

Jets carry hundreds of thousands of pounds of payload - a 747 can carry nearly 250,000lbs of payload.

Rockets carry payloads in the range of thousands pounds at most. Simply making your rocket bigger isn't an easy solution, and you start burning a ton more fuel for marginal payload gains.

It also doesn't cost $90 Million to fly a 747 every time it takes off...

Spacex-Starship with a booster below it could put that weight suborbital to the other side of the world and should only cost a few million per flight since the hardware is reused each time

A few million?

$90 Million is the current cost of a reusable Falcon Heavy[1].

Even if you cut that in half, that's still 10's of millions more expensive than flying a 747 between two destinations.

For comparison, it costs - on the high end - $27,000 per hour of flight to operate a 747[2]. For a 12 hour flight, that's ~$324,000 of cost, or about 0.72% of the fictitious $45 Million-Per-Launch "Starship".

There is no reality where flying a rocket is cheaper than an airplane.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy

[2] https://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-ai....

Rockets might not be cheaper but it could be close and they will beat the airplane by far on speed and views. Elon Musk is thinking/hoping that the cost for SpaceX to launch a 100 passenger Starship will be around $2 million[1] considering fuel and operational costs. The rockets will be fully reusable like airplanes and cost about the same to make. And, for long flights fuel use is similar. Hope it happens. Making rockets reusable was the key and SpaceX has been doing well with advancing that concept so far.

[1]https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-flight-passenger-cost-...

That's a whole lot of magical hand-waving right there.

For starters, even at these fantasy numbers, that's still $20,000 per seat. Who needs and/or wants that? Very few people, as Concorde found out, and as Boom will soon learn the same.

Rockets are also tremendously more dangerous and volatile than an airplane. If 1 out of 10,000 launches results in a total loss of the vehicle, and all passengers on board - we're not going to do it. Rockets are simply not a safe mode of transportation - particularly when compared to aviation.

Not to mention, you cannot launch with bad weather - or the possibility of bad weather... if it's too hot, or too cold, etc.

It's just not a realistic option.

Can't really know until you try. The physics does not prevent the possibility. Elon and the people at SpaceX are not just hand waving but actually working hard on making it a reality. Hope they do it.

A lot of people are willing to pay $250k for a minor sub-orbit hop in the Virgin spacecraft. I bet there are millions of people who would pay, at least once, to fly on one of these flights in conjunction with a trip from New York to Beijing or London to Australia. $20k is not much more than a two week luxury safari.

The comparison of the risk of rocket travel to the risk of helicopter travel is more realistic. That is the level of risk many wealthy people are willing to take to save time.

How many people actually go on luxury safari's?

How many people will actually pay $250k for a spaceship ride? I know everyone says they would, but who actually has the means to do so?

How many people will actually pay $20k for this fictitious rocket travel ride? That's the eqivilent of a decent brand new car.

The reality is there's a finite amount of people who have the means to do actual space tourism. You run out of these people after a short while... and then you go bankrupt.

And no, you cannot compare rockets with helicopter safety. It's well known helicopters aren't the most safe mode of transportation - but they do not spontaneously explode either. They are far safer than a rocket - arguing otherwise is disingenuous.

The first steam engines spontaneously exploded. The first internal combustion engines spontaneously exploded. I'm sure the first helicopters did also. Nobody has really tried to advance rocket technology since the early 1970's. That's only 25 years after Sputnik and 40 years after the V2. 1970 is 50 years ago.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 to start advancing rocket tech again and has made amazing advances so far. I agree that the West's safety first environment of today that rocket travel seems way too unsafe for most, but there still plenty of people that don't have that mind set. I would say too each their own, but would you advocate that no one should even try?

This transportation idea with rockets is also just a side business opportunity for the Starship. If the Earth flights work out then many more of them can be sold and launched, bringing down cost and increasing the rate of improvements. The main reason for building it is to dramatically reduce the cost of putting things into space and traveling to and from Mars.

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