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