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Comment by hnuser123456 | Hacker News Reader

Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic passenger missile approach.

Isn't that specifically one of the types of travel predicted to be made possible by reusable rockets capable of landing on the ground? From Florida to Japan in 45 minutes type of thing

Yes point to point travel was a market for Starship. I think they’ve mostly backed off that though, as Starlink offers an easier market opportunity and just as much revenue potential.

The supersonic plane would have advantages over the rocket approach though. Rockers require long, inconvenient transfers to offshore launch facilities. (But would have the selling point of a microgravity transit.)

Reaction Engines in the UK spent over 35 years working mostly on that concept (though when they eventually went bust trying to scale up last year I think they were focused on reusable space launch business model which is ironically more realistic)

No, they were working on the latter (skylon) most of the time, though the new management that came in after their £60M investment quickly dropped SSTO in favour of more immediate RoI applications. The passenger plane was LAPCAT which was a paper study commissioned by the EU. They did some interesting real work too, such as designing and testing a hypersonic engine combustion chamber that could reduce NOx emissions, which would be a big problem in any ‘conventional’ (eg scramjet) hypersonic engine.

> Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic passenger missile approach.

The terminal deceleration on an ICBM trajectory would be lethal. Ballistic passenger transport at global distances has to be almost orbital so the entry is sufficiently shallow.

ICPM! That's a new acronym you just coined!

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