In 2050, Flight Time From Europe to Australia Will Be 90 Minutes

mashable.com

8 points·dmoney67··13 comments

Aren't we supposed to have hoverboards and jetpacks by now? All we have is a million photosharing apps...

Isn't it commonly accepted that when R&D say "10 years" they actually mean "hopefully", "20 years" they mean "we don't know how to do it, but we might discover it" while "30+ years" means science fiction?

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/678/

> But he suggested the project could make enough progress to begin attracting private funding in another 10 years and aim for full operations by 2050.

So private enterprise will finance some project for 30 years before it starts to become operational? Considering that rocket scientists are usually not idiots, it seems that there could be an actually interesting story behind the "90 Minutes" headline.

http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10663/115...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceLiner

What is new here? Rocket powered aircraft concepts have been around at least since World War II. This seems to build on proven technology so why should we need to wait until 2050?

The Germans "considered" a sub-orbital bomber for attacking the US in WW2:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel

Brilliant, I'll be able to dock with it from my flying car :-/

you know that the 4h Paris-NY has been killed 10 years ago after more than 20 years of service right ? And what killed it is not technology but economy.

In 2013, Mashable is writing ridiculous headlines.

Sounds extremely inefficient, not to say it's a rocket. I can't even imagine how hard it would be to land this thing.

or maybe in 2050 only the super rich can afford to fly, because kerosine got so expensive? Who knows?

great.. in 2050 I'll be dead..

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