The End of Affordable Travel
While the rich traverse the globe in an instant, the rest of us will be staying put
In September 2017, from an auditorium stage in Adelaide, Australia, Elon Musk offered a dramatic vision of humanity’s kinetic destiny. The occasion was the annual International Astronautical Congress. Musk was there to give a presentation on the BFR, the massive rocket vehicle his aerospace startup, SpaceX, is developing to power the first manned missions to Mars. (BFR officially stood for Big Falcon Rocket, but Musk, with his adolescent geek’s sense of humor, had long hinted it really meant Big Fucking Rocket. He has since renamed it Starship.)
At the end of the 40-minute talk, Musk played a concept video showing the BFR launching from a floating pad off the shore of New York City, exiting the atmosphere, circling Earth, and reentering to land on another maritime platform near Shanghai. Total travel time: 39 minutes. “If you’re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars, why not use it to go to other places on Earth as well?” Musk said.
A genius of publicity as much as engineering, Musk knows how to craft claims that attract attention. The tagline “anywhere on Earth in under an hour” circled the globe even faster than an artist-rendered BFR. But if it was ambitious, it wasn’t particularly surprising…
