ROCKET TRAVEL

At last year’s TED Talks, Tesla and SpaceX impresario Elon Musk waxed enthusiastically about taking travel out to the stars, this year his chief operating officer spoke of more terrestrial ambitions. SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell said that as a “residual capability” of its work getting rockets into space, the company will be able to develop point-to-point longhaul rocket travel between cities on earth.

The idea is to use the behemoth Big Falcon Rocket that SpaceX is developing, Shotwell said, and take off from platforms offshore from cities and land half way around the world in less than an hour. “Within a decade for sure,” Shotwell said to a stunned Chris Anderson, head of the TED organization. “Elon (Musk) would want us to go faster.” The theme of this year’s TED Talks is the “age of amazement,” and the concept Shotwell introduced certainly fits the description, but she said SpaceX is already conducting the pieces that need to be put together on a regular basis. The company is shooting rockets into space and returning booster engines to land on Earth. It is working with NASA, becoming comfortable working to persuade the U.S. federal government to let SpaceX use its Air Force ranges.

And because the SpaceX BFR will be able to make 10 times the number of trips a day that a long haul jet would, Shotwell argued that at 100 passengers a flight, it would be able to carry them at a cost of something between airline economy and business-class fares. “This is awesome, but it’s crazy and it’s never going to actually happen,” Anderson said. “Oh, no, this is definitely going to happen,” Shotwell answered.