Eloп Mυsk has doпe it agaiп — aпd this time, he’s пot jυst aimiпg for the stars, bυt for the very laws of physics themselves.
Iп a jaw-droppiпg aппoυпcemeпt that seпt shockwaves across the aerospace world, Mυsk υпveiled SpaceX’s пewest creatioп: a sυpersoпic space jet that promises to blυr the liпe betweeп aviatioп aпd spaceflight. With techпology oпce thoυght impossible, this craft coυld mark the begiппiпg of a пew era iп hυmaп exploratioп.
Breakiпg the Barriers of Speed aпd Scieпce
Dυbbed “Project Helios” by iпsiders, the jet is rυmored to travel at speeds exceediпg Mach 10 — more thaп 12,000 km/h — allowiпg passeпgers to cross coпtiпeпts iп miпυtes aпd reach orbit iп υпder half aп hoυr. What’s eveп more astoпishiпg is its hybrid propυlsioп system, which traпsitioпs seamlessly from atmospheric flight to vacυυm operatioп withoυt traditioпal rocket boosters.
SpaceX eпgiпeers describe it as “a пew category of vehicle — part jet, part spacecraft, all revolυtioп.”
A Qυaпtυm Leap iп Desigп aпd Power
The secret lies iп its plasma-field eпgiпe techпology, capable of creatiпg a magпetized airflow that drastically redυces drag while maiпtaiпiпg stability at hypersoпic speeds. This iппovatioп coυld make loпg-raпge space travel faster, cheaper, aпd dramatically safer.
Mυsk revealed that the craft’s desigп υses self-healiпg carboп composites aпd AI-gυided stabilizatioп — materials aпd systems developed throυgh years of Starship research aпd пext-geп military collaboratioпs.
“The Fυtυre of Iпterplaпetary Travel Begiпs Now”
Staпdiпg before a massive crowd at the SpaceX Starbase iп Texas, Mυsk declared, “If Starship was aboυt reachiпg Mars, this is aboυt makiпg it roυtiпe.”
He hiпted that the jet coυld be operatioпal for short orbital tests by 2026, with early missioпs possibly iпclυdiпg poiпt-to-poiпt Earth travel, where passeпgers coυld fly from New York to Tokyo iп υпder aп hoυr — all withoυt ever leaviпg the atmosphere.
A New Space Race Begiпs
Withiп hoυrs of the reveal, aerospace competitors aпd aпalysts were left scrambliпg to assess the implicatioпs. Some called it “the Coпcorde of the cosmos.” Others, more caυtioυsly, warпed that Mυsk’s ambitioпs have a habit of oυtpaciпg regυlatioп aпd feasibility.
Bυt eveп skeptics admit: if SpaceX caп deliver oп eveп half of what’s promised, it woυld represeпt a leap iп traпsportatioп as sigпificaпt as the first powered flight.
As Mυsk closed his preseпtatioп, he looked skyward aпd said:
“Hυmaпity was пever meaпt to crawl. We were meaпt to fly — aпd beyoпd that, to soar.”
Aпd jυst like that, the fυtυre of travel may have takeп flight.
London to New York in ‘30 minutes’: Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Drastically Reduce Travel Times with Starship
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, is aiming for a radical future in which Starship rockets link major cities in a matter of minutes. Soon, you’ll be able to travel from London to New York in just 30 minutes. But how exactly will this game-changing technology work, and what obstacles remain?
Published on November 15, 2024 at 13:15|
Written by Arezki Amiri|Reading time : 3 minutes
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Elon Musk and SpaceX have revealed a bold plan to cut the time it takes to travel between major cities by an incredible margin. The company’s flagship rocket, Starship, which is typically designed for space exploration, could soon offer passengers the ability to travel between cities on Earth at mind-blowing speeds—including a journey from London to New York in just 29 minutes.
A New Era of Earth-to-Earth Travel
Starship, currently the most powerful rocket ever built, isn’t just a vehicle for space missions. SpaceX’s ambitions go far beyond the stars, with Musk envisioning a world where long-haul flights are a thing of the past. By utilizing Starship for Earth-to-Earth travel, SpaceX aims to make it possible to reach any location on the planet in less than an hour. This would be a monumental shift in how we think about international travel.
Features of SpaceX’s Starship:
- Top Speed: 27,000 km/h (around 25 times faster than a commercial jet).
- Flight Time Examples:
- London to New York: 29 minutes
- New York to Paris: 30 minutes
- Honolulu to Tokyo: 30 minutes
- Tokyo to Delhi: 30 minutes
- Sydney to Singapore: 31 minutes
- LA to London: 32 minutes
- London to Hong Kong: 34 minutes
- London to Cape Town: 34 minutes
- Sydney to Delhi: 36 minutes
- New York to Sydney: 49 minutes
The rocket would be launched from a sea-based platform, meaning passengers would first travel to the launch site by boat before boarding the spacecraft for a supersonic flight. This setup not only cuts down on launch site logistics but also mitigates the noise concerns that would arise from launching rockets near populated areas.
A High-Speed, Roller-Coaster-Like Experience
For those wondering about the comfort and safety of such high-speed travel, Elon Musk has provided some insights. In earlier discussions, he compared the experience to a roller coaster, suggesting that the rocket would be a fast, high-thrill ride that requires passengers to remain seated throughout the journey. He even mentioned the use of a restraint system, similar to Disney’s Space Mountain roller coaster, to ensure passengers’ safety during the high-speed ascent and descent.
Additionally, Musk mentioned that most flights would last only 15 to 20 minutes once the Starship is operational for Earth-to-Earth flights, with some journeys being as short as 5 minutes for very close locations. Given the rocket’s speed, this would make travel more akin to taking a hypersonic missile—just one that lands softly on the other side of the world.
Technical Specifications
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Maximum Speed | 27,000 km/h (Mach 25) |
| Passenger Capacity | 1,000 passengers |
| Flight Duration | < 30 minutes for most routes |
| Rocket Launch Platform | Sea-based platform |
| Flight Type | High-speed, Earth-to-Earth travel |
The implications of such a high-speed transportation system would be vast. Shorter travel times would likely foster increased international tourism, facilitate business meetings across continents, and perhaps even reduce the environmental impact of air travel, given the efficiency of the Starship design compared to traditional jets. However, with such technological advancements, there are also potential challenges.
Challenges and Considerations
- Regulatory Approval: The road to operational Earth-to-Earth flights isn’t without obstacles. SpaceX would need to navigate complex regulatory frameworks in different countries, including the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which governs air travel in the United States. Musk has hinted that the rocket could be cleared during a potential future presidential administration, but this remains to be seen.
- Safety and Comfort: While the thrill of traveling at Mach 25 is exciting, the safety of passengers remains a top concern. The technology required to make such flights smooth and safe at such high speeds will be critical, especially for those not accustomed to the intense g-forces associated with space travel.
- Cost and Accessibility: As with any new technology, the cost of operating such flights would likely be high at first, potentially making it an exclusive mode of travel. Over time, however, the hope is that it could become more affordable as the technology matures and demand increases.
The Future of Global Travel
SpaceX’s Starship could usher in a new era of ultra-fast global travel, with the potential to reshape how we connect across continents. While there are still many hurdles to overcome, including regulatory approval and technological refinement, the concept of Earth-to-Earth travel at hypersonic speeds is a tantalizing glimpse into the future. Whether it’s a business meeting in London, a vacation in Sydney, or a dinner in Paris, the prospect of reaching any destination on Earth in under an hour could soon be a reality.
My very fun Conversation with Blake Scholl
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. This was at a live event (the excellent Roots of Progress conference), so it is only about forty minutes, shorter than usual. Here is the episode summary:
Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he’s building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he’s equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it’s airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept.
Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why every road needs a toll, what’s wrong with how we board planes, the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon, why Concorde and Apollo were impressive tech demos but terrible products, what Ayn Rand understood about supersonic transport in 1957, what’s wrong with aerospace manufacturing, his heuristic when confronting evident stupidity, his technique for mastering new domains, how LLMs are revolutionizing regulatory paperwork, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: There’s plenty about Boom online and in your interviews, so I’d like to take some different tacks here. This general notion of having things move more quickly, I’m a big fan of that. Do you have a plan for how we could make moving through an airport happen more quickly? You’re in charge. You’re the dictator. You don’t have to worry about bureaucratic obstacles. You just do it.
SCHOLL: I think about this in the shower like every day. There is a much better airport design that, as best I can tell, has never been built. Here’s the idea: You should put the terminals underground. Airside is above ground. Terminals are below ground. Imagine a design with two runways. There’s an arrival runway, departure runway. Traffic flows from arrival runway to departure runway. You don’t need tugs. You can delete a whole bunch of airport infrastructure.
Imagine you pull into a gate. The jetway is actually an escalator that comes up from underneath the ground. Then you pull forward, so you can delete a whole bunch of claptrap that is just unnecessary. The terminal underground should have skylights so it can still be incredibly beautiful. If you model fundamentally the thing on a crossbar switch, there are a whole bunch of insights for how to make it radically more efficient. Sorry. This is a blog post I want to write one day. Actually, it’s an airport I want to build.
And;
COWEN: I’m at the United desk. I have some kind of question. There’s only two or three people in front of me, but it takes forever. I notice they’re just talking back and forth to the assistant. They’re discussing the weather or the future prospects for progress, total factor productivity. I don’t know. I’m frustrated. How can we make that process faster? What’s going wrong there?
SCHOLL: The thing I most don’t understand is why it requires so many keystrokes to check into a hotel room. What are they writing?
What are they writing?
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James
This is an odd, softball interview. Zero discussion of the status of Boom’s proposed product, which is – let’s be honest – the only reason that Scholl is relevant.
It’s a bit strange that Scholl, here and in other venues, is treated as some kind of general thought leader, when in fact he’s a startup founder whose company has a very long way to go and whose success is far from certain.
I hope Boom succeeds and give Scholl credit for taking a shot at something very hard, but it’s kind of grating to seem him doing adulatory softball interviews as if he’s already succeeded, and to see him taking snarky shots on Twitter at Boeing, which, despite its issues, has accomplished vastly more than Boom has.
Boom needs to design and build a new cutting-edge jet engine and a new supersonic passenger plane, each of which is a separate monumental task. Then they need to get the plane certified, and then they need to achieve commercial success. If I were interviewing Scholl, I would take at least a few minutes to drill into the details of how those things are actually going.
RAD
James: This is an odd, softball interview. Zero discussion of the status of Boom’s proposed product, which is – let’s be honest – the only reason that Scholl is relevant.
COWEN: There’s plenty about Boom online and in your interviews, so I’d like to take some different tacks here.
TL;DR: RTFM
James
Yes, I saw that Tyler said that, but it isn’t really true that these answers are easily available elsewhere. As I said, Boom gets a lot of hype and a lot of softball interviews.
MikeP
The thing I most don’t understand is why it requires so many keystrokes to check into a hotel room.
Hotel rooms seem quick to me. It’s also a pleasant, unpressured conversation. You’re where you want to be.
Rental cars is what I don’t get. Run the card, scan the license, give me a car.
If I have signed up for the loyalty program, I can walk right to a car. But what have I provided there but not in an ordinary reservation that has to be typed in if I’m not in the loyalty program?
It appears to be punitive for not being in the loyalty program. Punitive for me and for everyone in line behind me who is also not in the loyalty program.
Damn, everyone says. We should be in the loyalty program.
Dick King
The car rental keystrokes are for two reasons:
1: The agent is required to try to upsell the crapola that almost nobody wants, and also “we can give you a behemoth car that you can’t park downtown and that we have to have in our fleet because somebody might need it, for the same price because otherwise we’ll not sell it today.”
They also do have to check that your license is in good standing.
-dk
RAD
TIL: Why does it require so many keystrokes to check into a hotel room—what are they writing?
Short version: They’re not “writing a novel” — they’re fighting broken, aging hotel software, re-entering the same data in multiple disconnected systems, complying with legal identity requirements, and correcting errors in real time.
Below is the real breakdown…
It’s ironic that I’m writing this in reply to MikeP but, during the Covid pandemic, it became very clear—in Ontario anyway—that healthcare and other public institutions ran on a smorgasbord of siloed information systems from the 90s.
AI can help, moving forward, by first redesigning internal workflows to deliver a better customer experience (CX) and second, using coding agents to port/rewrite internal software to support this improved CX workflow.
AI-Augmented Two-Pizza teams FTW 😉
Rinse and repeat for every task/workflow described in GDPval 1.0 and future versions. This is the slow diffusion phase of a technology platform pivot rather than a FOOMy fast-takeoff.
MikeP
I do have to say I was pleasantly surprised picking up a car last night.
Budget directed Costco reservation holders to the garage to kiosks next to the loyalty desk. There were four kiosks there that were unmanned at that hour, but the loyalty desk took care of it. They quickly handed us the keys to a car fresh from the wash, still running.
What more is Costco telling Budget than an ordinary reservation tells them that lets them do that?
It’s plain price discrimination. It is faster for them to just hand everyone with a credit card and a drivers license a car than to do anything else, yet they don’t. But for some reason they don’t want to punish the warehouse club customer. Is it that they grandfather in another company’s loyalty club? Is it an agreement with Costco to treat their customers better?
Whatever it is, in the highly competitive rental car market where companies handle tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory, it isn’t an unwillingness to spend a few million dollars on better software.
