In space, you really do not want to have to use the motion sickness bag

Enough about Catalonia! What about point-to-point travel to anywhere on Earth in less than 45 minutes? That is the future Arthur C. Clarke promised me when I read Rendezvous with Rama as a boy ... and now that is the future Elon Musk is promising my son!

The idea is that SpaceX’s Big F--king Rocket (BFR) could be configured to propel a capsule containing 100 people to anywhere on Earth, where it would come in for a vertical landing. 

So I asked some friends, what could go wrong? And ... well.

We’ll start with the obvious one: these flights had better be damn well planned and pass only over friendly territory. We don’t want to be setting off nuclear strikes or losing the vessels to ABM fire. This is a serious problem, but a solvable one. After all, back in the 1940s people worried that nuclear weapons meant the end of international commercial aviation because of the threat of an atomic Pearl Harbor, but we managed to get over that one with only a few horrifying accidents. (KAL 007, Iran Air 655, and Malaysia Airlines 17, to name three.) 

I suspect that security will be just as strong as for current airplane flights, but I am not sure that it will need to be much stronger. These vehicles will not be hijackable, even if they have pilots, which I sort of doubt. 

But the next problem is insurance. In part that’s insurance against crashes and accidents. But that’s not the problem. The problem is insurance against catastrophic failures on the pad. Current launch insurance costs 10% of the vehicle cost. (Actually it’s 10% of the launch cost, but today rocket launchers are thrown away after a single use, save for a few SpaceX vehicles. Once the rockets are all reusable, the relevant metric will be 10% of the vehicle cost.) Moreover, insurance only kicks in once the rocket leaves the pad. Anything goes wrong before that and the rocket manufacturer is on the hook. And this is with spaceports located far away from population centers. Considering that the BFR lower stage could create a four-kiloton explosion should things really go wrong, we are not talking about a small issue.

Finally, there is another issue also identified by Sir Arthur Clarke: “It might not be unfair to say that in round-the-world satellite transportation, half the time the toilet is out of reach, and the other half of the time it is out of order.” In other words, these flights are not going to be comfortable. My first experience with zero-gee was on the old Freefall in New Jersey, in either 1987 or 1988. It was ... well. The second time was all right and the third time was fun, but the first time was unpleasant. I can say the same for getting thrown out of jumping out of an airplane over Georgia in 2004. Five times, hated each one. I am trying to imagine Very Important People capable of shelling out $10,000 for a ticket putting up with such adventure on a regular basis in lieu of a long trip in first class or holographic telecommuting. I am not succeeding. 

Anyway, it turns out the USDOT visited the issue back in 2010. They were not pessimistic, exactly, but optimistic neither. 

In short, this is super cool, the kind of thing I thought the future would hold, instead of the democracy-destroying social media and society-destroying artificial intelligence that we are getting. (Sure, portable videophones are neat.) Bad sadly I suspect that the cars will drive themselves well before we can fly rockets to Australia.

Comments

[Dave K]

There's really no solid proof that cheaper higher quality video teleconferencing (Tandberg ~2000) had an impact on the Concorde's bottom line by the time it was canceled in 2003.

Since 2003, tele-presence has drastically improved in quality and cost. I suspect a re-introduced Concorde would do even worse than in 2003.

What is the value proposition for a BFR with the options of both very high quality VTC and comfortable travel anywhere in under a day?

[J.H.]

Anywhere on the planet in under 45 minutes? It does seem kinda cool, but the applications seem somewhat limited as you noted. You can be virtually anywhere in the world in nanoseconds due to tele-presence, and without the jet lag (speaking of which, what would the jet lag be like after such a rocket trip halfway round the world?).

Plus in most cases it wouldn't really be anywhere on the planet, but anywhere on the planet with a suitable landing pad. Given that some countries today are still fairly inaccessible even to commercial aviation, commercial rocketry will likely also seem flights between just a few cities/countries at first

[James Davis Nicoll]

Unpleasant but fast seems an ideal choice when your valuable underlings whose skills are on-site use only need to be delivered to a remote city quickly. Crap twenty techies into a tin can, fire them off to Melbourne. Maybe not a huge niche and one telefactoring will undermine.

The bosses can travel slowly in luxury.

[Matthew McIrvin]

The most obvious problem I see is that this is horribly inefficient in every way. That's what killed the SST, and this is worse.