A few months back, I wrote about the prospect of colonising Mars. Tesla’s Elon Musk is a key figure in all this with his ambitious SpaceX programme. Late last month, Musk gave an update at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide where he unveiled a new launch vehicle system codenamed “BFR”.
The most interesting aspect of his speech was not about Mars but about what the BFR (Big Falcon Rocket) can do for inter-continental travel. Turns out, BFR is not just good for taking people to Mars; it can also be used to transport people from one side of the earth to the other — and in under an hour!
Musk, who many view to be the new Steve Jobs because of his visionary approach to technology, claims that under this system, passengers would be able to make most long distance trips within 30 minutes. Best of all, they can do it for cheap — at roughly the same price as an international economy-class airline ticket.
He accompanied his talk with a promo video that depicted passengers travelling from Manhattan to Shanghai in just 39 minutes. The video listed various trips which could be completed in less than an hour, such as Los Angeles to Toronto (24 minutes), Bangkok to Dubai (27 minutes) and London to Dubai (29 minutes).
Somehow though I don’t think Musk’s announcement has got Tony Fernandes lying awake at night. Super-fast intercontinental travel at economy prices sounds too good to be true — and it probably is.
TECHNOLOGY AND CHALLENGES
For sure, the underlying technology behind rocket travel is already well-established. You’ve probably heard of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), which several countries have in their military arsenals. These are usually designed to carry nuclear warheads. Musk’s plan is essentially for these rockets to carry people — about 100 at a time — instead of warheads.
But just because the technology is there doesn’t mean there aren’t any challenges. In fact, there are plenty, chief of which is how do you transport people comfortably in a rocket? Astronauts are trained to endure the strains of launch, fast speeds, re-entry and landing but this isn’t what ordinary people are used to.
It’s questionable whether anyone other than those who have been specially trained for space travel could take it. The strong gravitational forces followed by a period of weightlessness and then another strong gravitational pull would make even the worst airplane turbulence seem like a walk in the park.
This brings us to another crucial point: the training necessary for such a trip. The purpose of travelling by rocket is to save time. But in order to be able to make such a trip, surely the passengers will have to go through weeks, if not months of training to acclimatise their body to the strains of rocket travel. Will people be willing to do this rather than simply endure a long-haul airline flight? Compared to astronaut training, perhaps a 13-hour flight doesn’t seem so bad after all.
Then there’s the security aspect. The flight itself might take only half an hour but the time required to get passengers into the rocket, especially with the super strict security checks and the special outfits they’d have to wear, will surely take much longer than what it takes to board passengers onto a plane. It would probably take hours.
So, flight time: 30 minutes, boarding time: a few hours, training time: several weeks (if not months). Maybe it’s just not worth it.
Now, all this is assuming the economics of it makes sense. Remember Musk had claimed that you’d be able to do this for the price of an economy fare airline ticket. How he will be able to achieve this is not clear given how costly it is to launch a rocket.
OTHER FACTORS
For the sake of discussion, let’s assume all these challenges highlighted so far can be overcome. Let’s say he’s found a way to make the travel comfortable — or at least not unbearable — and you can load passengers onto the rocket quite quickly. Let’s also assume that he’s found a way to keep it cheap. There’s still the fear factor to deal with.
Do you remember how the Space Shuttle Columbia blew up in 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board? Now, imagine if something like that were to happen with Musk’s BFR rocket, killing all 100 people on board. All it would take is for one incident like that to scare off all future passengers.
It’s worth remembering what happened to the Concorde, which was able to fly at twice the speed of sound. Introduced in 1976, it was retired in 2003 by Air France and British Airways because of low passenger numbers following a high-profile 2000 crash which killed everyone on board. It was the only fatal accident involving the Concorde but that was enough to scare people off.
When you compare statistics for commercial airline and rocket crashes, it doesn’t look good for the latter. For commercial airlines, one in 500,000 flights results in a fatal crash. In contrast, one in 20 rocket launches fail.
For sure the world could use some revolutionary new way of intercontinental travel which would radically transform how international business is done. And maybe the solution isn’t necessarily rocket-based.
For all we know, Musk’s talk of BFR could be just hype to get people talking about high-speed intercontinental travel. But even that is a good thing. At least he has rekindled public interest in fast air travel. Hopefully it will spur interest among other technologists and industrialists — like Virgin’s Richard Branson for instance — and we could see super-fast air travel within our lifetime.
Oon Yeoh is a consultant with experiences in print, online and mobile media. reach him at oonyeoh@gmail.com