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Gwynne Shotwell: SpaceX's Plan to Fly You Across the Globe in 30 Minutes [video]
- cthulhujr 8y ago>This is the only time I've out-visioned Elon ... I want to meet other people in other solar systems. You're not out-visioning Elon; it's a petty attempt at one-upmanship. It just doesn't seem genuine. I want to meet people in other Superclusters. Now she's been out-visioned!
- ncallaway 8y ago> "it's a petty attempt at one-upmanship" I think it was just a light-hearted joke.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> it's a petty attempt at one-upmanship Gwynne Shotwell is SpaceX's President [1]. She and Elon are on the same team. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
- gfosco 8y agoIt was an attempt at humor. Take a deep breath and try to do something useful today.
- igravious 8y agoEmployee #7 at SpaceX didn't you hear? Relax, they're on the same team.
- AskewEgret 8y agoAnd a really interesting life story. I like how she randomly ended up in the job: https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/rocket-maam.html https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/roc... > Four years into the job, Shotwell had lunch with a co-worker who had just joined the then-startup company SpaceX. They walked by the cubicle of CEO Elon Musk. “I said, ‘Oh, Elon, nice to meet you. You really need a new business developer,’” Shotwell recalls. “It just popped out. I was bad. It was very rude.” > Or just bold enough to capture Musk’s attention. He called her later that day in 2002 and recruited her to be vice president of business development, his seventh employee. She wrestled with the decision. “The history of startup rocket companies isn’t exactly great,” explains Hughes, SpaceX senior vice president and general counsel. “This was not necessarily the safest play.”
- bluGill 8y agoYou will never meet anyone from another solar system. Even if we assume such life exists (it might or might not - either is extraordinary), there is every reason to believe it is far away. It would be extraordinary again if that life is close enough to earth that the round trip of a radio transmission is within a human lifetime. There are just a few hundred (I wasn't able to find an exact number) starts within 25 light years - 50 year round trip time for a radio signal. We know of hundreds of earth like planets, but only by a definition that includes mars which is pretty much dead.
- Semirhage 8y agoWhat would be the environmental impact of ubiquitous rocket launches for business travel?
- btcindivist 8y agoDepends on how many. Flying airplanes is around 1-2% of our total CO2 footprint. Of course, for an individual, doing 1 intercontinental flight with a full plane is equivalent to months if not a year of driving a car to work every day, but in total, not many people fly. Depending on the efficiency of the rocket and the reduced number of people doing this, the numbers shouldn't be that much higher.
- Retric 8y agoThat's not really the case. Per passenger mile commercial aircraft get ~70MPG with longer flights tending to have better fuel economy. The trend is really interesting: http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/business/the_juice/2014/07/140715_JUI_AirplanePollutionChart.png.CROP.original-original.png http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/business/the... So, they are actually very efficient transportation for long trips. Absolute worst case flying around the world is 24,901 mi which uses the same fuel per person as a 35 MPG car commuting 26 miles each way for one year. PS: You can double check this by considering ~1/3 of the cost of a seat as being spent on fuel.
- btcindivist 8y agoWhat is not the case? 1-2% of total CO2 footprint? That flying a full plane is equivalent to months if not a year of driving a nontrivial distance every day? I'm not saying cars are more efficient. It's just that the distance travelled is huge when one uses an airplane.
- Retric 8y agoMany people use more fuel in a month getting to and from work than a round trip NYC to London flight. It comes down to both distance and fuel economy with some commuters putting in over 1000 miles a week. The range for commuting fuel uses vs transatlantic flight is much wider than 10x months to year.
- bmcusick 8y agoThe main thing I'm thinking of is noise pollution. You think living near an airport is loud? I cannot even imagine what living near a BFR spaceport would be like. For coastal cities maybe it would be worth it to build a landing pad on an ocean platform some miles out to sea, but what about for cities like Atlanta or Beijing? There's nowhere around them to build that isn't already a suburb.
- ceejayoz 8y agoI'd expect a city like Atlanta to be served by an off-shore landing zone, with high speed rail (hyperloop!) as the connection.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 8y agoAtlanta is very open to running public transit lanes into the area and land acq is cheap OTP. /s
- rst 8y agoFloating platforms do, in fact, feature prominently in their point-to-point travel concept video. No clue what they'd do for travel to, say, Denver or Paris.
- bdamm 8y agoPerhaps, but maybe the model ends up being only a handful of BFR ports on each continent. Would you fly 1 hour to Mojave so you could rocket to SE Asia and fly another 1 hour to Singapore? Sign me up!
- mkirklions 8y agoSpaceX is promising something that is feasibly decades away? Do people still believe in Elon? Or have we figured out these are advertisements.
- randyrand 8y agoHe's not promising it. Despite the optimistic language, its a somewhat-realistic dream that he'd like to do and plans to work on. At least that seems obvious to me.
- Diederich 8y agoAs far as timelines go, Gwynne Shotwell is in an entirely different class than Elon Musk. If you haven't watched the video, you should, there's some interesting tension going on between her and Elon. If she says it'll happen in the next X years, I'll put it at a >75% chance of being accurate. If Elon said something like that, i'd put it at 33% chance.
- larrydag 8y agoAs a business model I think SpaceX should be a manufacturer and not in the transportation business akin to Boeing or Airbus. There is a ton of logistics involved in transporting people globally. Of course there is the safety issues as well.
- sandworm101 8y ago>> safety issues as well. And vomit. 4+G on launch. Freefall during cruise. 5+ G on reentry. Give me the first class ticket on a BA flight any day.
- Ajedi32 8y agoThat sounds amazing actually. As of today, I'd consider a few minutes of micro gravity to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. If that ever becomes something you can experience for the price of an airline ticket, I'd consider the ride itself to be worth the price of admission all on its own. Obviously not for everyone, but you don't really need to be able to service _everyone_ to be profitable.
- ksherlock 8y agoYou can do it today for the price of a reduced-gravity aircraft ticket (~$5,000, https://www.gozerog.com https://www.gozerog.com)
- zip1234 8y agoThe vomit can be fixed by the standard issue vomit bag! \s
- huslage 8y agoSpaceX already are in the transportation business...they launch payloads into space today. Boeing and Airbus are manufacturers of those payloads and aircraft and whatever else, but they don't routinely operate them.
- mulmen 8y agoBoeing (later United Aircraft) used to operate their own airline (later United Airlines). They also bought Pratt & Whitney, Hamilton Standard, Chance Vought, National Air Transport, and Pacific Air Transport. They were vertically integrated across the airline industry by the end of the 1920s. This all culminated in the Air Mail Act of 1934 [1] which prohibited airlines and airplane manufacturers from operating under the same corporate umbrella. It will be interesting to see where this ends up with SpaceX integrating the consumer facing airline operation with rocket manufacturing. Something commercial airlines are not able to do.
- aphextron 8y agoRocket based travel will never ever ever happen on a widespread scale simply because of the G forces involved. Passengers on an airliner will begin feeling uncomfortable at around 1.2 G's and > 20 degrees of bank angle. The thought of subjecting regular paying passengers to 3+ G's and a full 360 degrees of pitch/roll is absurd. It could definitely be a niche thing for people that are physically fit, but this just isn't the way to go for high speed transportation. More traditional airframes and scramjets are far more likely to make hypersonic travel a reality.
- ceejayoz 8y agoIf John Glenn could do a Shuttle flight at 77, I suspect you're overstating the difficulties here. People voluntarily subject themselves to 3+ Gs and 360 degrees pitch/roll at amusement parks daily, with fairly minimal levels of physical fitness being required.
- jjeaff 8y agoIf the full 30 minute flight is like a roller coaster, I would be green by the time we got there and probably have a full puke bag. But I'd still prefer that to a 12 hr long haul flight in coach.
- samastur 8y agoIf you could afford flying on a rocket, I bet you can also afford flying first-class. Would that alter your preference?
- chapium 8y agoJohn Glenn is an exceptional case however. His career was in rocket travel and experimental aircraft.
- TallGuyShort 8y agoYou know John Glenn's name precisely because he is exceptional. I would certainly choose the discomfort of a 2-minute roller coaster over the discomfort of a 2-hour commercial flight, but... a man who set milestones in American spaceflight and was trained by NASA for a shuttle mission is hardly the baseline.
- Animats 8y agoThis is going to be big with the crowd that has jumbo jets as a personal airplane.[1] [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-747-8-vip-private-jet-2016-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-747-8-vip-private-jet-...
- pjmorris 8y agoHow do you tell the difference between commercial scheduled rocket flights and incoming ICBM's?
- ninkendo 8y agoHeavy regulation and requiring all flights to be registered with NORAD with high precision, probably.
- ceejayoz 8y agoWe'd also know where the launch comes from, and how many got launched. Russia can already stick a nuke in a commercial airliner and set it off over NYC, if they want.
- soared 8y agoSame way you differentiate between an airplane and an alien spaceship. One is common, the other is so absurdly rare its not even worth considering.
- cryptonector 8y agoYou just build second strike capabilities and call it a day. If {Russia, U.S.} gets off a first strike, then {U.S., Russia} can still get off a second strike, therefore neither will strike first. Well, that's one option. Russia will need an early warning network to rival the American one either way, and given that and proper flight path registration... maybe there would be no confusion. Maybe.
- Ajedi32 8y agoThe same way you tell the difference between commercial scheduled airline flights incoming kamikaze pilots?
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 8y agoAssume that there aren't commercial scheduled airline flights going straight through a warzone?
- WhompingWindows 8y agoI think SpaceX should just sell this service to military clients. The other comments here are talking about noise pollution, G-forces, bank angles, and other negative downsides of the service. However, if you have a bunch of active-duty, trained personnel who need to get across the globe ASAP, this is something I could see the military paying for. Moreover, most bases are not directly next to large population centers, which helps with the noise pollution argument.
- jedisct1 8y agoDoes that mean no food, no snacks during the flight? That sucks.
- hackpert 8y agoI think a major point that isn't being talked enough about in public (although I'm sure people in SpaceX have considered it before coming up with numbers) with the "point-to-point" transport system is simple demand-supply economics. Sure, let's say they can run 10 100-person flights per day from New York to Shanghai but do that many people even want to travel that route on that particular day?
- sounds 8y agoMore speculation here, I don't have any knowledge on the matter, but... If the flight time drops from 12 hours to 30 minutes, and prices are in the same ballpark of $2,000, then there would be more demand. The execs could all be in Shanghai for the board meeting and some of them could be back in NYC for dinner.
- bdamm 8y agoNot so, due to time zones. Although I fully realize that if you can rocket out, meet, and rocket back, and go to sleep in the same time zone you woke up in, it would be a very significant development.
- elif 8y agoUgh.. a crown jewel of human innovation, used to make sure the plutocrats don't have to suffer from the terror of foreign 5 star chefs. can We call it "The Integral" instead of BFR? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
- jacquesm 8y agoBetting against Elon Musk is historically unprofitable but if there was one of those bets saying that SpaceX will never actually field this other than for PR purposes then I'd probably take it.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI'm glad Gwynne is talking about this rather than Elon as I always take what Elon says with a large grain of "execution" salt (as in sure you can do that but not when you think you can). Things will be very different when BFRs are flying regularly. BFRs imply full reusability, and full reusability implies a short 'cycle' time, which implies a much greater earth to orbit capacity, with implies a greater supply and more reliability to orbit, which implies that it stops being crazy to require that you have three or four launches in a single year to get all of your "stuff" into orbit. The logistics of space launch are still crazy. You can launch two rockets in a weekend using two launch pads but you can't yet launch multiple rockets a week from the same launch pad.