SPACE X founder Elon Musk wants to take you from Sydney to London in less than an hour. Only things might not be as simple as the billionaire suggests.
WHEN delivering a speech in Australia last week about Space X’s long-term ambitions, founder Elon Musk mentioned a not-yet-built system known as BFR or “big f***ing rocket”.
The plan is simple: Musk wants to create a rocket that can blast off into the atmosphere and take passengers to the other side of the world in just over half an hour.
Travelling from Bangkok to Dubai, Honolulu to Tokyo or Sydney to London would all be possible in less than an hour — and all for the cost of an economy airline ticket.
According to SpaceX, the short flight time would require the BFR to travel up to speeds of 26,900km/h.
The journey would be most intense during landing and take-off and would cause passengers to experience intense gravitational forces and weightlessness.
In a tweet, Musk explained travellers would experience g-forces between 2 and 3 — meaning two to three times their body weight — but claimed the overall trip wouldn’t be too bad of an experience for passengers.
However, mechanical and aerospace professor Ge-Cheng Zha doesn’t agree.
“That may not be a very comfortable way to travel,” he told The Atlantic. “Not everyone can take it.”
Having travelled aboard NASA’s now-retired zero-gravity plane, which simulates weightlessness, geneticist Andy Feinberg knows first-hand how intense flying on the BFR would feel.
He said while the NASA staff and astronauts enjoyed the zero-gravity flight, a lot of people on board began to get physically ill — something he thinks would happen with Musk’s creation.
“There’s a disconnect between the g-force and what the person sees, which can lead to severe motion sickness,” he said.
The same criticism was made for Musk’s Hyperloop system, which one researcher described as
“a barf ride”.
Professor Zha also raised concerns over fuel, using a now-retired commercial supersonic airliner that took passengers from New York to London in under three hours as the example.
The aerospace expert said the supersonic Concord used about three times as much fuel as a Boeing 747 and he expected the 106-metre tall rocket to require even more than this.
“The reason we use rockets for space delivery is because there’s no other options,” he said. “On Earth, aeroplanes are way more efficient.”