While it was a little unnerving, the plane did fly and I did get to where I was supposed to go, on time (well, mostly). I’ve experienced having an airplane de-iced during a mild snowfall. Unlike airplane travel, weather conditions for rocket launches have to be almost pristine. I can foresee no reason why this might change. Rocket launches are held up and delayed because of weather on a regular basis. It’s a factor that SpaceX has no control over. There is still another big reason why point-to-point rocket travel won’t fly (literally). The landings are perfect 99.999% of the time and regular launches to and from Tokyo happen on a regular basis. Ok, let's just suppose that SpaceX does figure things out. It’s hardly the thing to risk the lives of hundreds of people on. There are so many pieces and so many factors that can go wrong. Making rockets launch and land is complicated. There’s a reason that the phrase “rocket science” is batted about. I don’t see that happening with rocket launches.
So much so that during peak times over one million people are in the skies at a given moment. Travel by airplane has become very common today. Even at the unprecedented rate of three launches a day that would mean many years before point-to-point rocket travel could possibly be allowed.
Elon musk spaceship pro#
Subscribe to CNBC PRO for exclusive insights and analysis, and live business day programming from around the world.Regulators would be remiss if they did not require many thousands of successful landings before approving mass transit by rocket.
"Good chance you'll die, it's going to be tough going, but it will be pretty glorious if it works out." "I want to emphasize that this is a very hard and dangerous, difficult thing, not for the faint of heart," he added. "We're going to build a propellant plant, an initial Mars base – Mars Base Alpha – and then get it to the point where it's self-sustaining." The fundamental issue is building a base, building a city on Mars that is self-sustaining," Musk said. "And getting to Mars, I think, is not the fundamental issue. The company will reach the red planet "given enough time," Musk said, but "the question is: How long it will it take us?" In the near term, SpaceX plans for Starship to fly missions to low Earth orbit and then to the Moon. SpaceX's equity fundraising in the past two years totals about $3.75 billion, with its valuation reportedly climbing to $46 billion. SpaceX has continued to raise private funding for its programs, with the company most recently seeking nearly $2.1 billion in an equity round of investment. Work at the Boca Chica facility is continuing toward Starship's next flight test, with Musk saying the company will begin construction of the first Super Heavy booster prototype "this week." Super Heavy is the large bottom half of Starship rocket, which has most of the engines and is used during for the beginning of a launch. So we're rapidly making more and more ships." A year ago there was nothing there and now we've got quite a lot of production capability. "The thing that really impedes progress on Starship is the production system. Musk recently shifted the company's focus to Starship, saying in June that progress on the rocket must accelerate "dramatically and immediately" – and three months later, Musk's urgency appears to be getting results. But the Starship development program has suffered several explosive setbacks in the past year. The company has rapidly built up its facility in Boca Chica, Texas, where it has now conducted short flight tests of early Starship prototypes. The rocket's enormous size would also make it capable of launching several times as much cargo at once - for comparison, while SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets can send as many as 60 Starlink satellites at a time, SpaceX says Starship will be able to launch 400 Starlink satellites at a time. While SpaceX's current Falcon fleet of rockets is partially reusable, as the company can land and reuse the rocket's boosters, Musk hopes Starship transforms space travel into something more akin to commercial air travel. Starship represents the company's top priority, as Musk wants to build a fully reusable rocket system that can launch cargo or as many as 100 people at a time.