Feel like spending your vacations abroad? Today, you have to plan your trip early as seven hours’ flight are required to travel from France to the U.S., leaving from Paris. But SpaceX is willing to make it a common commute by 2027, so one could leave on the spur of the moment. As a matter of fact, super-fast flights aboard the Starship rocket will be cut down to only 30 minutes and flying at about 27,000kmph.
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“It’s certainly possible for our Starship rocket. At the moment, we’re focused on the Moon, on Mars, but also on flights from one point to another on Earth,” SpaceX President Quinn Shadwell told RTL. More flights will be available within 5 years, including a 50-minute Sydney-Zurich, or a 36-minute Los Angeles-Shanghai. Engines could then fly about a hundred people, from a platform at sea, but prices are reserved for an elite, an unknown to date.
An environmental aberration and a project going against all the environmental preoccupations and call for energy sobriety. As a matter of fact, to launch a rocket, it requires about 200 tons of CO2, more than an average long-haul flight. Furthermore, takeoff issues of the rocket to the Moon show the difficulty to launch such an engine in time. Without forgetting the extra carbon footprint to reach the launch pad set at sea.
