Travel

Elon Musk Wants Us To Take Rockets Anywhere In The World In Less Than An Hour

“It’s 2017. We should have a lunar base by now. What the hell is going on?"

by Rob Stott  29 September 2017
SpaceX

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Humans on Mars by 2022, and a city of one million people there shortly after. A base on the moon, and regular travel by rocket, anywhere in the world, in less than an hour. This was the vision laid out by (possibly crazy?) billionaire Elon Musk during a speech in Adelaide today.

Musk was at the Space Industry Association’s 2017 Astronautical Congress, which wrapped after four days in Adelaide today. Here are the key points:

We’re Going To Mars By 2022 (Maybe)

Musk described the 2022 deadline as an “aspiration”, but he has some pretty detailed plans for how he wants to get there. The SpaceX founder unveiled his “BFR” — which possibly stands for Big Fucking Rocket — a nine-metre-long spaceship with room for 100 people, which Musk reckons could be landing on Mars within five years.

Musk’s hope is to land at least two cargo ships on Mars by then so they can suss out exactly what’s going on there. They’d be looking for things like water and other resources, and working out if it’s feasible to build a city there. People could start heading to Mars by 2024, he reckons. Here’s what that city might look like:

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on

Also, Let’s Go Back To The Moon

“It’s 2017. We should have a lunar base by now. What the hell is going on?” Musk asked the crowd to cheers.

Musk said a base on the moon would make space travel heaps easier because you wouldn’t need to keep coming back to Earth to re-fuel. In Musk’s vision, you could just pop over to the moon, pick up some supplies and re-fuel, then head on your merry way to Mars or Tatooine or whatever.

Easy as moon pie.

Oh, And One More Thing…

At the end of his hour-long presentation, Musk just casually dropped plans for rocket-based international travel here on Earth. There wasn’t a heap of detail about how this would work, but it did come with a shiny video, which made it all look very simple, so I believed it.

The video claimed we’d be able to fly from New York to Shanghai in under 39 minutes, and we could get anywhere in the world in less than an hour, which means we’ll never have to listen to Americans complain that they’d love to come to Australia if only the flight wasn’t so long ever again.

Because the rockets are fuelled by a mixture of oxygen and methane, they’d also be super clean. Which is good, because the aviation industry currently pumps a shitload of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Here’s that shiny video:

You can watch the whole speech here.