Rocket travel is no longer a dream—fly around the world cheaply and quickly

By / MOOK Scenic Spots Editorial Department, compiled and reported

Flying has become a fairly common mode of transportation for international travel, but long-distance flights still require high costs and take considerable time. PayPal and Tesla founder Elon Musk once again boldly made an astonishing promise, stating that he will make rocket travel between cities on Earth a reality, reducing long-distance travel time to about 40 minutes, with fares only at the price of economy class airfare.

Musk presented his 2024 plan to send humans to Mars at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Australia, and also announced that construction of a large passenger rocket (BFR) will begin within the next six months to a year. This is Musk’s new dream of revolutionizing transportation, making global travel even more unrestricted.

Passengers will first take a boat from a harbor in New York to a floating launch platform on the water, then board the spacecraft. After the rocket launches and exits the atmosphere, it will reach the other side of the Earth—in Shanghai—in just 39 minutes. In addition, Los Angeles to Tokyo will take only 32 minutes, and London to New York or Dubai will take just 29 minutes.

In Musk’s Mars plan, it is mentioned that the BFR rocket can carry approximately 80 to 200 people per trip, and the first rocket is planned to be completed in 2022, initially for use in the Mars mission.

Musk is widely regarded as the real-life Iron Man, known for being the founder of the space exploration technology company SpaceX, as well as the co-founder of Tesla Motors and PayPal. In recent years, Musk’s space ambitions have grown ever larger, and this is not his first foray into transportation reform—he previously proposed the creation of the ultra-high-speed Hyperloop. All of this is aimed at improving intercity transportation and achieving unprecedented changes that will dramatically transform people’s lives.