What is the future of transportation? Electric Vehicles? Hyperloops? Or Rockets? Apparently, Elon Musk wants all of them to work perfectly. Recently, the SpaceX CEO announced the upgraded plans for a Mars colony at the International Astronautical Conference and discussed the technology that will put people on Mars. Musk also promised that the same technology would be used in long-distance transportation on Earth.
The new BFR rocket can complete any journey around the globe in less than an hour. At the IAC Adelaide conference, Musk said,
“Most of what people consider to be long-distance trips could be completed in less than half-an-hour.”
He added that the cost of the journey would be roughly the same as that of an economy airline ticket along the same route. There was a slight mention of city-to-city travels, but Musk did not give out too many details.
The BFR mega rocket is only a theoretical concept at the moment, but Musk says that the company plans to start building it in the next year. A video from SpaceX details the plans and shows people that are headed from New York City to Shanghai on a flight of mere 39 minutes, covering a 7,000-mile (11,265 kilometers) distance. As the rocket re-enters the atmosphere, it lands on a floating pad, similar to one of those Falcon 9 landings. It even includes routes from Hong Kong to Singapore (1,609 mi / 2,589 km) in 22 minutes, London to Dubai (4,450 miles / 7,163 km) in just 29 minutes, and Los Angeles to Toronto (2,519 miles / 4,055 km) in 24 minutes only.
The BFR Rocket will go at a maximum speed of 18,000 miles an hour. It is quite massive as compared to the fastest passenger jet Concorde that could only reach 1,354 miles in an hour. Musk believes that the BFR will render all other rockets “redundant.” He detailed the plans of the BFR saying,
“Some of our customers are conservative, and they want to see the BFR fly several times before they are comfortable launching [on it]. So what we plan to do is to build ahead and have a stock of Falcon 9 and Dragon vehicles, so that customers can be comfortable if they want to use the old rocket, the old spacecraft – they can do that because we’ll have a bunch in stock. But all of our resources will then turn to building BFR.”
You would expect BFR to have a reasonable full form. However, knowing that the Tesla EV lineup names string up to spell “Sexy,” you should not expect a decent one. BFR stands for “Big F***ing Rocket,” and we do not doubt that the name is a pretty good description. However, if you want to read this out to children, you might want to consider using “Big Friendly Rocket.”
