• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, October 2, 2017

If you think a five-minute air taxi from Times Square to JFK is pie-in-the-sky thinking, how about less than hour from JFK to just about anywhere in the world? Leave it to Elon Musk to suggest that the same rocket technology that purportedly will be taking us to and from Mars in the 2020s can get us from NYC to LAX in 25 minutes.

“Most of what people consider to be long-distance trips would be completed in less than half an hour,” Musk told the assembled at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, on Friday, the AP’s Marcia Dunn reports. 

The full 42-minute speech can be viewed here.

“Musk said if you build a ship capable of going to the moon and Mars, why not use it for high-speed transport here at home. He proposes using his still-in-the-design-phase rocket for launching passengers from New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes flat,” Dunn writes.

“‘It’s 2017, we should have a lunar base by now,’ he said, speaking just a couple of years shy of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landings. ‘What the hell is going on?’” writes Eric Berger for Ars Technica. 

“Musk's talk still sparkled with almost unimaginable technology. But it was leavened with enough tidbits of plausibility to think he just might maybe-sorta pull this off one day,” Berger concludes.

In what she characterizes as a “somewhat disjointed presentation,” National Geographic’s Nadia Drake reports that “one year after announcing an intrepid plan that he claimed could put a million people on Mars by the 2060s … Musk outlined an edited version of his original scheme. His final vision didn’t change much, but he did highlight revisions to a planned 42-engine rocket Musk has nicknamed the BFR, as well as a vague proposal to pay for that rocket by using it to deliver satellites into orbit and to service the International Space Station.”

About that BFR acronym: “The the ‘B’ stands for ‘big’ and the ‘R’ for ‘rocket’,” Amie Tsang and Michael de la Merced discreetly inform us in the New York Times.

“What Mr. Musk didn’t mention: financial figures to back up his assertions,” they also tell us, while reporting that he later posted on Instagram about those domestic flights: “Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that.” There’s a nifty concept video accompanying that claim.

“Musk says a multipurpose vehicle with a rapid launch rate will dramatically reduce mission and manufacturing costs, helping fund SpaceX's Martian ambitions,” writes Robin Seemangal for Wired. “The plan is to use the BFR to complete all of the smaller contracts carried out by its existing fleet of rockets and capsules — like taxi service to the International Space Station, or ferrying satellites into orbit — and to deliver bigger packages. The spacecraft's cargo bay, Musk says, could accommodate a telescope with a mirror 10 times the size of Hubble's — enough room to shuttle multiple customers' payloads at once.”

In a piece published by the San Francisco Chronicle that originally appeared in The Conversation, Arizona State University’s Andrew Maynard writes: “Dear Elon Musk: Your dazzling Mars plan overlooks some big nontechnical hurdles.”

He outlines several potential hitches, concluding: “It’s tempting to think of planetary entrepreneurialism as simply getting the technology right and finding a way to pay for it. But if enough people feel SpaceX is threatening what they value (such as the environment — here or there), or disadvantaging them in some way (for example, by allowing rich people to move to another planet and abandoning the rest of us here), they’ll make life difficult for the company.”

To be sure, getting the technology right is more difficult than just building a BFR.

For its part, “NASA is circumspect about … Musk’s latest bid to send crewed missions to Mars by 2024 — more than a decade ahead of what the American agency plans,” reports Chris Griffith for The Australian. “His speech on Friday sidestepped what is a key factor in NASA’s approach. NASA says humankind first needs to learn to live in space entirely independently of contact with Earth before going to Mars. In fact this is necessary for ventures beyond the Moon. It means troubleshooting problems on the spot.

“Unlike the Apollo missions to the Moon, there would be no umbilical cord to Planet Earth, and no ready help when you say: ‘Houston, we have a problem.’” 

Hmmmm. Then again, the folks who inched across the Bering Land Bridge didn’t even have mobile phones or geo-targeted advertising to address their needs, believe it or not.