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by yock 2934 days ago
> In 5-10 years we may have a 300 person 1 hr transport from sydney to New York by way of the BFR.

Is your average human's health and safety really compatible with the acceleration required for ballistic travel?

1 comments

At one time people thought that any transport faster than a horse would cause the human body to fly apart.

Engineering finds a way.

We're in the opposite position from people that doubted whether the human body could cope with transport faster than a horse.

We have pretty good data for what very high G-forces do to the human body and what the failure rates of rocket launches are, and neither are compatible with routine commercial flight.

If you consider that the early jets (ie comet) had a tendency to disintegrate, and take a speculative view that rockets have largely been in the comet era for perhaps a prolonged period (40-50 years!) and take another speculative leap that current technology/space companies are going to improve this by orders of magnitude (lots of ifs) then it isn’t too far removed.

And the cost of a flight would be 300-400k in fuel, which means that tickets would be roughly premium economy cost or business cost. Business would eat up day trip returns from ny to shanghai in a heartbeat. Maybe people would have to wear a g force suit like pilots?