[valuearb]

Musk has laid out some pretty big visions he hasn’t yet achieved (see Mars, colonization) and doesn’t always meet his aggressive deadlines, but he’s actually accomplishing a great deal. An rocket with 80 commercial launches, landing and reusing hypersonic first stages (and now fairings), the worlds first full flow staged combustion engine, the most powerful rocket in the world (Falcon Heavy), StarLink with already 655 satellites, and that’s just SpaceX accomplishments.

What has BO done other than land a suborbital rocket that doesn’t achieve more than tiny fraction of orbital velocity? They haven’t even had a person ride it yet, let alone a paying customer on board.

[cma]

If we can start replacing long-haul passenger planes with rockets that soon, I feel that BO can launch the sats or Amazon can pay someone else to launch them. Unless there is something going on edging into magical that is going to put SpaceX that far ahead that there would be people taking rockets for regularly commercial flight, not thrill seeking space tourism, price-competitive with commercial flight and reliable.

[valuearb]

There are a lot of steps remaining for SpaceX to start a long haul point to point passenger service on Earth. First, Starship has to meet its safety and performance aspirations, that’s at least a decades worth of work. The first passengers won’t be for a couple years, and they will only be astronauts and explorers for at least a decade, until Raptor has a long history of trustworthy flights. Then there is the government approvals, offshore launch and landing sites with high volume transport to/from them, etc. Point to Point might be twenty years away.

So yes, its reasonable BO will be launching payloads within the same time frame, 10-20 years.

[cma]

They say in that article it will start without a doubt by 2028.