[alpaca128]

Reusable rockets aren't coincidentally many orders of magnitude safer though. They would need to be just to come even with airplanes. It would also involve acceleration forces far beyond anything a normal passenger would accept. I'd be glad to be wrong, but I have yet to see an analysis that actually does the math and doesn't result in something along the lines of "this concept is insane and doomed to fail". Spaceship would probably make a good spaceship. But using it for quick flights between cities is less realistic than airlines reviving the Concorde.

[inglor_cz]

" They would need to be just to come even with airplanes."

Airplanes of the 1950s or airplanes of the 2020s? That is a huge difference.

It took the aviation industry 120 years to arrive at current levels of safety.

[CryptoPunk]

Very true. Though the high costs historically associated with rocket launches have precluded the kind of scale needed to achieve extreme safety. This will change if SpaceX succeeds with Starship, though of course it will take a long time to iterate enough on safety to achieve the extremely high standard seen in aviation, or at least as high of a standard as is possible with rocket transportation, and then establish a long enough track record that consumers can trust it.