> probably easier to ask Elon to start building airplanes
I’m not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but I had the same thought. I can’t imagine that building an airplane is more complicated than self-landing rockets. He could integrate them with Starlink too so customers on the flight had actual wifi that works.
The reusable, self landing rocket is certainly more complicated in some ways. But airplanes, and their engines are probably more complicated in other ways. SpaceX’s rocket engines are an engineering marvel. But they only need to run for minutes at a time. Aircraft engines can run for hours at a time, and for 10s of thousands of hours before a major overhaul is needed.
It’s a different kind of complexity.
On the starlink side, customers will get that anyways. The existing plane operators will start using it for their internet.