Elon Musk is once again pitching a wild vision of the future: replacing commercial airplanes with rockets.
“Travel anywhere on Earth (that’s willing to allow loud rockets) in half an hour or so at Mach 25!” Musk posted on X.
The post was a repost of a video shared by entrepreneur and popular X content creator Mario Nawfal, who said SpaceX’s Starship could potentially fly passengers from New York to Sydney in under an hour.
Nawfal described it as, “like teleportation but with fire and Elon energy.”
The Old Pitch Returns
This isn’t the first time Musk has made this claim. Back in 2017, at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, he said SpaceX’s then-new Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) would be able to complete long-distance Earth trips in under 30 minutes.
“Most of what people consider to be long-distance trips could be completed in less than half-an-hour,” Musk told the audience.
He even showed a promotional video suggesting that a London-to-New York trip would take just 29 minutes.
The plan, according to Musk at the time, was to build a single rocket system that would handle satellite launches, Mars missions, and what he called “point-to-point” travel on Earth.
He added that the key to making such a system viable was cost-efficiency: building one reusable rocket type that could do everything.
“I think we’ve figured out how to pay for it. This is very important,” Musk said at the time.
Still No Rockets to Catch
Nearly eight years later, no one has boarded a SpaceX rocket for a suborbital flight from one city to another.
Despite advances in rocket reusability and successful missions to the International Space Station, the idea of rockets replacing planes remains far-fetched.
The loudness, cost, infrastructure needs, and safety concerns of launching and landing rockets in urban areas make the plan highly impractical for now.
It’s also unclear how regulations, insurance, and passenger training would work for such extreme travel.
Cities would need to allow regular rocket launches in densely populated areas, and travelers would essentially be undergoing short spaceflights, something that currently requires extensive preparation.
Even Musk has admitted that many of his timelines are aspirational. In 2017, he told the Adelaide audience that unmanned Mars cargo missions could launch by 2022.
That hasn’t happened either. No cargo flights have left for Mars, and even suborbital human tests remain in the development phase.
The Starship program, while progressing with tests, has yet to carry passengers into orbit, let alone between cities on Earth.
Musk’s fans often embrace his big, futuristic ideas. But his critics note a pattern of repeated announcements with no near-term delivery.
Swinburne University astrophysicist Alan Duffy said in 2017, “What I love about SpaceX … is that they make things profitable at every step of the way.”
That may be true in some parts of the business, but replacing air travel with rockets remains a marketing dream, not a practical reality.