News hardware SpaceX: Elon Musk’s Paris New York flights in less than 30 minutes are really coming!
Announced in 2017 by Elon Musk, rocket travel from Earth to Earth to connect large cities like Paris to New York should see the light of day in 2027, announces Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX.
Paris-New York by SpaceX rocket in less than 30 minutes!
How far away the days of the Concorde, when Paris or London were linked to New York in just over 3h30, seem a long way off, when today it takes around 8h of flight for the same journey… And if the reasons for the closet of the Concorde are obvious (stark maintenance costs, catastrophic accident or ecological heresy to name but a few examples), many people dream of achieving new exploits in the field of air transport.
While many supersonic aircraft projects capable of flying from Paris to New York again in less than 3 hours are currently in development (including some for 2023), SpaceX, through the voice of its founder Elon Musk and its president Gwynne Shotwell, promises to go much further and above all much faster.
If you had not seen this little video at the time, we suggest you watch it now:
Flights at 27,000 km/h with SpaceX by 2027
It was during a visit to our colleagues at RTL that the current president of SpaceX, alongside Elon Musk, has confirmed that in less than 5 years, the dream will come truethe Starthip rocket will be able to carry out “long-haul” type flights across the entire planet.
It will then no longer be a question of sending men and women from Earth to space, but from Earth to Earth, and among the first “flights” proposed, there should be a Paris-New York, bringing back fond memories of our late Concorde.
For the moment, it is planned that departures and arrivals will be from a maritime platform, but a few years later we could well start from the mainland.
The rocket would thus fly off into space, in orbit around the Earth, and would travel at 27,000 km/h. With the current take-off and landing procedures, it would then take about 39 minutes for a Paris-New York, but by adapting the infrastructure, it could drop to less than 30 minutes! Absolutely incredible, even unthinkable until it’s real.
In the same vein, here are some routes mentioned by the president of SpaceX :
- Paris-New York: 30 minutes
- Los Angeles-Shanghai: 36 minutes
- Sydney to Zurich: 50 minutes
At the same time, Gwynne Shotwell reaffirmed SpaceX’s intention to send rockets to the Moon and then Mars, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal who has always dreamed of colonizing this planet.
If no price has been mentioned, we are talking about flights that can accommodate a hundred people and which would be accessible to all, without training or special physical condition.
There remains the environmental question, at the heart of the major current concerns, which, if the feat is resounding, it will not fail to make people cringe.