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wow
elon musk has a brilliant new idea that
no one's ever thought of before
of traveling traveling by rocket ship
i mean why didn't one ever think of this
before you know
like when we were building those
thousands of rockets that could pinpoint
delivery nukes at any point on earth
in about 30 minutes
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those are mini-man missiles
like a test sort of like a warning
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they're on their way to russia
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they take about 30 minutes to reach
their target
so do theirs right ah the
cold war back before you realized the
end of the world would actually be
announced
on twitter north korea best not
make any more threats to the united
states
they will be met with fire and fury
like the world has never seen
he has been very threatening uh
beyond a normal statement then yes this
is actually a silo door from a minuteman
firing room which is a
fascinating place to visit if you're
ever going across south dakota on
i-90 so yeah we can deliver nukes to any
point on earth in about
30 minutes with multiple re-entry
warheads
so why isn't amazon or pizza hut
considering this as a delivery service
why did nasa
not think about the commercial idea of
using rocket transport or
the russians or the chinese actually no
everyone thought about these decades ago
and discarded it because it's a bloody
stupid idea but for some strange and
unexplained reason
you take a bloody stupid idea put elon
musk's name on it if you if you build a
ship
that's capable of going to mars
what if you take that same ship and go
from one place to another on earth
so we looked at that and the results
are quite interesting let's take a look
at that
and of course the hallmark of modern-day
snake oil merchants the
digital simulation and boom couple of
million hits on youtube
90 something percent approval rating and
everyone raving about it
in the comments look the whole thing is
comical
from the start i mean let's just take
one of the things they so did get right
which is the remoteness of the launch
site
once fueling has happened the rocket is
essentially a giant potential
bomb sitting on the launch pad which is
why fueling
is typically the last thing you do
before launch
and of course you evacuate the pad while
you're doing it because it's so
dangerous fueled rockets are just a
massive hazard
indeed a fully fueled saturn v contained
an equivalent amount of energy
to all of the bombs the allies would
typically use to destroy a
city in world war ii and the elon musk's
rocket
about three times this size it carries
enough fuel
to make about a 10 kiloton explosion
and you want to park it next to a city
um
uh no i mean damn just look at the
existing
launch sites and the one thing you'll
notice there are no
cities in the background this is not
just because
of the dangers inherent in launching a
10
kiloton flying bomb but when a 10
kiloton flying bomb takes off
it makes an astronomical amount of noise
but just to put the size of a potential
explosion like this into perspective
the hiroshima nuke was about 20 kilotons
in size so just one of these rockets
blowing up
would be about half the size of the
explosion
of a hiroshima nuke and that's what the
hiroshima nuke would have looked like
on manhattan i mean just to put it all
into perspective these rockets
are about 1 10th the size of elon musk's
big boom
it's rocket be loud
didn't go you feel the heat
but then of course i mean you just can't
make this stuff up
how do you get out to the launch pad on
a freaking boat
one of the slowest forms of transport
known to man and you're using this to
get to a remote
launch pad that's ignoring the fact that
you've got to get all these passengers
onto the boat get them over to the
launch pad get them off the boat get
them onto the rocket
i mean you would be blisteringly
optimistic to say all of this
is gonna be done in less than about two
hours or something
which is four times the proposed journey
time
i mean hell i mean seen how planes can
get delayed
for hours for technical problems can you
imagine
what it's going to be like if there's
any problem with this rocket
normally safety issues dictate that the
launch pad
is completely evacuated prior to launch
for
obvious reasons
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with the exception of the people sitting
on top
of the rocket so yeah god knows how long
it would take to actually sort out a
technical issue
with a rocket like this you know when
just fueling a rocket this size
can take hours so for instance to fuel
the space shuttle
you had to pump about 700
tons of fuel into that external tank and
that took
hours i mean that's the weight of about
35
big hours tanker trucks that had to be
emptied into this rocket
and the amount of liquid fuel you've got
to pump into elon musk's rocket
is about 10 kilotons versus to me
one or so kilotons for the space shuttle
and then you get onto just the
practicalities
like you're not getting to be able to
land a rocket if the conditions
are bad at the destination so that means
that you
can't take off until the conditions are
clear
at the destination so what does this
mean that
the schedule's going to be completely
random or if the rocket's fueled but
you've got delays
because you can't land at the
destination that you're just going to be
sat around
on these 10 kilos and bombs waiting for
conditions to clear
at the destination look there are two
key reasons
why we don't travel by rocket ship the
first
is because people don't want to die
come with me if you want to live the
second is it's a ludicrously
expensive like million dollars per
ticket
expensive now for most people dying is
probably
the bigger issue you know when someone
says i want a plane flight to
australia or something it's unsaid but
kind of expected
that they won't die while flying there
this is a reasonable assumption
given that plane flight is one of the
safest modes of
transport get on a plane and there's a
one in a million one in 10 million
something like that chance
of the plane crashing and even if it
crashes
you actually still have a pretty good
chance
of survival well even with the best
rockets
a few percent don't reach orbit hell
even human rated flights it's better but
the fatality rate is still
suicidal compared to the safety issues
of getting in a
car or bus or plane or train or whatever
i mean just look at the shuttle it was
about 150 missions
two craft lost that's one in 75
rockets are inherently dangerous because
rocket engines
run under extreme conditions and rockets
fly
in extreme conditions there's no getting
around it
it's an intrinsic problem
hell even elon musk's rocket company
spacex
considered itself doing well when it was
getting up to
a high 90 percent reliability but that's
the problem though
no one's going to travel sub orbital
with that sort of reliability record
now sure you can argue that elon musk's
gonna do something that
no other rocket engineer has managed to
do in history
making rocket engines hundreds of times
more reliable
the holy grail of rocket engine design
and because i know people are going to
bring this up okay
sure elon musk managed to land some
rockets for the
idea of reusable spacecraft which is a
great idea
unfortunately it was explored decades
ago with this space shuttle
the only real difference here is of
course the space shuttle landed like a
plane
so it could use a runway
main gear touchdown as far as this
lands by firing its engines again now
with the space shuttle of course there
was the argument that this was going to
be
cheaper because they were reusing the
spacecraft
problem was didn't really work out like
that in the end
i mean this remains a neat trick but it
remains to be seen
if there are any economic advantages to
doing it
look even for musk's own people reusing
this rocket
halves its payload to orbit you have
the efficiency of the rocket just by
making it reusable
anyway offhat is a walk in the park
compared to the idea of making rocket
engines
hundreds of times more reliable and it's
not helped by the fact that these heavy
lift rockets
have 40 or so engines meaning they have
to be even
more reliable i mean even if they were
given these trips away for free
i mean sure i would love to see space
that'd be really cool
but in terms of transport with the one
percent chance of dying
sorry but i'll take the plane which is
about a million times
more reliable put simply the
backbone of this idea is a farce
secondly of course we don't trouble buy
rockets yet because it's bloody
expensive so let's take some ballpark
numbers
right so we're talking sub orbital
flight here so let's take
orbital flight to bracket this just to
give us an idea of what the upper limits
of the cost
might be so what does it cost to put
something into low earth orbit
because that's going to be the upper
limit here well the space shuttle was
about half
a billion dollars per flight and could
take about 30 tons
to low earth orbit so let's say people
are up 100 kilos each
it's about 300 people so the shuttle
could put people
anywhere on earth in about one hour at a
cost
of about a million dollars per passenger
oddly enough
that wasn't commercially viable and the
idea of just essentially taking a space
shuttle
sticking on top of a saturn v making it
50 or so
bigger in terms of volume i'm not
entirely sure that's going to make
any of this commercially viable or you
can just do the back of an envelope
calculations that low earth orbit costs
about
ten thousand dollars per kilogram and
you're looking at putting a hundred or
so kilos
into low earth orbit it's about a
million dollars well we're not going to
low earth orbit
and we maybe need only a quarter or so
of the energy but of course you need all
the extra stuff for putting people on
rockets you know like seats maybe some
life support or something i don't know
so let's say you only need
half of that energy so that puts the
rough price ticket here
as about half a million dollars well
let's take another
price point virgin galactic is offering
pre-booking
to take people to space for about a
quarter of a million dollars
per shot and that's basically just going
up
and down that's not including the extra
velocity you need
to go to any point on earth so a
sensible price ticket looks to be
somewhere in the region
of half a million dollars with about a
one percent chance of
dying and elon musk's estimate he's
gonna do it
for the price of a regular economy
flight
how oh don't worry about the details
remember claims are cheap i mean
honestly i was surprised he wasn't
promising to do it for 20
which would almost be as believable
especially
on a rocket that hasn't even been built
yet
and just so we're clear how far into
cloud cuckoo land elon musk is on this
he's planning to get that price of a
ticket to
mars cheaper than the virgin galactic
price ticket
just to get you to the edge of space
alternatively and more realistically for
100
the cost of a rocket flight like this
you can fly almost
anywhere in the world in the absolute
lap of luxury
with a statistically insignificant
chance
of dying this is why we don't travel
by bloody rocket ship it's not rocket
science
on top of that there are some niggling
details you know they sort of get almost
anywhere on earth in 30 minutes or
something that might be true
for nuclear weapons for humans not so
much
simply because accelerating people to
about 10 times the speed of a bullet
throwing them up into space decelerating
them and dropping them to the ground
safely
takes more time for people than for
nukes
again some examples the first mercury
missions basically propose to do
exactly what elon musk is proposing here
transporting people on suborbital
trajectories and the
second mercury mission went a couple
hundred miles in about
15 minutes and yeah the early mercury
missions were pretty harsh on the
astronauts
pulling the best part of 10 g's on
re-entry
that's the sort of force where just your
body weighs about
a ton that's struggling to stay
conscious type g
forces even in a pressure suit so
but this was a short flight with high g
forces maybe a better example
would be the space shuttle but even at
that they were pulling
three g's which is pretty harsh and just
getting the
space shuttle down from this sort of
altitude the altitude that this
space plane essentially would come down
from takes about
20 minutes that is just getting back
to ground would take almost as long as
elon musk's
proposed entire flight hell if
it was just a matter of free falling
from space i mean this guy's jump
was about halfway up to the edge of
space and it still took him
four and a half minutes to free fall
down to where he opened
his parachute now some people might
worry about the radiation up in space
after all it's about a hundred times
the level that it is on earth i mean
honestly that wouldn't bother me that
much because it's only about three times
the radiation that you get on a
commercial jet at
altitude this is why you should never
turn these things on during your flight
they are absolutely crazy
it's the highest i've ever seen it on a
plane
it's crazy
which of course doesn't seem to bother
anyone
and honestly given the choice i'd rather
not have the higher radiation levels
but compared to the hazards of rocket
flight
the radiation exposure is a joke
so yeah more realistically you're
looking at more like an hour
point to point anywhere on earth and the
shorter flights will be comparable
in time on top of that you've gotta had
a couple of hours for security checks
getting the passengers and the bags onto
the boat
nice leisurely boat crews getting the
passengers off getting them onto the
rocket and everything like that
so it's not really a 30 minute trip to
get anywhere on earth
then of course mr we need to go electric
mask the most important thing that needs
to happen is the transition of
transportation to electric
the ideal long distance transportation
mechanism is a supersonic vertical
takeoff and landing electric
jets is now proposing that we use fossil
fuels
for transport yep these things
run on methane essentially gas
hundreds of tons of it at a time and
unlike planes they don't dump most of
these combustion products
which is essentially you know carbon
dioxide and water in the lower
atmosphere
but they get all the way up into the
upper atmosphere
which for the odd rocket might not be
such a problem but if you've got an
entire army of rockets yeah that might
actually be
a real issue look elon musk is just a
genius
at coming up with ideas that were
thought about decades ago
and discarded as not being economically
viable
like the vacuum train and then
decades after it's patented he thinks he
can
first of all pass it off as his own idea
then re-patent it and then of course
just get everyone else to make it for
him
and i'm thinking like maybe i should
patent it and then offer to open source
the patent to anyone that can make
credible case that they could actually
do it
so i'm sort of debating it but it would
be for for a fifth mode of transport
and uh i have a name for it named for it
which is called the hyperloop
the hyperloop hyperloop yeah and pray
tell
how far has the hype loop come in half
a decade oh well it's now a rusty tube
outside of his headquarters where the
apex
of hyperloop design turned out to be
using our onboard propulsion system it's
a wheel
pressed to the rail basically it's a
very small
electric car but it's still one which
gained
absolutely nothing from running through
the rusty tube
basically he could as well have claimed
that he was inventing a sixth form of
transport
where cars run on metal rails in the
ground i call them
hyper cars or hyper rail hell you might
as well
call this rocket the seventh mode of
transport the
hyper rocket it's basically an idea
that's been kicking around
for decades and all that he's done is
giving it
a new name after all if you're gonna
sell [ __ ]
you could as well sell it big many
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