Spacex-Starship with a booster below it could put that weight suborbital to the other side of the world and should only cost a few million per flight since the hardware is reused each time
$90 Million is the current cost of a reusable Falcon Heavy[1].
Even if you cut that in half, that's still 10's of millions more expensive than flying a 747 between two destinations.
For comparison, it costs - on the high end - $27,000 per hour of flight to operate a 747[2]. For a 12 hour flight, that's ~$324,000 of cost, or about 0.72% of the fictitious $45 Million-Per-Launch "Starship".
There is no reality where flying a rocket is cheaper than an airplane.
Rockets might not be cheaper but it could be close and they will beat the airplane by far on speed and views. Elon Musk is thinking/hoping that the cost for SpaceX to launch a 100 passenger Starship will be around $2 million[1] considering fuel and operational costs. The rockets will be fully reusable like airplanes and cost about the same to make. And, for long flights fuel use is similar. Hope it happens. Making rockets reusable was the key and SpaceX has been doing well with advancing that concept so far.
That's a whole lot of magical hand-waving right there.
For starters, even at these fantasy numbers, that's still $20,000 per seat. Who needs and/or wants that? Very few people, as Concorde found out, and as Boom will soon learn the same.
Rockets are also tremendously more dangerous and volatile than an airplane. If 1 out of 10,000 launches results in a total loss of the vehicle, and all passengers on board - we're not going to do it. Rockets are simply not a safe mode of transportation - particularly when compared to aviation.
Not to mention, you cannot launch with bad weather - or the possibility of bad weather... if it's too hot, or too cold, etc.
Can't really know until you try. The physics does not prevent the possibility. Elon and the people at SpaceX are not just hand waving but actually working hard on making it a reality. Hope they do it.
A lot of people are willing to pay $250k for a minor sub-orbit hop in the Virgin spacecraft. I bet there are millions of people who would pay, at least once, to fly on one of these flights in conjunction with a trip from New York to Beijing or London to Australia. $20k is not much more than a two week luxury safari.
The comparison of the risk of rocket travel to the risk of helicopter travel is more realistic. That is the level of risk many wealthy people are willing to take to save time.
How many people will actually pay $250k for a spaceship ride? I know everyone says they would, but who actually has the means to do so?
How many people will actually pay $20k for this fictitious rocket travel ride? That's the eqivilent of a decent brand new car.
The reality is there's a finite amount of people who have the means to do actual space tourism. You run out of these people after a short while... and then you go bankrupt.
And no, you cannot compare rockets with helicopter safety. It's well known helicopters aren't the most safe mode of transportation - but they do not spontaneously explode either. They are far safer than a rocket - arguing otherwise is disingenuous.
The first steam engines spontaneously exploded. The first internal combustion engines spontaneously exploded. I'm sure the first helicopters did also. Nobody has really tried to advance rocket technology since the early 1970's. That's only 25 years after Sputnik and 40 years after the V2. 1970 is 50 years ago.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 to start advancing rocket tech again and has made amazing advances so far. I agree that the West's safety first environment of today that rocket travel seems way too unsafe for most, but there still plenty of people that don't have that mind set. I would say too each their own, but would you advocate that no one should even try?
This transportation idea with rockets is also just a side business opportunity for the Starship. If the Earth flights work out then many more of them can be sold and launched, bringing down cost and increasing the rate of improvements. The main reason for building it is to dramatically reduce the cost of putting things into space and traveling to and from Mars.
