SpaceX's Plan To Replace Air Travel: Starship Point-to-Point Explained!

• SpaceX is exploring groundbreaking point-to-point travel with its Starship.
• The potential of traveling from New York to Tokyo in under an hour is being discussed.
• Pros and cons of this ambitious project, from military applications to noise concerns, will be examined.
• Current challenges include cost, infrastructure, and regulatory hurdles that may impact viability.
• The project is still in its early stages with no definitive timeline for implementation.

Today we're talking starship, but not the moon, Mars or even the outer reaches of our solar system. Nope, this time we're sticking right here on Earth. Because SpaceX has something interesting in mind that could flip commercial air travel on its head. Imagine hopping from New York to Tokyo in under an hour. That's right. SpaceX's point-to-point travel with starship could make that a reality. At least that's what Elon Musk says.

But can it really? Can starship deliver on this ambitious promise? And is point-to-point the game changer we've all been waiting for? We're diving deep into all of this, so make sure you stick around until the end because you might just find out if this will change travel on Earth forever.

Next to Mars, the moon, and beyond, point-to-point is one of the most ambitious goals of the Starship program. It’s there to revolutionize the travel industry and cut travel time by huge amounts. On its website, the company lays out its vision. Imagine traveling to anywhere in the world in an hour or less, end quote. A lot of us have probably been on an intercontinental voyage at some point.

So the idea of replacing that with just 30 to 60 minutes of space flight sounds amazing, right? The way Elon Musk announced this program is absolutely meant as an attack on the commercial aircraft industry, which is quite a big challenge. They propose this not just as fast travel for the ultra-rich; they're also looking at broader market opportunities.

And of course, this also makes sense for SpaceX. It has the potential to create another huge demand center for Starship next to Starlink. This would secure the funding of the program and make the Starship program less dependent on NASA-led endeavors to the Moon or Mars.

Okay, let's imagine how point-to-point would work and then after that go over the pros and cons of that trip. We start our journey in London. Of course, the spaceport cannot be right next to London, so it’s probably a bit offshore, either connected by boat or hyperloop. We probably gave our luggage away already before entering transportation to the pad and it's already loaded on Starship as we arrive.

To truly keep up with the pace of commercial aircraft, SpaceX would need to achieve fueling while passengers are being loaded. So that is most likely our view as we enter the sea launch platform where we're launching from the roughly 130 to 150 meter tall rocket already venting and breathing as we arrive.

As of right now, an elevator brings us up to the highest level where we can enter the Starship. Passenger seating most likely will require multiple levels up and down the ship and there is either a staircase or a ladder that you can use to climb to your designated level on the ship. There you can find your seating, which hopefully is a window seat for this journey.

Shortly after all is boarded, the ground crews not only step away from Starship, but have to depart quite a distance. As 33 Raptors are about to light on this platform, we're strapped in into our seats and experience the sudden rumble and rapid acceleration that until that moment has only been reserved for astronauts.

After eight and a half minutes of ascent, the booster and ship have done their job. On the screens inside of the ship, we watch the booster flip back to land at the platform again for the next flight. Wow. The ship brings us on a trajectory to New York, and now microgravity. Customers would be able to experience about 20 minutes of low gravity flight.

Of course not all passengers are allowed to leave their seats just like that, as that could create chaos during reentry. But maybe we are seated in the selected first class that will have SpaceX personnel on standby. That will help us enjoy some microgravity before we have to enter our seats again.

We can do rolls in space and all the other things we've always wanted to do while being almost weightless. Starship is still so low that the experience most likely would not technically be fully zero G but microgravity as there's still some effect of the atmosphere on the ship during the coast phase.

To reach true zero gravity, you would need to go even higher than the International Space Station. We are able to go to the windows, see the curvature of the earth and observe the Atlantic below us as we fly over it for a quick hop to our destination.

This point-to-point flight would be much longer than the current suborbital hops that are available to rich customers such as the experience on New Shepard, which is closer to two to three minutes of microgravity depending on weight and mission profile.

After 20 minutes of microgravity, a calm but firm voice signals that reentry is imminent. Everybody gets back into their seats and we feel the gravity and deceleration kicking in as the ship is getting ready to either be caught by chopsticks or deploy landing legs and land on a sea platform. As of this moment, it's unclear what exact landing method SpaceX might use for the point-to-point concept.

During reentry, you would get to see the bright purple and blue and red flashing lights passing your window as plasma forms on the ship during reentry. An effect that not many people in human history have experienced so far. At the last minute, we see clouds rushing by as we head belly first for the platform just offshore.

The belly flop happens and we see the ship turning below us because the turning point of Starship is almost right exactly where the crew would sit. We feel and hear the roar of the Raptor engines that power up during landing. And we feel the ship getting slower and slower.

And with a soft bump, we feel the landing mechanism connect and touchdown just under an hour after liftoff. We're now in New York. We deboard, we get our luggage and we're able to take the speedboat back to shore to explore New York.

Sounds amazing, right? We all wish we could speed up our long flights and shorten travel days. So SpaceX isn't the first company to rethink long-distance travel. Venture Star was a single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch system proposed by Lockheed Martin at one point.

It was funded by the US government and was intended to help replace or assist the space shuttle, being easily reusable in a space plane and promising to launch to space at 1/10 of the cost. Of course, this video is not about Venture Star. The program was canceled after failures with the X33 technology demonstrator's cryogenic carbon composite tanks and that issue was solved later.

And so the cancellation is really annoying. But that's a story for another video. Interestingly, Venture Star at one point had point-to-point plans. Next to the main vehicle, a smaller dedicated cargo vehicle was planned to be developed. This version shown on one PowerPoint presentation that it also could be used to transport passengers in the future.

With the advertisement flying from California to New York in minutes. Sounds familiar, right? Of course, with the problems that the main program ran into, the secondary goals were never achieved. But Lockheed and SpaceX are far from the only ones exploring point-to-point travel.

Sir Richard Branson and his company Virgin Galactic at one point also voiced interest in potentially using their air launch crew transport platform as a potential point-to-point vehicle. These plans, however, have of course not yet manifested.

After these examples, it's time to dive into the pros and cons of this program. For this we looked at some numbers from various reports and also researched other concerns and advantages that have been brought up in the past. The biggest advantage of such a program would be the potential for this saving of time.

I mean, that's what SpaceX is also primarily advertising on its platform. Many people in the past dreamed of cutting their travel times and being able to just cross the Atlantic in minutes.

I mean, sounds like a dream to me. All the hours that people are stuck in the air could be put to better use. And of course, there are other time-critical things that need to be transported around the world that could benefit from such a fast shipping method.

Imagine a system of organ transplants where we would be able to quickly transport needed organs to all continents wherever they're needed in an hour. I'm now seeing in front of me FedEx Global next day Starship Shipping or any other shipping company you can name.

However, there are some things to consider when talking about travel time being a big advantage of Starship point-to-point. You cannot skip things such as security and customs checks. And additionally, you have to travel further away from the city center than usual with airports as the enormous forces and sound of Super Heavy kind of force you way out there so that you don't obstruct or endanger city life.

But of course, you still are cutting the travel time in more than half of the main flight. So there is more likely some sort of time gain here. Even if we assume 30 minutes for pre-checks, 30 minutes for transport, 60 minutes for flight, and 45 minutes for post-checks and transport again, we still would have a cross-Atlantic journey from city to city in under three hours.

Of course, we've all experienced long airport waits, so this could be more of a green lights to Malibu best-case scenario. What you also gain is a unique experience. We are all space fans in a reality where point-to-point space travel becomes affordable.

I can see a lot of space nerds going for at least one trip just to experience it, even if it's a bit more expensive. I certainly think window seats and microgravity experiences like that will make our lives even better. Especially as we experience our planet from above and maybe even get a little bit of that precious overview effect, which I know at least I would love to do.

I’m calling it now; should such a program ever exist, things like window seats or microgravity experience would make space the new first class. On such a short flight, serving a good meal becomes a little bit hard.

So making the experience more enjoyable is probably the upsell that will allow for such tickets to exist. We've heard in the past about the life-changing moments astronauts have had when experiencing earth from above for the first time.

So giving humans the ability to experience such a thing sounds like a win to me. I had something like a reverse overview effect. I was very critical of that. I was like, oh, you know, sounds like a made-up thing, the overview effect.

But looking down at the Earth and all the facets of the poles, I think you also saw the Earth as like a perfect planet. But then all the stars, and I just had this really strong feeling of that we belong as humankind to the stars and we need to explore more.

And then we're at the third pro, and probably the most likely and biggest application of Starship point-to-point: military applications. Yes. There's no good SpaceX contract without military applications somehow. And actually, the United States Space Force has already voiced interest in point-to-point transportation with Starship.

In 2022, SpaceX was awarded a study program by the Space Force to demonstrate technologies for space point-to-point transportation. This relatively small study sample still gave them $102 million, which is quite a lot for just a study.

Just goes to show the interest that the Space Force actually has in the topic and that they're ready to throw some money at the problem to get a piece of the final cake. And it makes sense, right? Imagine any crisis region in the world, just anywhere.

Now imagine the ability to deploy roughly 100 tons of cargo or crew at an hour of notice. This isn't even strictly limited to just military equipment. There's also a humanitarian purpose as well. Crisis regions that are hit by large natural catastrophes could get a hundred tons of critical equipment really, really quick if you find a spot to land.

That is certainly a capability any military or humanitarian organization in the world would love to have. And it's very understandable why the Space Force has already shown some early interest.

This would probably also require the research of proper landing legs for the Starship Earth vehicles, as military applications would be a lot less impressive if there was a need to construct a huge Mechazilla tower every time you want to land a starship.

That kind of defeats the purpose of getting anything anywhere in the world in an hour. Regarding getting the ship back from wherever it landed, there could almost be a situation where starships are prepared as a sort of crisis-region deployable base that is already equipped with a lot of necessities and is like a deployable structure with a ton of cargo already on board.

If you never intend to use the tanks again for fuel, then they could become even more usable space in the future, like for water or housing, structural loads permitting.

But of course, there are downsides to this program and concerns that we have to talk about. And spoiler, there are big challenges that SpaceX would have to overcome before this program becomes commercially viable.

And I'm not just talking about the legs, although that's kind of important. Let's dive into cost first here since, of course, this program has to fund itself somehow. We will start with oxygen pricing. According to market analysis published by Chem Analyst and Air Liquide, we have a current market price of roughly $230 per metric ton of liquid oxygen.

For methane, the same studies give a much more variable price range, with the lowest price range of methane somewhere around $300 and going up to all the way as much as $500 for a ton of methane, depending on when and in which purity and where you buy it.

The engine mixture ratio for Starship is expected to be about 3.6. Based on Elon's comments, there are 6,350 tons of propellant in total. That's 1,380 tons of methane and 4,970 tons of LOX. This would mean a full stack V3 Starship with the most modern numbers we have would need about $550,000 of liquid methane on average, and about $1.1 million on average for liquid oxygen.

Now I can already see some of you typing, but they don't need all of that for every flight. They can just produce their own cheaper, yeah sure, but they also need ground personnel and support and liquid nitrogen and helium, and all of this has to be transported to the spaceport, and a lot more than I'm probably not thinking of.

So using this $1.65 million figure is probably quite charitable to SpaceX. According to the Airline Cost Management Group, data collection for the fiscal year of 2019, airline costs are divided into three: flight operating costs, ground operating costs, and system costs. While 48% of the flight operation costs are indeed fuel, this is only about 25% of the final cost to operate an airline since you also have management costs, airport charges, overhaul, flight equipment, insurance, cabin crew, and much more.

If we apply that same logic to Starship, we would arrive at over $6.5 million of flight costs. Of course, SpaceX has been known to be able to reduce these numbers of a more traditional industry, but just including this for comparison, at the moment where Adrian is writing this, he's able to get a flight from London to New York for just under a dollar.

So the final price of Starship depends on how many passengers it can load for such a trip and the range here is quite massive, as Elon in the past has said that depending on configuration, it's between 100 to 1,000 passengers on a single flight. With a thousand people, the cost of fuel alone would be $1,650 per passenger, not including maintenance or refurbishment costs yet, and not including any taxation on the program.

And if the number of passengers is closer to 100, well, that puts the fuel price at over $16,000 per person. So right now it's probably safe to assume that this, at least until something in the calculation dramatically changes, cannot achieve the low price of the airline industry and the final price being at least four, if not many more times more expensive.

But there's another problem beyond price, and this might be one of the biggest problems of the entire system: noise. Aircraft are already quite loud and the commercial aircraft industry already gets protests, complaints, and other feedback every time new airports or changes to already existing airports are proposed.

It's quite a significant burden for local residents to hear an aircraft every few minutes. I mean, let's just be real. Although if you don't want to hear that, don't buy a house next to an airport. Although if you bought your house and then the airport gets built, I understand being mad.

Now, some of you might say I would never get tired of Starship launching close by, and that's probably true. I wouldn't either. But I'm a rocket fan, and we're not really normal people and not the group of people you want to consider for this.

One of the most intense noises next to the sound of launch itself that the stack would create are of course, sonic booms that happen when the stack breaks the sound barrier either during launch or reentry and are audible on every return to launch site landing, for example of Falcon 9.

This has annoyed people for a long time, both at the Cape and Vandenberg. And Falcon 9 is a much smaller rocket. These sonic booms are the reason why jets are not allowed to go supersonic over populated areas, because it can be very loud and, in some cases, even destroy windows.

According to the environmental assessment for a Starbase, which measures the ratios of sonic booms for the Starship program up until the point of Laguna Vista, Starship would create an overpressure event in the ballpark of £2.00 force per square foot that is 10 miles away from the Starship launch site.

Converting this to psi or pounds per square inch, we arrive at 0.02 pounds per square inch. While this is not enough to break a glass window itself, it could over time form micro cracks in the glass, which would be rather suboptimal for a big city covered in glass such as New York.

Using New York as an example here, where would you even put your spaceport? Well, for that one, it's a lot easier. You have to go offshore. For London, that problem already becomes much more complicated. And now you take Berlin. Where would you even put it? You would have to go all the way into the North Sea.

Conclusion. These spaceports need to be far offshore or way away from population centers and have a very sophisticated, fast transportation system to get people to the rockets and back to civilization.

It's a thing that can be solved with systems such as Hyperloop. But these systems have to be scaled for this to work and also cost money again, which only worsens the concerns voiced before this part.

Now for the third problem we're talking about, one of the things that's been criticized about the Starship and shuttle program for quite some time: the lack of an abort system. Right now, Starship doesn't have any emergency abort system whatsoever. And no hot staging does not count.

And so far, not a single rocket in history would have the reliability needed to be used as a commercial transportation vehicle without huge concessions. Tech Falcon 9 has a reliability of 99.3%. That sounds high, right? Like that's a lot of chances if everything goes well.

Well, would you fly on a plane that kills you 1 in 110 flights? Because again, Starship, in contrast to Dragon on Falcon 9, does not feature an abort system. If the rocket experiences a catastrophic failure, you have no safety net.

The commercial aircraft industry in 2023 had an accident rate of 0.8 per million sectors. Or to translate that, one accident for every 1.26 million flights, that's a success rate of 99.99992%. And planes were still grounded for not being safe enough, with questions being raised on if the industry needs to step up their safety game yet again.

This is a lot lower failure rate than any rocket ever in history. Just recently we've seen more aircraft failures and accidents making the news, and there's still a much, much lower accident and failure rate than any rocket has ever seen.

Historically, NASA has aimed for a catastrophic failure probability of no more than 1 in 270 for crewed missions. As stated for the space shuttle's return to flight risk assessment after the Columbia disaster, for the Artemis program and future crewed missions, NASA is working toward a risk level of 1 in 500 or better for loss of crew.

Both of these would never be acceptable for any commercial airplane and are magnitudes away from the goal that an airplane would need to load and go. A practice SpaceX uses for Dragon crew flights is also an interesting point here on renders.

It seems the rocket will be fully fueled and topped off during boarding. Because of the constant boil-off that happens to the propellants, they'll either have to slightly increase the cost for passengers or load propellants after passengers are already on board.

And loading while crew is on board could cost the passengers up to an hour of extra time. But of course, tanking a rocket right now is much more risky than fueling a plane with relatively stable fuel, so you would risk having people present next to it during fueling, which is no great Bob.

Also with Starship, where could it even emergency land in case of failure? Planes can of course glide and perform some emergency landings and have done so a lot in the past. But currently, SpaceX doesn't even have a plan or any form of landing legs.

Instead, they're just going to catch it with the tower. So can you even really emergency land? Or will this whole system rely on SpaceX making it so reliable that all of these emergency procedures and systems are just not needed? And is that even possible?

Next to this is also the problematic landing and maintenance equipment. Starship is big, very big. We see it in Boca Chica every day. So would every spaceport need a megabay and other support infrastructure? What if an engine needs a swap?

Would they be able to do that on the pad? And would it need to perform a static fire on the platform before flying? Again, lots of questions remain to be answered. Following current regulations, if SpaceX operates the point-to-point system like a commercial aircraft, they would have to follow point 121 of the FAA code which handles regularly scheduled air carriers.

This also means that SpaceX would need to have a transport of dangerous goods plan at every spaceport, a detailed hazardous material program, and all kinds of contingency plans for emergencies that will not only cost you time but also money.

Speaking of regulatory hurdles, and you're all probably tired of the FAA talk at this point, but we have to bring them into this. Currently, point-to-point would not at all meet the demands of any commercial air travel.

And yes, such a system would in the current situation, 100% be licensed under the FAA. Such a high endeavor would require a full investigation and rewrite of all commercial transport guidelines or even the establishment of completely new guidelines for such flights, which will take some time and some convincing.

At this point, we're talking about a major change of regulations and maybe even laws that would be required for allowing this. And this would of course have to happen in any single country that wants to be connected with Starship until a global solution is found.

There's one other big thing besides pros and cons. We have to address SpaceX's own focus on the program since Elon Musk's first reference to this plan. We had SpaceX COO and President Gwyn Shotwell once in a talk in 2018 talk about the ambitious goal of point-to-point.

But besides that, that's it. We've not seen any huge focus of SpaceX on this program and it makes total sense. It's not only risky, incredibly expensive, and difficult; it would also swallow a lot of the manifest of Starship to even get tests running.

And you could probably argue that every Starship test is sort of a point-to-point test so far, plus all of the engineering talent that would need to be diverted from HLS and Artemis and Mars. Point-to-point can wait. Furthermore, Starship needs to be incredibly efficient and developed to be able to achieve a good cost ratio.

For point-to-point, as we've talked about in the price section earlier, the program is just not mature enough yet to even consider Point to Point a relevant topic. Artemis is taking shape right now and with tankers, test flights, and Starlinks somewhere in there, this will probably take most of the Starship manifest until 2030.

Once SpaceX achieves a reliability level that would even satisfy the requirements for point-to-point, then we can talk about it again. But until then, we'll probably have to wait.

Point-to-point is cool, it's exciting, it's inspiring, and it would come in incredibly handy both for private military customers and the public and humanitarian organizations. But the cost, the noise, the infrastructure required, and the reliability required are issues that need solving before this becomes an actual program.

It won't replace commercial flights anytime soon, but for emergencies, military use, and high-end travelers, it might just be the future. However, we'll likely see SpaceX focusing on Mars long before point-to-point ever becomes a reality, at least on Earth.

After watching, I have three questions for you.

1. Will point-to-point ever take off or is it too far fetched?
2. Will point-to-point happen somewhere other than Earth first, like the Moon or Mars?
3. Did this video change your opinion in any way?

Let us know in the comments. Thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next time. Until then, don't forget, be excellent to each other.