The actual passenger-carrying Overture will be delayed from 2023 to the mid-2020s. It will have a first flight and a two-year test series with six aircraft.
It will be able to fly from San Francisco-Tokyo in 5h 30m and Tokyo-Hong Kong in 2h.
The Overture will have 55-75 business-class seats, with a crew of six, including two pilots.
Nextbigfuture Believes Supersonic Planes Will Get Leap-frogged by SpaceX Starship
SpaceX Starship will be able to fly at mach 20 in one stage and travel up to 6000 miles. This will be a speed of 18000 mph.
SpaceX Starship should be able to carry 100 passengers.
SpaceX Starship could have manned test flights by 2023.
Elon Musk says adding two to four Raptor Engines to the Starship will let it go sub-orbital for 6000 miles at mach 20. This would mean trips like San Francisco to Shanghai or New York to Berlin. Many world cities are within 6000 miles of each other.
Boeing extended range 767s can reach 6000 miles and the newer 777 and 787 have longer ranges.
If SpaceX can determines ways to save 30% on Starship point to point efficiency then they could get to 8000-mile ranges. This might be possible by lightening landing gear and heat shields. They could need less heat shields for sub-orbital only vehicles.
Going from two stages to one stage will increase the safety of the Starship. Increasing safety by 1000 times is the major hurdle to transporting passengers.
President and COO Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX could begin offering Earth-to-Earth transport services as early as 2025, if not earlier with Musk’s proposed Starship-only variant. This would start with non-passenger services.
Add 2 to 4 more Raptors for Starship point to point on Earth. You can go surprisingly far, even with low lift/drag. This was an unexpected result.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 30, 2019
Yeah, *way* better. Dramatically improves cost, complexity & ease of operations. Distances of ~10,000 km with decent payload seem achievable at roughly Mach 20.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 30, 2019
My thoughts exactly! Simply moving from 2-stage to SSTO would make point-to-point so much more viable. Probably means Starship could operate much closer to land, compared to a 31-Raptor booster…
— Eric Ralph (@13ericralph31) May 30, 2019
SOURCES- SpaceX, Elon Musk Twitter, Wikipedia, flight Global, Boom Supersonic
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture