SpaceX and the Air Force Research Lab will start testing and developing the capability to fly anywhere in the world in under an hour.
SpaceX’s Starship is poised to revolutionize global logistics and travel with breakthrough ultra-fast point-to-point flights on Earth. The US Air Force Research Lab and Space Force have awarded SpaceX contracts totaling approximately $200-$300 million for a “Global Logistics” program, aimed at rapidly delivering cargo and personnel using Starship. Capable of traveling up to 8,000 miles and landing propulsively, Starship will soon begin (maybe 2026) testing landings on Johnston Island, with up to 40 landings planned over four years. The cost of Starship flights is expected to drop significantly, potentially to under $10 million per flight, making global cargo transport economically viable with a 200-ton payload capacity at Mach 20. While initial military tests focus on cargo delivery, such as medical supplies and personnel transport in as little as 30 minutes, future commercial applications could enable passenger travel between continents in under an hour. Challenges include the need for specialized infrastructure like launch and catch towers for rapid refueling and relaunching, as well as the complexity of lifting off from remote locations without damaging the spacecraft or landing site. SpaceX anticipates Starship landings on Johnston Island by 2026, cargo missions by 2028-2029, and passenger flights by 2035, potentially transforming global logistics with same-day delivery and offering passengers a thrilling ride with G-forces and views of Earth’s curvature.
The Air Force will build two landing pads on Johnston Island near Hawaii.
The flights will likely start from California so that they are not flying over land.
There will be up to ten flights per year for four years for testing.
The SpaceX Starship problems where they have exploded the last two flights will get solved this year.
The Starship will need to have landing legs.
There will be no catch tower, because the goal is to land on relatively common concrete pads. Those would be hundreds of regular military bases around the world.
The Starship could then launch from any regular launch tower and then land near where they want. Drones could then fly out and deliver the cargo or urgent supplies where they are needed.
The exciting thing is that in a few years this could change our lives with hourly delivery of cargo anywhere in the world and a few years after that flying people anywhere in under an hour.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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No abort option is a spicy meatball!
I think going with the military is the right way to do this. If you start this program with the intention of civilian transport, then you’ll never get enough funding or regulatory approval, plus people will understandable be a little bit testy about getting on board. Once it’s a flight-proven concept with the military, though, people will want to have a civilian version.
Given that it takes:
1) From 1 to 12 hours to LOAD the payload
2) From 4 hours minimum to stack starship on the booster
3) 1 hour to fuel
4) 90 minutes of technical countdown checks and procedures before take off.
5) and all the above has to be done in optimal weather conditions
I think is a very inefficient way of spending taxpayer money.
because
A) either you have multiple starships with different STANDARD payloads and these starships are all continually refueled (and maintained refueled). In that case it is probably cheaper to have the payloads in containers in different airbases around the world.
OR,
B) iyou want A VERY SPECIFIC CUSTOM payload to be loaded. In this second case you have still a MINIMUM 7 HOURS AND A HALF, ON AVERAGE 13 HOURS AND A HALF of technical delay BEFORE launching, assuming that your CUSTOM PAYLOAD IS ALREADY AT THE LAUNCH SITE which is not as convenient to reach as, let’s say, an airport. Then you have 30-60 min flytime and then landing quite remotely, hopefully on a nicely levelled platform of reinforced concrete, because you REALLY do not want your PRECIOUS custom payload that needs to be shipped ASAP getting destroyed if starship lands, but the ground collapses making it fall and burn.
1) There’s no reason loading the payload has to take more than perhaps a half hour. If that. And can happen at any point before takeoff.
2) You can keep the Starship stacked on the booster.
3) You can keep the stacked Starship and booster fueled. (Yes, this requires special provisions to keep ice from accumulating, but it can be done.)
4) You can do the countdown and just hold at T-20 minutes.
5) Weather at the landing site is actually more important than weather at the launch site, and Falcon boosters now routinely land in bad weather.
I’d say the irreducible minimum is probably about 20 minutes: This is how long it takes to pre-chill a load of fuel already delivered to the rocket. Pre-configured payloads could be loaded during this time.
Remember, the military has rather different tradeoffs between safety and speed than the civilian world.
What you say is unrealistic:
1) The procedure to get astronauts into the space shuttle (that was indeed progressing through its launch sequence) took at least a couple of hours and they are the kind of payload that load itself on its legs. I do not assume that you want swinging cranes and speeding forklifts around a giant tank of fuel. But maybe it is just me. Furthermore the payload has to be perfectly secured and balanced to avoid movement during launch. It is easy if you have somewhat standard configurations of payloads that you prepared in advance, if you need something very special very specific at the last second not so much. Furthermore if you keep always your starships fueled then EVERYTHING in the facility (including the warehouses) will be VERY FAR AWAY from the launch tower.
2) if you keep everything stacked all the time you have reduced accessibility for inspections and assesment, not to mention you make the loading of starship (which sits on the top) more problematic. There is a reason why it is not done that way.
3) Everything can be done, not everything can be done efficiently or safely, if you want to deliver critical components increasing the risks of failure due to fuel leaks, ice formation and so on, might not be worth it.
4) Sure you can stop the countdown and skip every check, but again, there are reasons why these checks are in place. The general truth is that “go fast and break things” is a quick way to lose a lot of money without delivering results. The procedures and check in place make the systems MORE reliable and ingeneral if your plan is to deliver something SO CRITICAL that has to be on teh other side of the planet in an hour or so, I assume it is not present in hundreds of easily replaceable copies if a launch fails.
5) Hey, you are the one that plans to load the payload on a fully stacked, fully fuelled starship! You cannot dismiss weather at launch site when you are moving tons of stuff at 300+ feet of height.
I think it is all bogus and another way in which the good elon will try to squeeze money from uncle sam without delivering. (I am still waiting the lunar lunar lander by the way)
Another point I’d raise is that for point to point Starship doesn’t actually NEED a booster, because it doesn’t need enough delta-V to achieve a circular orbit.
But the key point is that military cost/risk/benefit tradeoffs are very different from civilian, so the military is willing to do things that would be considered excessively risky or expensive, to get capabilities that would not otherwise be available.
You can think it’s bogus, but the feds have been funding this program for years now. I think they’re serious, and it’s technically doable if they really want to spend the money.
Now, civilian point to point rocketry? Yeah, that’s nuts.
One would think that taking a rocket ship from New York to Dubai would be an order of magnitude or three more ‘carbon intense’ or at least ‘BTU intense’ than taking a flight, just based on the whole 17,000 MPH suborbital speed… What do I know? Just plant trees, eh? /s
There is some “Tragedy of the Commons” going on here (fouling the atmosphere) that people wouldn’t stand for. Would need StarTrek propulsion to make it accepable.
I don’t think a couple of flights for military/fancy people is going to make a difference. This will only become an issue if frequency reaches the scale of global air travel, which just isn’t very likely to happen. How often would the capability to have 200 tons shipped at Mach 20 halfway across the globe in 40 minutes justify the massive cost?
Well, if the billionaires club isn’t satisfied with imploding Titanic observation subs, they can always fly this fireball express straight to Hölle.
I have had dozens of articles explaining that SpaceX will replace ALL long haul air cargo over the next decade or so.
Large planes cost $250 million to $300 million each and they move 30-90 tons of cargo.
The Starship upper stage costs about $20-30 million each and with $250-300K engines will cost $5-10 million each.
Fuel is not very different.
An airplane can do 10000 flights reliably, so the cost of the hardware of a 300M the plane is effectively 33K per flight. If each of the rockets is reusable 100 times (which never happened at the moment), even with a total cost of the system of just 10 millions (which is again science fiction) starship has a cost per flight of 100K so it is 3 times more expensive assuming a level of reusability they never achieved and assuming that hardware costs 10M instead of 35M (which in my opinion is very optimistic) and fuel efficiencies are the same with a plane.
NOT. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.
Look at the Rapid Dragon program.
A disposable Starship put to the same task could eliminate an entire Chinese invasion fleet once it’s determined they’re making their move.
I believe that Starship, by itself, without the booster, actually IS capable of doing suborbital hops of useful range. But if you land at a location not intended for Starship, even if it’s been equipped with landing legs, refueling is NOT going to be easy.
For military purposes you’d probably want to have some sort of HALO cargo container that the Starship could drop while passing over at a safe altitude, and then go on to land at a proper landing site past the target. This would dramatically increase the range of suitable delivery sites.
Of course though, if the container is disposable, that increases the launch cost, and if it’s reusable, then you need a way to ship it back to wherever it’s needed next. The only advantage of shipping the container back vs shipping Starship back is the smaller size, which may or may not be worth the added complexity, weight and reduced payload capacity.
If you’re landing the Starship in remotely contested territory, you’re treating the Starship itself as disposable. Rockets are not particularly bullet resistant.
OTOH, a bolt on HALO conversion for a standard shipping container seems feasible.
Detachable legs.
Land. Unload. Take-off.
Leave the legs behind.
Return to a tower.
Could we see a launch from central New York to central London? Or would it be some remote launch pad that takes 1 hour reach from the center of a big metropolis?
It would have to be the latter; Rocket launches of this size produce enough noise to liquify your brain, out to a considerable range.
Ok, from watching the video, yes they are one-way trips with Starships being shipped back.
Just want to reiterate Icepilot’s comment. Are these one way trips? No tower, no booster, no launch – as far as I can see.
One way, unless you have catch tower to catch tower. Return is via a large drone ship or modified navy ship. Or the military expends the $5-10 million vehicle. Which is far cheaper than many missiles.
What about transporting and ejecting goods via parachute?
Would there be any advantage to not landing?
“The Starship could then launch from any regular launch tower …”.
If the Starship w/legs can’t launch from a plain concrete pad, how does this work?
Considering orbit is not necessary for point to point travel they could probably launch the starship without a booster which is a lot less force on liftoff.
yes no booster is needed. No stage separation. Only upper stage 6 to 9 engines. I expect a stretch version with 9 engines. But also a mini version with 3-5 engines might also happen. Those would be for low volume routes. However, if it is economic to run with only 10% loads, then mini versions may not matter. I think a smaller version works for some Mars scenarios like Zubrin said.
They first have to manage a complete orbital launch without a Starship RUD.
Yeah, point to point sounds exciting and all, but they should get some other things sorted out first.
Prior to switching to hot staging, they were only suffering heat shield burn through during reentry. Worst comes to worst, they could give up on hot staging and take the payload hit, but I expect they’ll just lengthen and open up the interstage, which struck me as a bit too short and closed in from the start.
SpaceX plans to use gas-fuelled thrusters on the Lunar lander to avoid kicking up rocks and dust during landings.
Adding the gas fuelled thrusters around the ring — or Starship itself, eliminating the ring, could provide a few seconds of thrust.
Just enough to let space open between the two stages.
They need to design and build them for the lander anyway, might as well start now.
I am not sure if the ‘Anywhere’ in the world will work out in practice. What do you do with the Starship after it lands? Refuel and let it take off again? Get a giant Dirigible to airlift it to the nearest spaceport? Regulatory issues alone will limit the ‘anywhere’ to just a few global locations.
One possibility to explore is to package cargo in a secondary lander (parachutes? retro rockets? gliders?) – this would allow smaller cargos to be delivered in that hour timeframe with perhaps fewer issues for delivery.