Comment by internetionals | Hacker News Reader

Comment by internetionals | Hacker News Reader

The earth-to-earth idea is nice, and whilst it would be an improvement, I expect the travelling time to be the biggest obstacle.

You have to gather the people, check them in and clear them during internation flights. Then you have to load everybody on a boat, ship them to the platform X miles into sea, unload them, take them up the big tower, letting them board and settle and depending on how predicatable this is, wait for clearance to take off.

Now is the short flight.

And afterwards we can do the entire thing in reverse.

Some things might be a bit more optimized, like perform customs, safety instructions etc during the boat trip. But the entire trip from arriving at the sea/space-port until leaving it at the destination would probably be making this a diminishing returns and only really interesting for the extremely long flights.

That's a good way to explain Amdahl's law to people: no matter if you travel by plane or by rocket, you don't save that much time if you still have to deal with the TSA.

Let's optimize it a bit:

- Get everybody on a boat in NYC harbor with ferry level security (i.e. not much)

- As the boat is travelling to the platform, perform the more thorough check in, any security scans, etc. Everyone simultaneously straps down in their seats, last minute toilet runs etc.

- Slot the passenger capsule into the rocket like a cartridge and take-off immediately at arrival. Plot twist: the capsule was on the boat. Passengers might not even get to see the rocket.

I like the whole cartridge idea and that would surely help get the human component out of the whole thing.

If this were to happen I would imagine it to not be a capsule, but simply entire rows of chairs.

The main killer would still be the whole transit between the harbor and the rocket, but this could probably shave about half an hour.

At the moment there's lots of time wasted walking to some gate at the far end of a massive airport. There's only one company here and one or two flights that go straight up and don't need to taxi. So the travel time in the boat won't be much more than the walk from the terminal to the gate.

Possibly, but decreasing the flight time still won't take much out of the equation that would make it a net win against normal aircrafts.

That's not saying there is no market for something like this, but for anything but the longest flights it's going to be a very specific kind of customer.

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