‘Most Starship spaceports will probably need to be around 20 miles / 30km offshore for acceptable noise levels,’ Mr Musk wrote on Twitter. This, he added, would be especially true ‘for frequent daily flights, as would occur for point to point flights on Earth’
| elon musk | seasteading | spaceports | offshore | hyperloop | oceanic business alliance™ |
Elon Musk reveals plan to build floating ‘spaceports’ 20 miles out to sea for launching SpaceX’s Starship rockets to the Moon and Mars
- Offshore launches would be needed because of the noise of the blast-offs
- Mr Musk revealed the idea while discussing the progress of reusable rocket tech
- Such spaceports would launch Starship, SpaceX’s planned long-duration rocket
- With space for 100 people, Starship could also travel between points on Earth
By IAN RANDALL
Elon Musk envisages building commercial spaceports that float around 20 miles (32 km) out at sea from which Starship rockets can launch towards the Moon and Mars.
An offshore location would be needed to ensure that routine, noise-polluting, blast-offs from such spaceports would not disturb anyone, he tweeted.
Starship — formally dubbed the Big Falcon, or F******g, Rocket (BFR) — is SpaceX’s planned long-duration cargo and passenger spacecraft.
The gleaming silver rocket will carry a complement of 100 passengers.
The 387 feet-long vessel would be launched atop a so-called Super Heavy rocket and could also be used to travel between two different points on Earth.
It could make a journey between the United States and the United Arab Emirates, for example, in around 90 minutes, according to Popular Mechanics.
‘Most Starship spaceports will probably need to be around 20 miles / 30km offshore for acceptable noise levels,’ Mr Musk wrote on Twitter.
This, he added, would be especially true ‘for frequent daily flights, as would occur for point to point flights on Earth.’
The SpaceX CEO made the comments during an exchange on twitter concerning how far reusable technology for space travel had progressed in the last eight years.
Travellers could reach the spaceports by boat — or perhaps an underground ‘hyperloop’ rapid vacuum-based transit system, a concept that Mr Musk has previously floated.
‘Starship will be fully reusable with booster reflight possible every few hours & ship reflight every 8 hours. No boats needed,’ Mr Musk wrote on Twitter.
In contrast, the rockets used by SpaceX at present — dubbed ‘Falcons’ — are only 80 per cent recoverable, he added.
This relies on the rocket’s fairings — the heat-resistant nosecones needed to pass through the majority of the atmosphere — being recovered after each launch.
Fairings are expensive — each one for the Falcon Heavy rockets, for example, is estimated to cost around $6 million (£4.7 million), according to CNBC.
At present, SpaceX has been recovering fairings by capturing them in giant nets which are carried to the component’s landing site on large boats.
