Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, but he also thinks that, maybe, he could use SpaceX’s badass rockets to ship packages from New York City to Tokyo in a smooth 25 minutes.
The SpaceX co-founder and CEO gave a major presentation about his company’s plans to travel to Mars and colonize it at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, but he also took a minute to just kinda riff on some possible terrestrial moneymaking plans.
“Maybe there is some market for really fast transport of stuff around the world, provided we can land somewhere where noise is not a super big deal. Rockets are very noisy,” Musk said, spitballing. “We can transport cargo to anywhere on earth in 45 minutes at the longest. Most places on earth we can get to in maybe 20-25 minutes.”
“Maybe if we had a floating platform off the coast of New York, say 20-30 miles out, you could go from NY to Tokyo in 25 minutes, cross the Atlantic in 10 minutes,” he continued. “Really most of your time would be getting to the ship.”
Musk would probably admit that it’s not the most thought-out plan — at least at this stage. Who knows, though. Maybe down the line, SpaceX will rocket boxes of goods around the world at unprecedented delivery speeds — but not Amazon packages, we bet.
The next step is Planet Express.
