UCLA MAE Associate Professor Richard Wirz was quoted in the LA Times article “Book the next rocket to New York? What it’ll take to realize Elon Musk’s bizarre travel plan.”
From the article:
The computer-generated animation also shows the rocket landing on a similar floating platform far off the coast of Shanghai.
“You may end up saving some number of hours, but you would have to get to the launch site, and then you’d have to launch and then you’d have to arrive at the destination,” said Richard Wirz, a professor at UCLA and director of the university’s Plasma and Space Propulsion Laboratory. “There would have to be hours on either end of you embarking and disembarking on your trip.”
Ryerson said passengers already have to decide that kind of trade-off when determining whether to travel a potentially further distance to a larger airport with nonstop flights, versus a closer, but smaller airport that offers trips with more layovers.
Video screenshot of rocket launch from SpaceX.