Gwynne Shotwell is an inspiring person. (Through clenched teeth "Big
Falcon Rocket") Nothing is as awesome as the launch of the Falcon Heavy. The next milestone is a capsule abort at the top of burn.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-mus...t-travel-plan/
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Then he gets to tackle the real problems. Like how to get passengers through the crushing g-forces that come with takeoff and landing. The weightless period in the middle may be cool, but it’s not exactly a work environment business travelers will enjoy. Running anything more than the occasional flight would require an unprecedented integration with the national airspace system, to keep the rockets from taking out planes the way planes take out birds.
Building launch pads at sea assuages concerns about annoying city dwellers with the noise, sonic booms, and vibrations that come with hurling rockets into the sky, but brings up another concern. The flight itself may be brief, but forcing customers to get to the ocean in the first place could easily add hours to trip time. And it’s hard to see rockets serving any major city that’s not near an ocean or lake, like Paris, Berlin, New Delhi, Denver, Riyadh, or Johannesburg.
“I would like to see this development mesh with existing infrastructure,” like airports, says Madhu Thangavelu, who studies space exploration at the University of Southern California. “Then it becomes much easier to put safety protocols in place.”
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So suborbital buses are unlikely. But she's not thinking about Mars—"...because I want to meet other people in other solar systems."
The Moon and Mars are red herrings. The true future in space is hollow planets.
http://farm1.staticflickr.com/219/49...896_z.jpg?zz=1