Thread by @PeterDiamandis

.@elonmusk wants to use @SpaceX's megarocket, Starship, which was designed to take humans to Mars, for terrestrial passenger delivery.

The Starship travels at 17,500 mph. It's an order of magnitude faster than the supersonic jet Concorde.

Think about what this actually means:

Bangkok → Dubai in twenty-seven minutes.

London → New York in twenty-nine minutes.

Sydney → Singapore in thirty-one minutes.

So how real is the Starship?

As @elonmusk explained this past June, "There will be many test flights before commercial passengers are carried. First Earth to Earth test flights might be in 2 or 3 years."

Those test flights are proceeding as planned.

Back in September 2017, @elonmusk announced his intentions to retire his current rocket fleet, both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and replace them with the Starships in the 2020s.

Less than a year later, LA mayor @ericgarcetti tweeted that @SpaceX was planning to break ground on an eighteen-acre rocket production facility near the port of Los Angeles.

April 2019 marked an even bigger milestone: the very first test flights of the rocket.

Based out of their facility in Boca Chica, Texas, @SpaceX has been steadily iterating since then and testing mock-ups of the Starship.

And just last month, they tested their 8th version, dubbed #SN8, which traveled 40,000 feet in the air before exploding on landing.

But as @elonmusk put it, the test flight was a success: "…we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!"

Sometime in the next decade or so, "off to Europe for lunch" may become a standard part of our lexicon.