On Sep. 29 at the International Astronautic Congress in Adelaide, Australia, Elon Musk unveiled a new spacecraft as SpaceX continues to set its sights on Mars. Dubbed the BFR, the vehicle can carry 150 tons of cargo into orbit and is almost entirely re-usable.
Musk hasn’t designed the vehicle solely for Mars or the moon. Toward the end of his address, Musk said that he plans to use the BFR for earth-bound travel too. In his vision of the future, humans will travel from New York to Paris in 30 minutes, or from London to Hong Kong in 34 minutes—sitting inside the same rocket that could potentially propel them to another planet.
“If we’re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars, why not go to other places as well?” he asked the audience. He then played an animated video illustrating a future wherein people hop on a spacecraft to travel across the globe in minutes.
Musk detractors will likely find this among the most far-fetched proposals the entrepreneur has ever touted, and will write it off as yet another marketing stunt. His supporters, as usual, will continue to wait patiently to see if his ambitions turn into reality.
In this rocket-propelled future, how many minutes away from your dream destination are you? Below is the full list of travel time estimates Musk presented in his video, matched against their real-life travel time via plane. Quartz reached out to SpaceX to ask how it calculated these estimates but did not receive an immediate reply.