Have you ever wanted to visit a faraway place but can’t because it takes too long to get there? Someday soon you may be able to get there faster. A company called Space X is working on exactly that. The trip from New York to London takes about seven and a half hours by plane. Space X wants to fly rockets that will make the same trip in only 29 minutes.
Saving time when traveling has always been important to humans. The distance from Taipei to Kaohsiung is 361 km. That would take days on foot! Taking a car, bus or regular train will get you there in about four hours. The HSR (high speed rail) can do it in only one and a half hours! That means you have more time to do other things, like explore the city. Imagine the extra time you would have if you could take a rocket!
Even though getting to new places in a rocket would be very convenient, there are some problems too. The technology for a passenger rocket can look a lot like the same rockets that countries use to attack each other. Some people are worried it will be difficult to tell the difference between an intercontinental ballistic missile (IBM) and a passenger rocket.
Traveling by rocket may not be very comfortable. Rockets speed up very quickly, making some people sick.
火箭之旅也許會很不舒適。火箭加速極快，這會讓乘客感到身體不舒服。
不一定省時
It takes time to get everyone on and off of a train or plane. Some people think it will take even longer for rocket ship passengers. That means for some trips, it might not be faster than a regular airplane.
Rocket fuel is like gasoline for a car—it burns and leaves behind things that pollute our air.
火箭燃料就像汽車行駛需要汽油，燃料燃燒後，殘留的物質會汙染空氣。
票價昂貴
Sure, these rockets may be fast and cool, but how much are the tickets? Flying in an airplane from Taipei to Los Angeles costs thousands of dollars. The same trip could cost much, much more than that!
Space X is working on taking you to the other side of the world. In the future, they even want to fly passengers to the moon and build a city on Mars. In the meantime, they recently helped Taiwan. In August this year, Space X used their Falcon 9 rocket to launch Taiwan’s first homegrown satellite into space, the Formosat-5.
Space X正在研發地球上的火箭之旅，未來，甚至還可用火箭載客到月球，或到火星建造城市。Space X最近也協助臺灣，今年八月該公司的「獵鷹九號」火箭，將臺灣第一枚自主製造的「福衛五號」衛星，發射到太空裡。
道地說英語
skyrocket（像火箭一樣）一飛沖天
If something becomes very popular quickly, like those fidget spinners did, we might say that it skyrocketed. You might hear adults talk about the prices of things skyrocketing, or going up quickly.
