Rockets to fly people from New York to Shanghai in just 39 minutes.

Elon Musk predicts rockets will one day be able to fly people from New York to Shanghai in just 39 minutes. Speaking at a space conference in Australia on Friday, Musk said the company had looked into applying the technology to whizzing people to different places on Earth in insanely fast times.

"The results are quite interesting," he said as a video showed a simulation of people boarding a rocket in New York that blasted off into space and then came back down to land in Shanghai.

Most journeys between points on this planet will take less than 30 minutes, he predicted, and none should take longer than an hour. In an Instagram post after the presentation, Musk said the cost per seat "should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft."

Musk also has plans to build an underground "hyperloop" network that can shuttle commuters between New York and Washington, which are about 230 miles apart, in 29 minutes.