(EN) Jeff Foust, Musk offers more technical details on BFR system, in SpaceNews, 15 ottobre 2017.
«[The] spaceship portion of the BFR, which would transport people on point-to-point suborbital flights or on missions to the moon or Mars, will be tested on Earth first in a series of short hops.
[…] a full-scale Ship doing short hops of a few hundred kilometers altitude and lateral distance, […] fairly easy on the vehicle, as no heat shield is needed, we can have a large amount of reserve propellant and don’t need the high area ratio, deep space Raptor engines.»