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Musk: Come ride my Big F**king Rocket to Mars

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Setting aside my own scepticism for just a moment...

Slower than flying depends very much on the corridor. London to North America takes 8 to 12 hours and to south-east Asia takes 12 to 14 hours. London to south-east Australia can't even be done in a single hop, but when it can it's expected to take 20 hours to Sydney.

Tanking before passengers have boarded may well take some bravery from legislators, operators and passengers alike, but a lot of the other pre-flight checks don't require passengers to be around. That's going to take some interesting work on the sequencing, I suspect.

How long the boat journey takes depends on how far out to sea it is. That's quite an unknown at the moment.

I think it's fair to say that personal spacesuits for each passenger aren't likely to be terribly useful; if the craft has lost cabin pressure at any point in its journey, I'd expect a raft of other individually catastrophic (and terminal) failures to also have occurred! However, the spacesuits used by national space agencies are as complicated as they are because they are required do a lot more (and for much longer) than would be required of these ones.

I enjoyed the video because it shows they're thinking about crazy things. I just love the madness of some of these ideas and I don't mind at all that they will likely never happen.

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