Everytime I hear Musk speak, I feel like I'm looking at a modern day Howard Hughes.
It's an impressive goal, and I have no doubt that Elon will absolutely try and make it happen. But I found the presentation lacking on a couple of critical points.
Firstly, 100+ people, for months, in that crew capsule, looked... pretty uncomfortable to me. He speaks of "making it fun", lectures, cinema, restaurant... which really doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because...
Secondly, who is going to go, again he speaks of "making it affordable", but come on now, even if it's affordable, having people stick their hand up holding 500k cash and saying "shut up and take my money" isn't going to cut it, the people you need to send are not necessarily the people who want to go.
Long long before Mars would be suitable for "Joe the Pizza guy" to move to Mars and setup shop, it's going to need a LOT of highly skilled people, thousands upon thousands, some of these people would certainly be amongst those who want to go, but would there really be enough of them, knowing that, there's no coming back in any short term.
I just kinda feel like the plan for going to mars is much like his presentation's plan for funding it (Steal Underpants ... Profit [for those who don't get it, this is a Southpark reference]), namely "1.Build Mars Ships; 2.
; 3.Multi Planet Civilisation".
Still, I'd love to see that thing launch. Super cool.