Yes, my claim is a bold one, Mr. Branson. Not as bold as your Virgin Earth Challenge, but nevertheless bold. I claim that I have conceived a plausible idea of how to construct a long-distance mass transportation craft capable of moving people and goods across the globe in a comfortable and efficient way, consuming less energy per mile per person or ton of cargo than today’s means of transport (including cargo ships), only slightly more time consuming than travelling by airplane.

This craft can run on solar energy, making it a zero-emission vehicle. I'm not talking about a PV-powered airplane, like the Solar Impulse. My suggestion is based on a different approach and is more of a disruptive innovation than that. But before I begin to explain the technical aspects, let’s consider the state of the art modern high speed long-distance means of transport on Earth (namely airplanes) and their advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages of travelling by airplane include:

1. For long journeys, it is the fastest way to get to a destination.
2. It requires minimal infrastructure (i.e. compared to the length of the journey): only an airport at the location of departure, and one at the destination. 

Disadvantages of travelling by airplane include:

1. In order to be economical, it requires a crowd of people to be crammed into a small, uncomfortable space.
    
2. Flights happen in the air. If the technical devices which keep the plane in the air (the wings, control systems or engines) fail, passengers will most likely die, and during the dramatic final minutes of their lives, they will know it.
    
3. Those of us who have a fear of flying, will spend more or less the entire flight, with their minds and thoughts focused on the topic explained in #2.
    
4. The infrastructures needed, the airports, are only to be found in a relatively limited number of locations. These locations often happen to be far away from the actual places of departure and destination. So for a journey from A to B, two extra journeys are needed: One from A to the departure airport, and one from the destination airport to B. Those two extra journeys and the transition between them and the journey in the air, tend to be very time-consuming, and for some people: stressful.
    
5. While the hours pass and you sit there, squeezed between your fellow passengers on your small seat, something insidiously harmful happens which you don’t sense, and which the flight attendants did not warn you about, during the pre-flight safety demonstration: Harmful radiation from the sun, unimpeded by air layers closer to the ground, penetrate the thin hull of the airplane, your skin and deep into your flesh, where it rages with the cells and their DNA. The gametes are particularly vulnerable. Frequent flights, especially long-distance flights at high altitudes, inhibit fertility, entail greater risk of birth defects for your future offsprings and increase your chance of getting cancer.
    
6. Flights pollute — a lot.

My idea removes all the above mentioned drawbacks of flights. It requires far less port infrastructure than airplanes. (It’s not a ship either.) It is a fairly quick way of getting from A to B. (The speed is superiorly higher than for road transport.) Although the craft does not move quite as fast as an airplane, it does so in a gentle manner. The passengers have plenty of space to roam and relax on. Thus, the concept can compete for customers, because the journey can be arranged to be so much more of a pleasant and eventful experience for the passengers.

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