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Elon Musk Admits He Is Too Busy To Build Hyperloop
DavidGilbert99 writes "It sounded like the future — a 600mph train taking people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just 30mins. In fact it sounded like a future too good to be true. And so it seems to have proven. As Alistair Charlton at IBTimes reports, Elon Musk, the man behind PayPal, Tesla and Space X has admitted that Hyperloop is a step too far and he should never have mentioned it in the first place — 'I think I shot myself in the foot by ever mentioning the Hyperloop. I'm too strung out.' Oh well, let's hope SpaceX works out a bit better ... " Considering that SpaceX has already sent materials to the ISS and retrieved the capsule, it seems to have worked out pretty well so far.
Great article!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/497781/20130808/elon-musk-admit-busy-make-hyperloop-shot.htm
who where what when now?
I get the feeling that if we had about a dozen Elon Musks we would be living in the 2010's version we see in 40 year old sci-fi films...
Ok, the Hyperloop is a bit too much (for now), but the work he's done with Tesla and SpaceX is amazing. And don't forget he had PayPal back when it was a good thing!
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Elon Musk Admits he is Too Busy to Build Hyperloop
The editors should be paying me to do their homework.
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This just completely shattered my illusions of Elon Musk as a real life Tony Stark.
Hell, a single high speed rail link through the middle of the country linking the existing decent rail on the coasts would be great.
I wonder if he realized all the people "on his side" pushing trains would turn around once it got started and put tens to hundreds of millions in lawsuits in the way about environmental studies, hiring union people, and anything else they can think up, not coincidentally buying time for people to throw up apartments in the way, or cram warehouses in the way full of old machinery, all of which must be bought at vastly overinflated government condemnation appraisals.
More stories from Washington, and bankrupting Detroit in this month's issue of Actual Tales From Actual Freakin' Reality.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Launching through cleared airspace is probably much easier than trying to secure right-of-ways for a slightly-subsonic transport through thousands of municipalities, state and federal lands, and individual property owners, not to mention likely tangles with the EPA and whatever unions might be involved. Plus, a high-profile transportation project like that might pick up TSA attention too.
Delegation often doesn't work for endeavours like that. He'll delegate it to someone else (or more likely: a team of executives), and they will certainly push work and decisions even further down the chain until you end up with a typical corporate managerial quicksand geared to kill any innovative idea. Compare that with a driven, visionary, smart and in-control CEO, who knows when to step in and has the authority to do so (and knows how to make his middle managers sit up straight when ordered, too). Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, people like that who are not afraid to take charge of the nitty-gritty, even if they do not always get it right. It's a rare combination of talent and influence, which cannot be delegated... unless he finds the next Jobs and gives him carte blanche.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Why wouldn't it work? Is he personally qualified to design and build this thing on his own? Somehow I doubt that.
No, but he is motivated to get people to do it.
Instead of endless meetings where "None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us" is the order of the day he can step in and push the project forward. Once you start delegating you will have layers and layers of delegation and nothing gets done. Welcome to Corporate America.
Maybe we just need to figure out how to apply regenerative braking to rocket engines...
It sounded like the future — a 600mph train taking people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just 30mins. In fact it sounded like a future too good to be true.
A future where SF and LA are only 300 miles apart does sound a little unlikely.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No, it is not. For flights you have to get there an hour or more in advance, they are chronically late or canceled and you can't get up and walk around during it.
Go someplace they have HSR and check it out.
People travel by air because they don't have HSR available to them.
It's bad for another reason too. Earth Quakes.
Earthquakes take time to propagate, so unless it is built right on the faultline, there will be time to react.
Protip: If you immediately see a serious problem with something you know almost about, it is likely that the responsible professionals are already aware of the problem and have considered it in their design.
What you meant to say is, "Nowhere in the world do roads compete successfully with railroads except thanks to road and motor vehicle subsidies."
If you hire competent executives and managers rather than a friend of a friend, you can get that.
Good people don't have a big "G" printed on their forehead. They are hard to recognize, and hard to hire (they are usually busy). Building a good team is even harder. Smart, capable people often have big egos, like to be in charge, and are often direct and abrasive. Good people that work well on one team often fail when put on another team with different dynamics. You cannot be successful by just throwing together a bunch of "good people" and then walking away.
Sadly, this is an example of unions run amok. Trains don't need drivers. It's entirely feasible to automate them. Look at all the automated airport shuttle trains. But in Spain, there's a union, and they make damn sure there's a driver on every train, and unfortunately, they don't police their own members so we get incompetents who cause fatal wrecks because they can't be bothered to pay attention to their meaningless makework job.
Unions have their place, but that one is a poster child for Fox News to point to. They should be ashamed.
Why does it have to be profitable? If the economic benefits on the area are great enough it will pay for itself through economic growth. That's what governments are for, to finance things that benefit the people but don't necessarily make a profit.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Why would there not be simply some mechanical/electrical switch that triggers the train to slow down automatically approaching sharp corners?
I don't know about Spanish railroads, but the NYC subway system has had what you're talking about for many decades. For a dramatization, watch the original Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (1974). The part where the train is automatically slowed down going around the loop at South Ferry is entirely accurate.
I believe it's called a "railroad". I wonder if it's ever been tried as a business model?
Not successfully. No where in the world do passenger trains operate profitably without subsidies.
Now there's a [citation needed] if I ever saw one, SNCF is booking half a billion per quarter. The TGV network is a goldmine.
(At any given moment there's more high-speed equipment waiting to depart at Gare du Nord than exists in all of North America.)
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It's bad for another reason too. Earth Quakes.
Japan has earthquakes too, much more often and intense than we have on the west coast (we haven't actually had a large one since 1999). Japan has a fairly substantial rail system, complete with high speed lines. If they can do it, why can't we?
Lisbon to Minsk is about the same distance from NYC to LA.
How many people travel from Lisbon to Minsk (or equivalent distance) by train? Seriously - I don't know.
People rave about the TGV, but Paris to Lyon is only 237 miles (roughly like a Boston to NY or NY to Washington trip) Even Berlin to Paris (like an old war movie) is only 545 miles. It seems that when people travel from, say London to the south of France, they're more likely to fly, and that's only about 600 miles.
Among the many problems with hyperloop is elevation changes. If you're going even 1000 miles per hour, the minimum turning radius to stay less than half a g is 25 miles. There are 4000 ft mountains between LA and SF, and either you have to build a 80 mile long tunnel through them (pretty expensive) or build a viaduct that is 2000 ft high and 100 miles long. Going around the mountains might make more sense, but you're going to end up way out to sea.
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