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Elon Musk's 'Hyperloop': More Details Revealed
astroengine writes "Entrepreneur Elon Musk revealed details today about his concept for a high-speed transportation system he calls the Hyperloop. After tweeting that he'd pulled an all-nighter preparing for the announcement, Musk told Businessweek that the design could transport people as well as cars inside aluminum pods that move up to 800 miles per hour through a tube. The tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, not interfering with land needs because it would essentially follow major highways, such as I-75 in California."
. . . it would essentially follow major highways, such as I-75 in California.
Let the record show that TFA correctly states "I-5". Somebody in Michigan needs to watch his typos.
Elon, you remind us to do better than the conventional wisdom says!
Kudos to your enthusiasm. Also for reawakening us all and note, Genesis II from Gene Roddenberry also features such transport with underground based vacuum systems world wide too.
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
The problem I see with this is while it's nice to dream about 800 mph travel, I can't imagine that it would be feasible to construct a track or tube that could follow the terrain at that speed and still maintain passenger comfort. If you are building above-ground supports, you don't want them to be 500 ft tall as would probably be required in order to keep the tube straight enough for passenger comfort and safety.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
What about the steam storage? Would it be under pressure? If so, isn't that dangerous in case of a leak? If not wouldn't the tanks need to be gigantic? Also, what about friction of air between the inlet and the nozzle expander?
Speak for yourself, Musk. Tube Land sounds awesome.
I think it would be a much better replacement for freight trains and trucks. I'm guessing that may be their goal but they don't want to upset the train and trucker unions just yet. I'd say Amazon should get it on this as well to speed up their shipping times and hit their same-day delivery dream.
That's actually a problem past a certain speed. At least in the U.S., they don't allow trains to travel at high speeds in populated areas because they can't usefully stop if somebody walks across the rail. They can't stop because there is very little friction possible. With a closed tube, you don't have that risk, so you can shoot through downtown L.A. doing 250 MPH.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
It's been over 5 years since money was initially dumped into the California high speed rail project. After 5 years and 15 billion dollars we still don't have a single foot of track. If we can't even get two pieces of metal in the ground, what makes it believable that miles of metal tubes would be any easier and cheaper.
Na, never makes it to Indiana, but it goes north from Detroit all the way to the Canadian border at Sault Ste Marie in the Upper Peninsula. On the south end, it goes somewhere in Southern Florida (not sure where, never been all the way to that end).
No need for tubes and whatnot, simply allow for high speed autonomous vehicles on a "normal" highway. ~200 mph speeds with no humans in control. It'd be way better than a train, and autonomous driving conditions could be well controlled since the road could be designed with them in mind.
It's simple: there's no way of knowing exactly what the hyperloop would really cost to build, since one has never been built. He's comparing real-world prices to fantasy prices.
it's much like how pharmaceuticals that haven't been released yet always seem to promise "no side effects."
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It would be a LOT cheaper to build an access control fence then to build a tube that will hold good vacuum.
You can't stop a train _anywhere_ when someone walks across the rail. That's just evolution in action. I just hope they haven't bred when I hear about things like that.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Also, you can't climb hills with rail. Standard rails max out at a single-digit percent grade. If you want to climb more than five or six feet per hundred feet, rail can't do the job. That severely limits where you can run it; in particular, it is not practical to run a rail alongside most roads that go through mountains, much less run one at anything approaching a high speed.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I know that the original target speed was 4000 mph but even at 800-1000 mph how safe will this be when a fast deceleration occurs. In a plane during a crash it skids, hopefully, in a empty field or ocean and then comes to a stop. In a car there are crumple zones to absorb the impact to slow down the deceleration. It doesn't seem like there would be the enough padding to make it stop reasonably. This idea seems to be great but only if it had it's own separate rail section to handle emergencies. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/09/13/1459026.htm
in a region known for earthquakes. sounds fun!
No, you can't, but the faster the train is moving, the greater the danger, because the less warning you have before it gets there. Hence, speed is severely limited when traveling through populated eras, even with access control fences.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
“The pods would be mounted on thin skis made out of inconel, a trusted alloy of SpaceX that can withstand high pressure and heat,” Vance wrote. Air would get pumped through tiny holes in the inconel skis to create an air cushion, and it would get there via an electric turbo compressor. An electromagnetic pulse would each pod an initial thrust.
I saw this described almost exactly the same in a popular science magazine in Australia in the mid '70's . I can still picture the cover illustration, but damned if I can remember the title of the magazine ("Scientific Australia"????)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It seems like one could deter people from walking across the rails with some sort of symbolic notification device? To not reinvent the wheel, we could reuse the old inventions of "words" on a "sign":
WARNING
TRAINS GO THROUGH HERE
THEY GO REALLY FAST
IF THEY HIT YOU YOU'RE DEAD
EVEN IF YOU'RE DRUNK
or something.
We haven't roped off every cliff in the mountains, even though people die there. We've not even put warning signs on a lot of dangerous things ("WARNING: THIS IS A BEAR. DO NOT POKE IT. IT IS BIGGER THAN YOU. EVEN IF YOU'RE DRUNK.") Why do we need derp-proof railways?
The article explicitly states that the tube does not hold a vacuum, and thus greatly reduces costs.
For high-speed rail, you either need to buy up vast tracts of land (some parts in areas with very high property values, as that's where you want the stations), or shut down large parts of the current rail network (either for long periods, or short periods with very slow progress) reducing fare revenue. You then have to clear that land, and if it's fresh build do large amounts of earthwork/tunnelling to get it into the correct shape to take a railway line (no sharp curves horizontally or vertically), and even if it's an upgrade some earthwork may be necessary (higher speed requires even gentler curves) if you want to operate that stretch at higher speed. On top of that there's additional work to gauge clear for whatever rolling stock you're going to operate. The track is assembled on site. And long-term, the track and cabling are open to the weather, vandals, metal thieves, etc.
This scheme meanwhile has prefab track sections, avoiding the bespoke assembly, and requires little earthwork (installing struts after ensuring the ground gives sufficient support) and can presumably done with at worst the closure of one or two lanes of freeway. Long-term repairs to problems caused by external factors is reduced (although track maintenance for mechanical wear would still be necessary, as well as checking the support structures and track housing was undamaged).
I haven't done the maths (and don't have the numbers to do it anywhere near precisely), but you can see where potentially huge savings could in theory be made. It's not just a clear-cut "it's in the air so it must be far more expensive" thing.
All the /. experts come out of their caves to debunk a paper by a guy that brought us internet payments, commercial space travel, and luxury electric cars.
I look forward to the day I can commute via trebuchet and parachute.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ok, building an electric car is one thing, since public utilities, like roads, don't need to be heavily modified; but dreaming of a high speed rail... quite a bit needs to be done for that. Why are we even posting this? There's plenty of people dreaming, my 6 old daughter thinks there should be an emergency slide to get from a space station back to earth. Where's her article?
Given that California has been struggling since the 80s to establish high speed rail between LA and SF... I doubt this will get any consideration. We've finally got approval for the project to start with initial rounds of funding being approved for a project that will cost at least $50Billion.
I also dream of having a gold plated urinal in my Ferrari filled garage but like Elon, that's just dreaming.
Maybe this thing is feasible and maybe it isn't. But either way, "common sense" has historically had a poor track record on this sort of thing, and appeals to it have no place in a rational discussion.
Cue the pack of bleating neckbearded Mythbusters-humping assholes screaming "IT WILL NEVER WORK BECAUSE I AM SCIENTIST!" before they go back to their bongs and gripe because there are no jobs and there's no reason to go to college any more.
Now mod it down because you're a butthurt crying bitch.
A sign like this becomes a magnet to suicidal people, who I think represent the majority of people killed by train impact. The tube pretty much removes any chance of such suicides taking place.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I love it when simple obvious, and in this case old, technologies blow expensive and complicated technologies out of the water. Let's see, an old pneumatic message system with cars big enough for people. Cheap, easy to build, probably dirt cheap to run and maintain. Wow.
But there is huge problem with this system. Being so cheap and simple there is little room for massive companies to lobby/sell their complicated overpriced technologies. Tubes? How long is the list of companies that could build tubes? Pylons? How long is the list of companies that can build pylons? The train cars are a bit more limited but again not being maglev that list is still pretty long. Land purchases? I suspect that a bunch of insiders had land all lined up to sell.
Then you get other technocrats who don't like that their territory is being infringed. The rail people are probably scared that this might be independently run.
And lastly you get the aviation related interests that are far larger than most people might think. You have the oil refineries who will be unhappy to sell less fuel to both planes and cars, you have taxi drivers who run people to the airports, you of course have the airlines themselves, and you have the airports who will be unhappy to have fewer landings and takeoffs. Plus the no-doubt 50 unions who run the airports among others.
A tube system like this would be pure evil as far as those people are concerned dropping people off right down-town, how dare they.
He never promised anything remotely near 4,000 MPH. He promised about a half hour between LA and SF. Proposal does it in 35 minutes, which is indeed about a half hour.
The one thing I did not see is what the expected magnetic field levels will be for passengers.
Many folks with implanted medical devices are told to stay away from significant RF and magnetic fields. It is possible that the pod could be magnetically shielded enough, but it would be great if he added that info.
Otherwise, I say scrap the Cali High Speed Rail and build Hyperloop instead!
(The truth is that I bet the Casinos would throw in the first billion to build one from LA to Vegas...they dumped $650 million on the Las Vegas monorail).
Common sense would tell you that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun rotates around it.
That would be why the rail is usually grade separated at that speed, i.e. roads run under or over the tracks. Hell, even mainlines here in Sweden are mostly grade-separated, and where they are not there are systems in place to detect obstacles and stop the train before the train driver can physically see the obstruction. And we only have trains running 200 kph, you can be pretty sure that railways that allow trains to run at over 300 kph are entirely grade separated.
Then he's completely insane and doesn't understand. Likely never heard of boundary layers or looked at how they pump gasses down existing pipelines.
Of course I didn't RTFA. Are you new here?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Most areas are populated. Some just not very densely.
I'm fine with losing the kind of morons that climb fences onto high speed rail tracks. In fact I think the fences are unneeded.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The one thing that bothers me is how cheap he estimates it to be. Just 6-7 billion which is about 10 percent of the cost of the competing design. Just the steel for the tube (and being thick enough to not crush under atmospheric pressure) has got to be crazy expensive. He estimates 4 or 5 billion (depending on diameter size), but that seems low? Anybody know the cost of steel on projects of this magnitude?
The drivers will be extremely upset by it, needing counselling and often quitting their job afterwards, many passengers may be similarly scarred,
Only a problem until people adjust. The "emotional scarring" is a side effect of people being completely detached from the reality that people's actions have consequences. Once they realize that it's no big deal when an idiot snuffs it due to their own choices, we'll be better off.
and in the short term the time and money costs of the damage to the train/track and delays
Sounds to me like maybe we should invest in research into high-speed cowcatchers.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
That's actually a problem past a certain speed. At least in the U.S., they don't allow trains to travel at high speeds in populated areas because they can't usefully stop if somebody walks across the rail. They can't stop because there is very little friction possible. With a closed tube, you don't have that risk, so you can shoot through downtown L.A. doing 250 MPH.
So put up a chain link/plexiglass fence around it. Or better yet, worry less about drunks. Build the fence for cows anyway though.
In populated areas, the residents will look at the fence as an eyesore and file endless lawsuits to stop it. If you elevate, they will still file endless lawsuits. The only way to satisfy the nimbys is to build it underground. This costs a fortune but it would be exact same for Hyperloop.
Hyperloop doesn't solve any of the land use issues. It just removes the option to lay simple track on bare ground. Going down the unpopulated parts of the I5 corridor is the easy part for both Hyperloop and High Speed Rail. It just ignores the difficulties of getting in and out of cities. For instance, I5 doesn't even go to San Francisco and finding an acceptable connection from the the Central Valley to the Bay Area has been probably *the* biggest land use problem for High Speed Rail.
Musk had a supply of good crack that week. Also thinks anything he doesn't understand is easy.
He has a solid track record of getting stuff done.
Even things that others didn't think were feasible.
And he has done so repeatedly.
Musk had a supply of good crack that week. Also thinks anything he doesn't understand is easy.
Yeah. Who the hell is he anyway? All he ever did was make a fortune on the internet and started a car company and a space tourism company. What the fuck would he know compared to a smartass cunt like you trolling on the internet? I'll bet you've done more in your life than he has.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Impossible goal. The suicides will just jump off an overpass in front of the train, if that's their only option.
We should educate the suicidal. A disposable charcoal grill in a small room and warning signs about CO hazard...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
From TFA referenced in that slashdot post you linked to:
Musk said the Hyperloop "can just be out there as an open source design that people can keep improving. I don't have any time to focus on it as I have to focus on SpaceX and Tesla."
He never said he was cancelling the plans, just that he can't do it himself right now.
...the 42-year-old also said that if no progress on Hyperloop has been made in a few years, he might attempt to "make it happen".
That's actually a problem past a certain speed. At least in the U.S., they don't allow trains to travel at high speeds in populated areas because they can't usefully stop if somebody walks across the rail. They can't stop because there is very little friction possible. With a closed tube, you don't have that risk, so you can shoot through downtown L.A. doing 250 MPH.
I suspect it's got more to do with the sub-standard rickety tracks that keep getting thrown out of whack by the freight trains that have priority on them. Tracks in America are usually owned by freight companies, passenger trains piggyback on those tracks. Kinda the reverse of how it works elsewhere. Roads are maintained by the public sector, people provide their own cars, for example. Hence why American railroads are pretty decent at hauling cargo over long distances, but terrible at carrying passengers since they have to run on track and signalling technology that dates from the industrial revolution.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I hope they're planning to make the passengers out of inconel. With no windows, astronaut-like accommodations, no bathroom for when it breaks down and leaves you stranded for hours the passengers will need to have "the right stuff" and possibly Nowak diapers too. The travelling public in general are not noted for being level headed and calm in a crisis - ask any cabin crew member for their top ten encounters with crazies.
Nullius in verba
We don't need to build all the intervening tubes, do we? Just get it up to speed, then launch it every 5 miles or so; I'm sure we can catch them safely.
Jhyrryl
Amtrak spent $80 million back in the 1980s on a plan to build a high speed rail from LA to San Diego. Every little burg between the two cities sued to stop it. They finally sold the plans to somebody for $5 million.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
So you're assuming that this guy, who has spent $zillions on engineers for his successful SpaceX endeavour (including ones who _really_ understand both subsonic and supersonic airflow and boundary layer effects, which are all critical elements of rocket design), and for his successful Tesla venture, has not spent dime one on engineers to work out the details? Hmm.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
FYI: Link to Bloomberg video. Seems like Musk was vacillating but now is going to build a prototype.
Yes, but at 800 MPH even a large blob of water can cause serious damage to whatever hits it.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Well in order to lay train lines, you need to buy/expropriate a lot of land. Then you need to level all of that land, etc... Apparently his proposal is to stick poles at regular interval along the freeway and put the tubes atop the poles. So yeah I can foresee the execution to be much cheaper and quicker.
People like him are the reason the middle class no longer exists.
...They all got up and made successful internet startups or car companies or space companies? Is that where the middle class went?
Or do you mean they no longer exist because they all stopped working at North American factories like Tesla or SpaceX?
Or do you mean they went somewhere else because they were no longer were inspired to be entrepreneurial because no-one had the spirit anymore or could prove it was possible to grow a successful business?
We missed the opportunity to fix this back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the railroads were pretty much all bankrupt. The fix would have been to buy the mainline trackage (everything except the maintenance yards) from the railroads and give them a 20 year free ride to help pay for the deal; then run the railroads as part of the National Highway System. Then the railroads could have become the customers rather than the vendors, and the government, which generally does infrastructure pretty well, could have made the rails a viable solution while the railroad companies, which could then compete on an equal basis, could do the business things, which they do pretty well. And new companies could enter the market to provide passenger train service on an entrpreneurial basis.
Alas, instead we had a huge bailout of railroad companies, and the creation of the bastard stepchild Amtrak, which was designed and intended to fail, but has continued to survive despite the best efforts of the government and the railroads to kill it.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
"this will be cheaper than a high-speed rail?"
Red tape? ROW restrictions? Sound Pollution? Grade restrictions? base material restrictions? etc. High speed rail has some pretty significant drawbacks that limit its use and increase its costs. There are some pretty significant advantages to elevating the "tubeway", decreasing the size of the footprint (ROW in this case) and simplifying the "cars". Not saying its going to be a walk in the park, but with high speed rails mounting costs ($65-117 Billion and climbing) for Californians HSR project alone and ever distant completion times (2040 at the earliest) alternatives should be considered.
The tubes will be decorated to look like rolled $100 bills.
This is pretty much not the way Musk operates. SpaceX developed and built almost every part of their rockets, because the existing vendors were too expensive and too slow. And their launch prices are listed on their website - no cost-plus BS. If you plunk down your $180 million or so, SpaceX will build it and launch it. Musk likes efficiency and economic solutions to tough problems.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Obviously you didn't RTFA as a ordinary idiot. Part of the proposal is to turn that boundary layer problem into an advantage by turning it into an air bearing and having a turbo fan engine (electrically powered... another of Elon Musk's ideas he has toyed with so far as to make electrically powered airplanes) suck up the air in front of the pod and blast it out of the back of the pod.
The air itself in the tube isn't really moving. The tube is kept at a partial vacuum, but it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum. Essentially, the pod is "flying" through the tube in a fashion similar to an airplane.
At least download the PDF file and make some intelligent comments rather than suggesting the guy is insane based upon wild ass speculation of what folks thought the concept might be prior to Musk's announcement.
As the document is a preliminary feasibility study, I think high level analysis of potential use cases is definitely in scope.
to a massive state/federal boondoggle that is way over budget and was a terrible idea in the first place.
California doesn't need high speed rail between san francisco and LA. We have "planes"... they're faster, go to more locations, are much cheaper, and involve very low comparative infrastructure.
Both the train and hyperloop would require building this thing. Why would we do that?
Are airports terrible? Yes. Thank you 9/11. Airports are terrible. The TSA is terrible. But that doesn't mean we go back to trains. It means you fix the f'ing airports or consider building more mass transit in LA that ACTUALLY connects to LAX.
A major issue throughout the US is that mass transit frequently doesn't connect to airports. Why? Taxis. They get a license to run their taxis in the cities and its a lot of money. And when push comes to shove... the cities would rather keep the taxi companies happy then give people reliable mass transit.
Now... Assuming you can but a muzzle on the TSA. Assuming you can ACTUALLY build mass transit to the airport hubs... Why would that not be superior to the high speed train/hyperloop idea?
It would be superior. Planes are faster, cheaper, more flexible, involve less infrastructure...
Passenger trains make sense over very short distances. In distances over 200 miles they stop making sense for PASSENGER travel. Now, cargo trains... that's a different story. But guess what kids... the distance between SF and LA exceeds 200 miles... its a dumb idea.
At this point, the only people supporting the high speed train in California are the ignorant that don't know enough to have an opinion and the corrupt feeding like boated ticks on the stimulus money.
No one else supports it.
As to the hyperloop... sounds like a good idea... in a cartoon. In the real world?.... comically awful for so many reasons. Stick with the planes.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Amtrak spent $80 million back in the 1980s on a plan to build a high speed rail from LA to San Diego. Every little burg between the two cities sued to stop it. They finally sold the plans to somebody for $5 million.
If it had been a freeway, the property owners would have been told to take a walk.
what he should do, is point that tube up the side of a mountain, load a falcon 9 or falcon 1 variant into it, shoot it out the top at about mach 5-6 in the thin mountaintop air, and have a reusable single stage to orbit linear accelerator assisted rocket launch. but then, maybe this is part of his plan to get something developed along those lines.
Possibly. Those cities became what they were/are because of the original freeways, which were both a blessing and a curse. It was the cities themselves, not the property owners within them, that lined up to sue. Amtrak did not have the eminent domain power but the State of California does. So once the 10-20 years of environmental challenges finally waddle through the courts, the present $5 billion state plan _might_ actually get started.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
As far as I can tell, TFA doesn't mention breathing air. Do we assume that there is bottled air provided on-board?
If there are not windows, its a no go, this solution forgets that you are moving people.
A mere 300mph is fine if it has car like comfort, Instead build:
- Some type of track that can handle a small 2-4 passenger pod at 300mph, and transfer energy to the electric drive.
- Elevate track for reasons given by Musk
- Build canopy over track covered in solar cells to get as close as possible to zero net energy
- Track canopy protects track from most weather
- Cars that can handle a 300mph crash without killing occupants (big crumple zones)
- Side windows, and a big screen in front for entertainment and possible operator interaction
- On / Off ramps and terminals about every 30 miles. You are never more than 6 minutes or so from a terminal.
- Computer can space cars for airflow efficiency (think Nascar drafting), and make gaps when cars need to switch tracks.
- Build a hub and spoke network across the US, with the first track from the East Coast to the West Coast.
Select a route with an app on your phone or touchscreen in a terminal. It shifts the nearest empty car to you (think elevator). You get in, select your in car entertainment. If you need to stop for bathroom just let the computer know, or perhaps push a button, and your car will stop at the next terminal. When you are ready you get back in and continue your journey. All the while watching something close to low level flight out the window.
This is doable today.
reminds me of a Popular Science magazine from the 50's. It had cylindrical cars ahot through long tubes form one city to another. A vacuum in front, air pressure behind to keep them going.
Different in detail, updated by 60 years, but much the same.
Maybe feasible now. Maybe Elon Musk has a good collection of old pulp science magazines.
-- hendrik
I'm no actuary, but I don't think that happens very often.
I'd say the risk is very very low
Driving your car is exponentially riskier.
But but but, what about earthquakes? Yes, earthquakes are dangerous. During an earthquake I'd take my odds in that tube over my odds in just about anything else.
Feasibility: No new technology needs to be developed. It uses no exotic technology or materials. Think about the components: steel tubing, concrete pylons, solar cells, batteries, compressors, conventional electromagnets (no superconducting or rare earth magnets). It is an engineering and system integration problem. It is no where near as hard as what SpaceX and Tesla have already done. Tesla can supply the expertise for batteries and linear motor design based on their current experience.
Economy: The claimed price is $6 billion US. The price could be off by a factor of 3 and it would still cost half as much as the existing rail proposal. More then enough room for cost overruns. Musk experienced this already on SpaceX and it did not kill the company.
Benefits: It leapfrogs all existing high speed rail technology. It's a complete game changer. A successful outcome would immediately generate a world wide demand. There is a staggering amount of money to be made. In addition, it is ecologically very sound. The worst aspect is likely the amount of energy required for the concrete pylons, and that seems less then an equivilant roadway. Plus solar power is getting cheaper, so some of the price will go down in the long run.
If the US had any real capitalists around, they would jump at this opportunity. I expect without Musk it will go nowhere, because most big capital expects automatic government guaranteed profit. Although there have been some modest examples of innovative capitalism in the last couple of decades, for the most part capitalism in the US is non-existent, except for a few lone individuals.
Why is Snark Required?
Probably within the realm of affordable engineering. Fragile, easily wrecked with lots of knock-on economic damage like 9/11. Doubt there's enough adventurous investment capital to get it going within the next couple of decades.
Unreliable, and any excess CO2 (not just CO is produced) would make the death physically unpleasant.
A small industrial bottle of N2. A gas humidifier (or a home-made water bong with appropriate piping). And a $2 nebuliser breathing mask. (And a "Warning! Low Oxygen! Use Breathing Apparatus" note on the door for rescuers, just in case. You don't need to seal the room, and so the gas released shouldn't completely displace oxygen, but better to err on the side of caution.) Turn on the nitrogen, put on the mask, relax and go to sleep.
(It amazes me that the US has created such bizarre over-elaborate death penalties as electrocution, cyanide gas chamber, and chemical cocktail lethal injection, when a simple bottle of nitrogen, a humidifier, and a mask is all that is required. Twist yourselves in knots to create supposedly "humane" executions, but the easiest, most painless way to die is always ignored.)
There have been a few aerospace part suppliers that Elon Musk simply went to the company and made an offer to buy their company completely, offered them shop space in the El Segundo plant, set them up with newer tools and higher pay, and let them work on the Falcon rockets in other areas of the plant if they were interested. Elon said he didn't want them to start making parts for a competitor and making SpaceX a lower priority, so he was willing to bring them into the company at technically a loss.
The nice thing about his vertical integration of rocket construction is that he can control the quality at every step making sure that suppliers (since they are mostly in-house) don't cut corners pushing for some quota. It also doesn't hurt that his production rate is so freaking high right now where he is turning out a new Merlin engine about every other week (or is that every week now?) on the assembly line and trying to ramp that up to an even higher production rate. I don't know of anybody else in the aerospace industry doing something like that in terms of mass producing rockets. If the folks in Texas destroy a few engines, it really isn't that big of a deal as more are coming off of the production line to take care of any needs for upcoming launches. In short, SpaceX is getting very good at building rocket engines.
A lot of people drive 40 or so miles each way to get to work. Driving a car costs around $0.50 per mile when you add everything up. That's the same $20 each that Musk thinks would be the cost of a ride on the hyperloop. If it were built, it definitely would be used for commuting.
Or not take away their guns thereby keeping the train engineer safe.
YES!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
In Russia, the pillar takes out the semi!
heh heh heh!
Seriously. you don't think there will be barricades?
What happens when a big rig hits the pillars of a bridge?
What happens when a big rig goes into on-coming traffic?
Common sense would tell you that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun rotates around it.
Actually, common sense would not tell you that. It was the best scientific minds of their time that came up with that and even the math to explain the motion of the planets in such a system. It was a mu.ch more complicated system than what we now believe to be correct.
Because that happens about 10 times a day already? What about this proposal would cause the pillars to become Peterbilt magnets?
Building a hyperloop from San Francisco to Sacramento, or San Francisco to San Jose, would be useful and much shorter and cheaper.
> How on earth can he possibly keep on insisting that all this will be cheaper than a high-speed rail?
Maybe it's because he estimated prices for all the components, many of which aren't entirely unfamiliar because his companies work on similar hardware?
> It just flies in the face of common sense.
Ah, there's the problem. Common sense is no substitute for actually sitting down and doing some math. Which he and his engineers did. Common sense, despite it's popular reputation, isn't really that useful beyond the most basic of problems. It certainly isn't what got humanity out of the dark ages.
Yes, he's making ballpark estimates. Yes there are many unknowns. But he made a legitimate effort to price it out and it looks like it will be much cheaper. You may want to ask yourself how much you really know about the complexity and cost of high speed rail systems.
Tesla Coil > Hyperloop
I'm not so sure about that. In one place I worked three guys sat down for lunch near a large furnace (coke oven at a steelworks), dozed off and never woke up due to high carbon monoxide levels.
If the most expensive cost is land even seemingly expensive things that don't use much of it start looking cheap.
High speed track is quite expensive to make and maintain. Friction for high speed trains is mostly aerodynamic, and often about 1/2 of that is the wheel bogies.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
And the award for the biggest vaporware announcement that has ever been, or ever will be; goes to... Elon Musk, for his Hyperloop press conference, where he even admitted that he won't be building it.
Seriously, this is news? I'm pretty sure a boy at age 6 somewhere saw the drive-up bank tubes and had this idea too.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Problem with suicidal people?
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There's a filing fee for lawsuits. After this has been decided stupid, just throw out the rest but keep the filing fee. Make the morons fund the fences.
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"not interfering with land needs because it would essentially follow major highways"
That makes them MUCH easier to blow up with a roadside bomb or car bomb. How convenient. And I thought the terrorists would have to go hiking out into some field to do it.
Anyway, if this lovely idea has the same customer satisfaction rate and successful service rate as Paypal (also Elon's), people are going to be landing on the damn moon the hard way quite often when this thing malfunctions.
The air itself in the tube isn't really moving. The tube is kept at a partial vacuum, but it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum.
Sounds like those pneumatic tubes they have at some banks and pharmacies.
When I was a little kid in the 70's waiting with my mom at the bank drive-through, I used to wonder why nobody tried using those for mass-transit. Nice to see somebody's finally looking into it. :-)
The beauty in the design is how simple it is. It's frictionless and rides on "air bearings" to keep it aloft. One big potential problem is running out of air at 800mph for the skis. TFA doesn't say, but at that speed, it's difficult to imagine what happens to Inconel when it contacts aluminum; Gamma Ray Burst is all that comes to mind at those velocities. But, it's Elon Musk so rest assured he's worked this all out. He's no Boeing.
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While the pneumatic tubes is a fair analogy, that isn't perfect here. In those tubes, the capsule is propelled by high pressure air pushing against the back of the capsule and perhaps "sucked" forward as well with a low pressure partial vacuum. The hyperloop uses a slightly different system where the capsule is accelerated using some sort of launching system, then there is a turbofan on the front of the vehicle (similar to a jet airplane engine and acts on a similar principle) that is used to compress the air in the tunnel and push it past the capsule as well as use that air to act as an air bearing to support the vehicle (like a hovercraft or air hockey table).
There are some practical limits to the pneumatic tube system, which is why it hasn't been used for mass transit. It was thought that the pneumatic tubes could be used for large scale postal delivery, and some buildings in NYC had some extensive networks installed. I've also seen them used in hospitals where pharmacies and various wings of the hospital were linked together to rapidly transport medicine or documents (like x-ray images.... now done via computer networks so that isn't really as big of a deal any more).
Mr. Musk merely parrots the evacuated tube and capsule transport systems detailed in novels by L. Neil Smith and Robert Heinlein some decades ago.
I'm not impressed.
Each section of high speed rail is a very high quality track. Each section of a hyperloop is an encompassing tube, elevated at that. The tube vehicles however are much cheaper.
Wish I still had mod points. I hadn't heard this story before, but it's similar to many others I've heard which point to Musk's thoroughness and attention to detail. Case in point: he's been kicking around this idea in his head for at least a year (that we know about, maybe even longer) but he held off on publishing it until he could honestly justify taking enough time away from SpaceX and Tesla to give it a reasonably complete "alpha" treatment.
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It seems all some terrorist has to do is sabotage some small portion of track to create a massive, highly visual, costly accident -- just the kind of thing terrorists go for.
Maybe if the "tracks" are all underground that might help, but for hundreds -> thousands of miles?
It would be interesting to read how the security of the rails/tracks/tubes would be maintained. It seems at some point they are going to have miles and miles of the stuff that would be impossible to guard.
they should instead re-purpose the HOV lane to be a driverless car lane operated at 250MPH. Anyone who owns a car that meets the eligability criteria and operates under autonomous control can get past the barrier and the car's computer will automatically merge it with traffic in the lane. Sure it will take 90 minutes to make the SFO-LA trip, but there's no check-in, you have your own car when you get to the destination and aside from adding a wall alongside the HOV lane and adding the automated entry barriers and lanes the infrastructure is essentially already in place. I would have thought Tesla would be more interested in building the first compatible vehicles.
Nullius in verba
The PDF touches on security, but only alludes to faster lines. I wonder how you'd protect the 25,000 pylons? Seems like the answer is "not bother".
Typical high-speed rail is increasingly inefficient. Fuel and maintenance costs increase due to track wear-and-tear and increased drag from high speed travel through atmosphere. He's proposing a system that avoids those issues and a number of other engineering problems, so it could possibly be cheaper than the normally expensive and inefficient high-speed rail.
For reference, bullet trains are ridiculously inefficient, while light rail (top speed: 70mph at the straight part of track on a good day) is more efficient than bus.
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Math isn't common sense. Common sense is looking up, seeing the sun come up over the eastern horizon, move through the sky, and sink to the west. I mean if you spin a gigantic ball that's wet, water flies off it; what madman would come up with stupid shit like "the earth is spinning and the equator moves at roughly 1000mph"?
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Math isn't common sense. Common sense is looking up, seeing the sun come up over the eastern horizon, move through the sky, and sink to the west. I mean if you spin a gigantic ball that's wet, water flies off it; what madman would come up with stupid shit like "the earth is spinning and the equator moves at roughly 1000mph"?
Math is common sense, at least basic math. Even caveman paintings show rudimentary math. The druids, who would seem pretty primitive by our standards seemed to have a good grasp on many things celestial that required math to account for the passage of time. From the moment that early man threw a spear at a running animal math (geometry, actually) was being used. Just because it wasn't defined yet, didn't keep it from being used. Early man knew through common sense that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. He didn't know what geometry or trig or calculus was, but he knew how to use basic principles. The first time he divided the spoils of a hunt up equally, he again used math.
Math is all common sense. The formal definition and descriptive language of mathematics is not, but math itself is. We use it all the time without thinking about it.
As for common sense saying the earth was the center of the universe because of the rising and setting of the suns, stars and planets, that is was not common sense. That first had to cause the realization that there was something more that the world around us. Common sense attributed the rising and setting of the sun and other celestial bodies to the work of the gods. That was what common sense told them. Common sense also told them that if you displeased those gods, bad things happened to you.
If only there was some kind of map that would show where highways go.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I suspect that they'd outlaw trains in this country before outlawing guns.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Uh, the shortest distance between two points on the earth is a curved line. In many ways. It's shorter in some cases to go north and then come arcing back south rather than to travel directly westward.
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There is a great discussion from Alon Levy at Pedestrian Observations. Alon is a mathematician who is very knowledgable about transit issues and rail alignments in particular.
In stark contrast to most media (which seems incapable or disinterested in addressing the engineering issues and is basically repeating a press release) he has a number of specific issues:
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Nothing that comes out of an allnighter is going to be good.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Imagine a they were to demand that the airline stop in their little towns.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
All you really need is the legislature to get behind it and pass a law forbidding the lawsuits, a statement of, more or less, "Sit down, shut up, we're doing this."
The whole ride is about 30 minutes. No need for bathrooms.
If they build it out so we can do this:
NY to Pittsburgh - 311 miles, 31 minutes. Drive car to next pod.
Pittsburgh to Indy, 330 miles, 33 minutes Drive car to next pod
Indy to St. Louis, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod
St. Louis to Joplin 260 miles, 26 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Joplin to Oklahoma City, 200 miles, 20 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Oklahoma City to Abilene, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Abilene to Odessa, 160 miles, 16 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Odessa to El Paso, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod
El Paso to Tucson, 270 miles, 27 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Tucson to Yuma, 210 miles, 21 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Yuma to San Diego, 150 miles, 15 minutes. Drive car to next pod
San Diego to LA, 110 miles, 11 minutes.
and each of those rides is $20, then you can go coast-to-coast for $240 and get there the same day, easy. That's pretty darn good, the price of an airplane ride to do the same thing.
Looks like you better build a concrete wall around the support so that doesn't happen, eh?
What big rig? With the cargo-carrying capacity of these tubes, once they're built-out nation wide there will be no big-rigs, all cargo will move on these tubes.
Reminds me precisely of this toy I messed with as a kid. 1970's. remember Micronauts Rocket Tubes? http://2warpstoneptune.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/micronauts-rocket-tubes.jpg
Since reading the paper on the proposed Hyperloop when it was posted, I have been wondering what piece of the research and development will turn out to be the most difficult. Everyone focuses on the costs and political difficulties of getting this actually built. But at least on /. we should be able to contemplate the engineering without worrying about the biggest problems for these systems which is that foolish humans have to build and use them. :)
It seems to me that maintaining alignment of the tube might be the most difficult challenge. To maintain accelerations below 1g at 350 m/s (782 mph) you have to have a radius of curvature more than 122 km (a=v^2/r). That means the variation from a straight line of only 3.7 mm over the 30 m between pylons will produce 1g. And it takes 0.085 seconds to travel this distance, so it has the potential to produce one hell of a bumpy ride. Now I think they could maintain alignment of a few microns over 30 m and a good suspension could probably remove most of the bumps, but it could be a tough challenge. Since day/night temperature differences and many other things will probably move the pylons on these scales, they are going to need active feedback to maintain alignment.
The alignment will need to be measured and corrected over scales up to at least tens of kilometers. What kind of a system would you use to measure alignment with accuracies of microns over tens of kilometers? What kind of actuators would you use to position a steel tube 2 cm thick and 2.3 m in diameter with accuracy of microns? What failure rate can be tolerated with 25000 pylons? How much would the tube bend if one pylon had its actuators fail or if a semi truck ran into a pylon?
When I first thought of how to build a prototype for this system, I thought of using a circular loop since it would allow a single induction motor to accelerate a cycling capsule many times until it reached full speed, just like a cyclotron. But then I calculated the radius necessary to maintain moderate accelerations, and realized how straight this tube is really going to have to be. Maybe they can use a circular loop to test low speed operation, but even a circle of 10km radius can only go to 70 m/s (158 mph) before going above 1g. In a 1km radius circular loop at 350 m/s you have 122g. So the high speed tests are going to have to be in a straight test facility with linear motors capable of taking the capsule up to full speed.
I read halfway down the 450+ comments, and I didn't see one person mentioned air travel. I can fly from SF to LA in an hour on a flying bus that goes 550MPH and carries 200+ people. There's wi-fi, it costs $100 if I book ahead, and I can get a free drink if I have a coupon.
all this to say, the hyperloop looks like a solution in search of a problem.
hivemind, what problem is solved by the hyperloop?
http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/27/27/2272747_de23195f.jpg
It was thought that the pneumatic tubes could be used for large scale postal delivery, ...
There were plans to do this. But the US Postal Service (then a government department with a legal monopoly on delivering sealed "first class" mail) blocked them, as it had shut down other competing private-enterprise postal services in the past.
Under the current legal regime it might once again be possible. But given the expense of building the infrastructure in the midst of built-up cities (without existing steam tunnels and the like) and the relative cheapness of electronic communication, it seems unlikely to be profitable.
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Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?
Yes - by running fiber along their rights-of-way along with the tranport tube.
Which is exactly how SPRINT got started.
The name is an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications, and dates from the time they upgraded their own along-track communication from microwave to fiber and took advantage of the recent demonopolization of long distance telephone, driven by MCI, to enter the long-distance phone service. But they were already selling other messaging service along their microwave network, as Railroads have been doing since the initial deployment of the telegraph.
Power companies occasionally do this, too.
When you already have a right-of-way and your own communication along it, adding more bandwidth to sell is FAR less expensive than setting up a communications-only standalone company by buying signal-line right-of-way and installing equipment from scratch.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Steve Jobs brought high(er) quality computing to masses vs. Elon Musk brought us Tesla and SpaceX. While I can understand your preferences, I would not trust Steve with anything requiring large scale mechanical engineering effort.