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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.
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.
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.
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Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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).
But, but... propulison... partial vacuum... cost... bounday layer... turbulence... lateral accellerations...
Oh never mind, if Gene Roddenberry said so, it must work.
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.
Red tape could be a helper here.
They should be acquiring rights of way with _all_ of the initial money. Then start building when the population has grown to the point where it can run at break even.
But politically it was a non-starter without money for the construction unions.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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?
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'
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.
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.
A fast deceleration caused by what?
Like detecting a crack or fault in the tube structure shortly ahead of the current location and it needs to come to an immediate stop.
Most fast-decelerations that planes suffer are imposed at 9.8m/s^2...
Actually almost None do, a plane becomes a glider when it's engines quits and glides to the ground. 9.8 m/s^2 would imply that it descends straight down like a rock with no air resistance. When engines fail planes can glide to a landing and then skid on the ground with the resistance of the ground slowing the plane down during the "slapdown"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Impact_Demonstration
I was thinking is sounded like the train described in the Robert A. Heinlein book Starman Jones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starman_Jones
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
The target speed was never 4000 MPH (I think you're confusing this with ET3's proposal). For deceleration: emergency brakes and the cars have wheels for emergencies. One question that should be asked is, what is it going to crash into? Not other capsules, they're moving away from you and have a huge safety margin of distance between them. Not the station, it's a passive system that handles deceleration (no power required). If the capsule needs to decelerate themselves for some reason, you're going from a maximum of 760 MPH to 0 MPH using the capsule's mechanical emergency breaking system. At the same deceleration as the capsules would accelerate, that's about seventy seconds over roughly seven and a half miles. Which is much faster than a high-speed train can do the same thing.
The document Must posted does cover several emergency scenarios. Passenger health emergency? Best thing is to keep going to next station as scheduled, with a maximum trip length of 35 minutes it's the fastest way to get an active response, and much faster than you can get emergency services to an in-flight aircraft. Major depressurization of a car? Actuate emergency breaks on all cars and rapidly re-pressurize the entire tube. Major earthquake (beyond the ability of the pylon dampers to handle)? Emergency break all the capsules and wait it out. Power outage? The system has many times more stored battery capacity to complete all in-progress journeys. Power failure of system itself? Cars are self-powered, so can coast a decent distance themselves, and then the batteries normally used to power the turbine can be used instead to power motors on the emergency wheels to get the capsules either to the station at the end of the line or the closest emergency exit location. I'm sure there are tons of possibilities that haven't been accounted for, but many are.
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.
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/
If you read the paper in detail, you'll find some numbers. Since it's not a really hard vacuum inside the tube, and since it's cylindrical, the tube isn't as thick as you'd think. The tube walls are 20 to 23 mm thick (0.8 to 0.9 inches). That thickness can handle the load of the pressure differential, the torsion of its own weight between pillars, and the loading caused by the passing of the capsules, as well as standing up to quite a bit of seismic activity. Steel is pretty strong stuff. Cost for just the tube in the passenger-only model is $650 million. Upgrade the width to allow it to transport cars and light trucks and the tube costs somewhat less than twice that. $1.2 billion or so. That includes fabrication.
Surprisingly enough, the pillars cost more than the tube. Steel reinforced concrete with height adjustment gear should run around $2.55 billion for the passenger-only version or $3.15 billion for the vehicle version.
I suspect the competing design is spending more on real estate than the entire Hyperloop system. Hyperloop can use much of the I-5 route, saving a fortune in real estate costs, an option not available for heavy rail on the ground.
Consider first that sufficiently large deflection would result in the immediate emergency breaking of all capsules. There is also the consideration that earthquakes don't travel instantaneously, which means there is some advanced warning between an earthquake being detected and an earthquake reaching the hypertube. There is also the capability of the dampers on the pylons to absorb a certain amount of movement. These things combine to give sufficient time to decelerate the vehicles.
Consider this: earthquakes are a far larger problem in Japan (both in intensity and frequency), and there are similar consequences to deflecting the rail of a high speed train (the danger there is derailment). Even a stationary train can topple in an earthquake, much less of a concern on the hyperloop. Japan has never suffered a fatality on a shinkansen due to earthquakes, over the past half century. The hyperloop's emergency stopping distance would be vaguely similar to that of the shinkansen. The shinkansen emergency braking from top speed takes about 40 seconds by my math, and the *normal* deceleration from top speed of the hyperloop would take 70. If it decelerates faster than normal for emergency braking, it could potentially even stop faster than the shinkansen.
That's different from an impact-style deceleration, which all of your examples involve. I suppose it depends on what kind of fault is in the tube, unfortunately there are so many that there are a number of different scenarios including: not stopping, allowing the increase in air pressure to slow the car, slamming into a fractured tube and crashing, etc.
Oh right, they tend to fail in the sky then either explode, break up, lose engine power at low altitude then drop from the sky at odd angles or glide to the ground. And when you hit the ground, if you're lucky, they won't collide with something, break apart, and burst into flames (if there's fuel left.) There's a reason air crashes are so terrifying despite being relatively uncommon.
I suppose I'm struggling to see your point, given that this project hasn't gotten much past the concept phase.
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.
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"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.
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.
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.
The actual PDF with his plans does mention this briefly. It has a massive air compressor in the front, and the air that's in the hyperloop tubes is just ordinary air that leaked in. There's compressed air tanks inside the front of the car, and so basically some of that compressed air gets injected through tiny holes in the skies, and some of that air is pumped into the cabin, with the exhaust air pumped out the back.
If the car loses pressure, those exact same plastic masks that fall from the ceiling they use on airliners would come down, and the oxygen would come from those chemical oxygen generators that they also use on airliners.
Elon Musk has done some preliminary engineering and at least modeled the concepts to come up with some pretty reasonable guesses for the prices. Keep in mind that SpaceX (one of the companies he runs) happens to make aluminum tubes of about the diameter he is proposing with the hyperloop and knows to the penny how much they cost to build and to ensure the quality needed for a project like this. Land acquisition costs are something that numerous studies by the California Department of Transportation alone has done several studies for high speed rail lines, not to mention monorail fans and other groups including AmTrack that have at least studied many of the costs involved with establishing a transportation corridor.
On top of that, his experience with Tesla Motors is more than sufficient to make reasonable guesses in terms of how much each pod is going to cost. Mind you, many of the technologies in the hyperloop were things he was considering as additional lines of business in the future for Tesla (like electric turbofans) and he also knows how to build a passenger vehicle where you can travel in style.
While the costs might be preliminary, I'd bet they are good +/- 50% of the figures he is quoting. He did a pretty good job of coming up with a price on the Falcon 1/5 as well as the Tesla Roadster back when people like you were saying he was a nut case that didn't have a clue what he was doing with those vehicles.
That is the thing about Elon Musk. You might dismiss him as a crackpot spouting off at the mouth, but he has a track record of tacking crazy ideas like this and making them into reality. A whole lot of actual engineering effort has gone into this idea, where some people experienced in mechanical and aerospace engineering (actual rocket scientists I'll add) have contributed to its design specifications. That is how engineering works, where somebody with a bold vision puts out an idea, digs into the details for how it might work, draws up some diagrams, and uses real-world physics and knowledge gained by doing previous projects to come up with a way to take that crazy idea into reality.
Otherwise, I suppose you are a Luddite who thinks we need to sit on our hands all day wishing that civilization can collapse along with 99.9% of humanity so the few remaining can return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Good luck with that.
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?
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.)
I'm just curious how he is going to deal with the expansion issues of an metal tube that is 1000 miles long in various different temperatures and weather. The pipeline industry has been struggling with it for decades. It would seem that his designs are going to need some fairly close tolerances to work and with the various thermal coefficients involved it will be interesting to see how he plans to deal with it.
Sure, it's pressurized - but pressurized with what? GP says it's like an airplane; but passenger jets are flying in pretty thick air compared to these tubes - the tube is almost a vacuum. As soon as your capsule is loaded, they essentially evacuate the airlock, and we've got to wait until that front-end compressor is sucking enough of that almost-vacuum to pump air through the capsule? So we're going to just accumulate CO2 and hope that somehow there's enough exchange somewhere (not mentioned) to replenish the O2 in the partial vacuum of the tube? I can't consider this one answered yet. I don't doubt it's a fairly simple problem (bottle a bit of air), just that it wasn't really talked about. If you were going to fly a hypersonic plane, I kind of doubt you'd be relying on external air for breathing, and this is basically the same deal.
Building a hyperloop from San Francisco to Sacramento, or San Francisco to San Jose, would be useful and much shorter and cheaper.
Another person who didn't read the paper. Sigh. Is this really what Slashdot is now?
The reason we're posting this is because it isn't just dreaming. He laid out a specific plan with some reasonable numbers. Did your daughter calculate the the drag effects for moving through a low pressure tube at mach 1? Did she spec out the size of batteries it would take to power the turbofan that moves the air from the front of the system to the back while creating a suspension cushion? What about how the lateral g force limit for human comfort impacts the maximum turn radius for various speeds?
And he priced it out. And the components aren't far more exotic than stuff his companies already build. And the cost is likely to be less than the, actually, $70 billion rail project.
So no, you have, like everyone else in this thread, failed to levy an intelligent criticism. Without any interest or understanding of the topic you dismissed it. Are there any real geeks left out there? Anyone have intelligent criticism of this project so we can analyze it and learn?
The pipeline industry has been solving it for decades. There's even an oil pipeline over a fault in Alaska that moved by ten metres in an earthquake which survived because of a clever design of a couple of bends over the fault. For extreme thermal expansion problems look at power station pipework, and something like this is not so limited to materials that can withstand high temperatures and pressures. Great big compressible plastic rings are used between segments of some water pipelines for instance.
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.