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."

Comments

I-75?

[dtmos]

. . . 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.

Re:I-75?

[ShanghaiBill]

Lets see... build a system where one small misalignment will mean crashes that kill passengers, in a state that has more earthquakes than anywhere else in the US... Riiiiiiiiiiiight...

The faultlines are mostly along the coast. The hyperloop would run mostly through the central valley. Even if there was a big quake, the seismic waves would take time to propagate, so there would be time to react.

It doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be an improvement on the alternatives. If you look at the current plan for high speed rail between SF to LA, almost anything would be an improvement.

Re:I-75?

[pla]

still, your chances of surviving a car accident are overall pretty good. Your chances of surviving a crash at 800mph are 0.00000000%

The odds of surviving a crash don't much matter here - The odds of a crash do, for two reasons.

First, because the accident rate matters. You have made an argument appealing to the fatality rate, while ignoring whether or not tubes would have more or less total (fatal) accidents. If fewer than 350 100-passenger tube-pods crash per year, you have a net improvement vs cars. Comparing that to flying, if we had an average of one packed airplane going down in flames every day - We'd see commercial aviation end almost overnight. More to the point, people die in car accidents largely because people fail, not because their cars fail.

And second, bad things happen in car accidents beyond "death". Things (IMO) worse than death happen. And don't forget all the high-cost but not-worse-than-death injuries (broken limbs, major surgeries needed, etc). Yes, an 800MPH accident pretty much means trying to ID the bodies by searching for teeth with a sieve; that doesn't mean you get to just ignore all the "not quite dead" car accidents, which far outnumber the actual fatal ones.


/ And hey, if I really end up dying in an accident some day - I'll gladly take "you need to look for teeth with a sieve" over "watching myself and my family slowly bleed to death as paramedics try to cut us out".

Re:I-75?

[larry bagina]

. . . 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.

They used xerox copy/paste

Tubes

[SnarfQuest]

Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?

And so it begins

[kylegordon]

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 love the obvious technologies

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Re:Cool but probably not feasible...

[ZigMonty]

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.

Luckily, advancement doesn't have to wait for the average guy's imagination to catch up. Have you actually read the proposal or are you just doing the usual slashdot thing?

The guy runs two companies, one in the space business and one that makes electric cars. I'm sure he'll need to ask a construction company for advice about the pillars, etc, but is there any reason to suppose he hasn't run this past the best engineers in those two companies? I'm sure his cost estimates are off, they can only be estimates this early in a design study, but it's not like he doesn't have engineers that know aerodynamics and vehicle design.

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until real rebuttal arrives, say from someone who can point out actual errors in the proposal.

Re:Cool but probably not feasible...

[fiannaFailMan]

It seems to me he has absolutely NO idea about the very real engineering challenges to something like this.

As opposed to some smartass cunt on the Internet.

By your logic we should be hand-carrying water buckets around to wash our ass with. FUCK I wish this site would go back to what it once was.

Preach it brother! I once read the comments on a regular basis because there used to be a bit of informed comment. But the rot started to set in with the "no wirelss, less space than a Nomad, lame" episode. Now it's just a bunch of basement-dwelling know-it-alls who think they know better than the man who made a fortune on the internet, started an electric car company, and is on the edge of establishing commercial space flight for tourists! And these dickheads truly think they know better than him even though they didn't bother their sorry asses reading TFA! It beggars belief.

Kudos on your choice of language. "Smartass cunt" just about sums up the typical /. commenter these days.

Re:very unfeasible

[Teancum]

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.

Re:Cool but probably not feasible...

[localman]

What part of the science is not clear enough? It's a new combination of technologies, but every aspect of it is reasonably well understood physics. And what's wrong with hyping a fairly dramatic new idea that needs a lot of input and momentum to reach fruition?

This rest of my comment isn't directed at you, but so far I've seen a hundred critiques of this thing, and each one would be eliminated with reading comprehension. Expensive? Likely cheaper. Necessary? Voters already approved a more expensive, less functional system. Eminent domain? Less of an issue than current plans. G forces? Calculated. Air resistance? They cover that. Maintaining vacuum? They cover that too (or rather, they don't, because it's not a vacuum). Earthquakes? General Safety? Failure modes? They touch on each in the paper. It's a well thought out starting point for a new mode of travel. Of course it needs work - he says that right up front. But this is a hell of a kickoff. I can already hear the people who, after saying it was impossible, finally going through the paper and understanding it, jumping straight to "well it's not that amazing, it's all kind of basic". It's like people desperately need to bolster their self image by shitting on things.

Actually I'm curious to hear some intellegent criticism because it would be interesting to consider, but all the criticism so far is either a) ignorant idiocy or b) even more vague than his proposal.

For heaven's sake people, if this paper doesn't get you at least a little excited, you really ought to turn in your geek card and pick up a boring naysayer card in exchange.