Elon Musk Plans To Build Hyperloop Test Track

An anonymous reader writes that Elon Musk wants to speed up the development of his proposed 800-mph tube transport. "Billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk is getting more hands-on with the Hyperloop. Musk, who heads up both space transportation outfit SpaceX and electric-vehicle maker Tesla Motors, casually announced via Twitter on Thursday that he's decided to help accelerate development of his vision for near-supersonic tube transportation, first outlined in August 2013. Musk said he will build a five-mile test track for the still-theoretical system for students and companies to use. A possible location would be Texas, he added, where presumably there is plenty of flat land to go around."

Comments

Digital Age?

[rtb61]

I thought in the digital age we were meant to be working on less reasons for travel. Tourism, sure fun and nice and an economic bonus when it is not let get out of hand because tourism is really kind of a bad idea. You know, sucks up huge amounts resources and generates large levels of pollution, denies access to locals at the tourist venues and is only seasonal creating an abandoned work force or another immigrant workforce, for 'er' way poorer tourists. Want to invest money in something new, consider the Arcology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A..., a place where many can live, work and play, year round with minimal total impact and where people do not feel the need to escape from a regular intervals. The arcology is really cool because of course it is the needed stepping stone to a space colony. The importance of recycling, conservation of resources, energy balancing, habitability, nutritional sources, safety issues, leisure activities all can be tested in the arcology. Stop looking to tweaking the past and start looking to preparing for the future and virtual digital travel is far more likely the future, rather than trying to pretend you are the idle rich for only two weeks in every year.

Re:Digital Age?

[towermac]

Past provincial, I'd go hermit, if I could get a window apartment in that arcology. But then, everybody would want one.

So apartments are in 4-plex pods that rotate, giving each apartment 6 hours of frontage. Or maybe 5, to break it up and everybody gets a sunrise now and then.

That'd be cool.

cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hoping Elon would be content to just publishing his idea. Lots of people have thought about low pressure transportation tubes, for over a century, and none have been built for a reason. It will be very expensive.

High speed rail is just 2 steel rails, on top of cement blocks, on top of a bunch of rocks. Now, they are all high quality, and precisely laid. But the point is that, in spite of using cheap building materials, instead of something like titanium, double track, high speed rail lines are at least ~$40 million a mile. Imagine how much a vacuum tube, that carries people, will cost per mile.

But, high speed rail ultimately wins on volume. A high speed rail line can run 30 trains per hour. Each train could carry 1,600, or more people. Can hyperloop reach those volumes? Will the hyperloop tube stay intact for decades? Will hyperloop be too expensive to maintain?

I personally think Elon Musk is overhyped. I argue that the SpaceX cofounder, Tom Mueller, was more important that Elon Musk. If Mueller had the money, he could have founded SpaceX.

Re:"plenty of flat land to go around

[Rei]

There's a few reasons. But the biggest ones involve not having to use new land - not out some sort of idealist reasons, but pure economic practicality. First off, you need right-of-way. This is expensive. Also really ticks off land owners if you have to use eminent domain. These things almost always get tangled up in the courts. For in-town legs it'd be even harder. Secondly, all new projects have to go through a series of impact reviews. If you're building over a highway median, you're in an area that's already passed review - you still have to defend your incremental changes, but you don't have to pass as much of a barrier.

Also, most people overestimate the cost of the columns, comparing them to the cost of rail bridges. Just ignoring that by their very nature rail bridges are generally only built over difficult areas, and are going to be extremely price, It's important to note that one of the key cost-saving measures designed into Hyperloop vs. rail is often overlooked: weight. Hyperloop vehicles are more than an order of magnitude lighter than a passenger train, and only spend a brief period over any given segment; consequently the required structural strength is dramatically lower than for a rail bridge. I did some quick calculations, including tube mass, and found that and Hyperloop loadings should be similar to that of Disney's monorail. So think columns like this, not this.

While I do have criticisms for Hyperloop, I found that a lot of the criticisms levied against it on the net were seriously misguided, using ridiculous cost comparisons (another one is comparing the cost of Hyperloop tunnel boring to that of boring tunnels over an order of magnitude larger). I dug up "comparable" projects for each step of the project, and I really have to say, Hyperloop's numbers don't actually look to be that unrealistic. The keys of right-of-way reuse and low point loadings offer serious cost savings.

That said, I think Musk's positioning of the concept was stupid. By putting it in competition to an already-controversial high speed rail project, he both invited the rage of rail fans (who are used to feeling as if they're under attack), as well as inviting the expectation that it can do everything rail can (including, for example, making many stops along the way). It really is, as it was billed, an intermediary alternative between high speed rail and air travel - in speed, in throughput, in ability to make stops, etc. Consequently he should have proposed the first major project of it to be LA to Vegas. Then he wouldn't have encountered opposition from high speed rail fans, and the route doesn't have much population along the way to service. Plus, he could probably get tons of private backing for such a project, as Vegas is always desperate to better connect itself with customers in California.

I also think that for the current proposal, Musk should have positioned the LA station further into town. He's thinking "airport", and of course you can have local train / bus service to the station wherever it is, but airports are only on the outskirts because they *have* to be, mass transit is really ideally located more in-town. And there's no reason that he can't continue into town - the roads get a bit curvy but there's some nice straight rail lines that they could go over straight into the heart of town, and that'd probably be even easier to get approval for than for over road.