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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."
Nevada would likely be a better choice than Texas because of it's high altitude and large flat areas. Of course there are likely other states that would be even better.
My guess is he's trying to get Texas to let him sell Tesla's directly in the state. That's why he's dangling this carrot in front of them.
"where presumably there is plenty of flat land to go around"
Other states have plenty of room for a 5 mile test track. I'd bet a dollar that Rhode Island could find room for it. I wonder why California didn't pop to mind, especially since he lives there.
He said Texas because they will be glad to see it, and get him some building permits quickly. In other states, some more than others, it takes a long time to get approval for these things. Not just business-wise; impact studies and environmental studies and social studies... And a good chance that your project would become a political football in the meantime.
It wasn't because of flat land.
Finally a use for that giant abandoned circular tunnel that's been sitting out in Texas for the last few decades.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
To be fair, you should be comparing it to other fictional forms of transportation.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We need voter friendly measurements. Instead of "Los Angeles to San Francisco in 28 minutes.", we need "like crossing 20 Olympic swimming pools in 13 parsecs."
Silence is a state of mime.
Why do we know this, exactly?
This guy has actually designed and built rockets that go to space and can land safely back on Earth. You think he's so out of touch with reality that a fucking Wiki page is standing between what he says and what reality is?
Musk may not ever perfect the Hyperloop, but if he doesn't, it won't be because of anything you think you know. It'll be because he's too busy revolutionizing the automobile, space travel, and power industries simultaneously. What a stunning display of arrogance to sit where you sit and toss trivial criticisms like "we know it's impractical because I read a Wiki article about it" at a guy who launches shit into space for a living while he's not building electric tank-cars or spreading affordable solar power or raising his kids. The day you know more than Musk about -anything- is the day he has a fuckin' tag on his toe.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
If you think this is like a pneumatic tube, then you know absolutely nothing about this.
Hyperloop is a system involving partially evacuated (not hard vacuum) tubes. The reason is that hard vacuum is much more difficult to achieve and maintain. The very low (but not vacuum) pressures offer little resistance, but do present a problem: you can't allow air to build up in front of the craft. Hyperloop solves this by a system of watercooled battery-powered compressors.
A pneumatic tube is propelled by pressurized air behind the projectile expanding, with lower pressure in front of the projectile. Hyperloop involves nothing of the sort - it involves magnetic accelerator segments for propulsion. Only a few reboosts would be needed over the length of an LA to SF run due to the low air resistance.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
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.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
There are two proposals in the initial Hyperloop document. One is for a passenger-only version. The other is for a passenger + vehicle version. The passenger-only version's estimate is $6B, while the passenger + vehicle version's estimate is $7,5B.
The estimated ticket price for a seat in the passenger-only version is $20 (amortizing the $6B cost over the number of passengers). No cost for transporting a vehicle is mentioned, but we can attempt to calculate it: if they have to amortize an extra $1,5B and there's 28 passengers per pod, plus 3 vehicles per pod in the extended version (as per the proposal), then each passenger-only pod is earning $560, so the vehicles need to earn an extra $140, so about $50 per vehicle, plus $20 per passenger who comes along with their car. So about $70.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
I don't see his Solar City work as particularly revolutionary. But SpaceX and Tesla have achieved some pretty darned impressive results thusfar which were widely ridiculed as fantasy several years ago. "Tens of thousands of annual sales of $60k electric vehicles that go hundreds of miles on a charge and getting the highest ranking Consumer Reports has ever given for a car? In your fevered dreams!" "Beating Ares 1 to the ISS for 2% of the development cost, on a rocket cheaper than the Russians and the Chinese, *without* the reuse that it was designed for? Yeah, you believe that, kool-aid drinker!"
Look, Musk is not some sort of demigod. But give the companies credit where credit is due. That's some pretty darned impressive stuff.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Air is not magical. You can't put a pinprick in a partially evacuated tube and have it just suddenly equalize. Viscosity on the order of the size of small cracks highly limits the rate at which air can migrate in. A little crack or a leaky seal is simply not enough to overcome an air compressor.
To put it another way: the pressure differential here is approximately one atmosphere. Large trunk natural gas pipelines have a pressure differential of about 13 atmospheres. By your logic, a natural gas distribution infrastructure is utterly impossible because "the natural gas on the inside is still going to *aggressively* want to rush out through any little crack".
First off, let's make this clear. Hyperloop is not Maglev. In fact, the design document notes that they could use Maglev, but dismisses it as too expensive: "A viable technical solution is magnetic levitation; however the cost associated with material and construction is prohibitive." Hyperloop uses air bearings - skis operating in ground effect with the pipe.
Maglev trains are expensive for many reasons. The cost of having the track be able to provide forward propulsion however usually represents only the tiniest fraction thereof. First off, you have the reasons that rail is expensive, period (right of way costs, environmental reviews, and all of the other overhead). Then you have to have the entire route be able to lift up a multi-dozen to multi-hundred-tonne train. Not just propel, but actually hold it stably in the air, which is a far more difficult challenge for many reasons than propulsion - you either have to have an extremely precise computer-controlled fluctuating magnetic field in a train with hanging magnets, or you have to have the entire track be magnetized or be able to magnetize, in a manner that resists dynamic instability.
Hyperloop only involves propulsion, and the accelerators represent just a few percent of the length of the track. It's a tried and tested technology, use around the world, and their budget for it is in-line with industry norms. There are all sorts of trains today that use linear accelerators, almost all of which represent way more length of accelerator than Hyperloop needs. Examples include
Airport Express in Beijing (opened 2008)
AirTrain JFK in New York (opened 2003)
Detroit People Mover in Detroit (using ICTS) opened 1987
EverLine Rapid Transit System in Yongin (opened 2013)
Kelana Jaya Line in Kuala Lumpur (opened 1998)
Scarborough RT in Toronto (using UTDC's (predecessor) ICTS technology - opened 1985)
UTDC ICTS test track in Millhaven, Ontario
SkyTrain in Vancouver (Expo Line (using ITCS) opened 1985 and Millennium Line opened in 2002)
Limtrain in Saitama (short-lived demonstration track, 1988)
Nagahori Tsurumi-ryokuchi Line in Osaka (opened 1990)
Toei edo Line in Tokyo (opened 2000)
Kaigan Line in Kobe (opened 2001)
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
"Look, Musk is not some sort of demigod."
Citation needed.
Given that the previous longest range before Tesla came around was in the ballpark of 40% that far and was produced by the hundreds, not the tens of thousands, and that the model S outperforms the BMW 535i, and has higher customer satisfaction ratings, and the whole teensy detail that no new US manufacturer that has anywhere near that order of sales for any type of car (let alone a radical new one) has been established since 1925... yes, that is damned impressive.
Where'd you get the impression that the Merlin was designed by someone else? Merlin is the most from-scratch engine design for an orbital launch vehicle in the US since the 1950s. It shares a few parts with older engines, such as the pintle injectors, but the vast majority of the engine is of brand-new design. The engine shares some similarities with work done at TRW, but it's not a TRW engine (doesn't even burn the same fuels). The reason that it's sometimes referred to as a descendent of work done at TRW is because TRW's former chief engineer is SpaceX's head of propulsion. He was tinkering on rocket engines in his garage that he felt he couldn't get support for at TRW when Musk picked him up; he proceeded to use his new position to create what became the Merlin series.
Nice dodge: let me repeat: #Beating Ares 1 to the ISS for 2% of the development cost, on a rocket cheaper than the Russians and the Chinese, *without* the reuse that it was designed for": how the heck is that not bloody amazing and something to be celebrated? If it's so easy, then why hasn't everyone been doing it? And yes, people like you were all over the place here a few years ago saying they'll never get off the ground.
No, something that's "really game changing" is dramatic reductions in the price of getting to orbit, with serious potential for even more significant drops if reuse works out. That is bloody game changing if the term "game changing" has any meaning. The propellent mix is irrelevant. You can have the highest ISP fuel mix on earth and still cost a bloody fortune to get to orbit if it's not economical. The Russians beat the US for the longest time with much lower performance engines for that reason.
Any more difficult challenge than that and you might as well just call it "magic". You don't get much harder in the rocketry world than something like that. Rocketry *is* engineering, and adding the word "mere" is just an insult.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
I've been around long enough to know when an idea is a crock of shit.
Arrogant and self-obsessed. When you're around a little longer, you'll come to realize that you don't actually know everything. Or perhaps you won't as some never achieve significant emotional maturation.
he's too busy revolutionizing the automobile, space travel, and power industries simultaneously.
Wow, you have drunk the Kool Aid!!
First to create a workable, marketable, functional-in-the-real-world electric cars and created the first new successful car company in the US in decades to design, build, and sell them. Designed and built reusable rockets that run good reliably to the ISS for a fraction of the cost of any other solution ever devised by man. Also working towards sending people to Mars, which even world governments haven't even seriously considered. And on the Solar City side, they're making solar power so affordable to people that they've become the number 1 installer for residences in the US and the number 2 installer overall in less than 10 years of existence. 4.3 gigawatts of power produced by their installations as of 2013. They're doing all this while bumping up US manufacturing to compete directly with the Chinese. Who else is doing that successfully?
And again, I ask, what have YOU done lately besides read Wikipedia and spout off about things you don't understand? Because Musk, the guy you're criticizing, seems to be busy getting shit done.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
For what it's worth, the founding of SolarCity with his two cousins have caused a gigawatt of solar to be installed in the last 8 years, and a massive manufacturing plant to be built in Buffalo, NY to create manufacturing jobs in the US, and give China some competition for solar panels.
No, it's not a complete game changer, but it's also not the square root of jack shit.
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I worship him...therefore he is a demigod :)
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?