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Does Elon Musk's Hyperloop Make More Sense On Mars?
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk's Hyperloop project has its challenges in places that have air. But in places with little air and no fossil fuels, where you can't fly and there's little drag, it makes a lot more sense. Post-doc researcher Leon Vanstone thinks the Hyperloop may have more of a future on Mars than here on Earth. He says, "Conservative cost estimates for building a single Hyperloop track from Los Angeles to San Francisco come in at US$6 billion. Taking the technology nationwide would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more. When you consider that normal, boring airplanes already travel at about 500-600 mph – about two-thirds as fast as the Hyperloop’s predicted speed – you might begin to wonder if an extra 200 mph is enough of a payoff for those hundreds of billions of dollars. ... Well, Elon Musk is no idiot, and he certainly has the money to hire some of the best and the brightest. ... A high-speed, safe, self-powered transportation system will be vital to connect Martian settlements – likely to be few in number and separated by large distances."
A train system designed to reduce friction has better metrics in a vacuum environment?
You don't say.
Let's shoot him up there...
Its easy to throw around big numbers to scare away people, US$6 Billion is the average price of an airport.
You have to put things in perspective.
Furthermore, how long is that of Iraq war? A few days? Hours? What's more important, to invest in our infrastructure or to wage illegal wars halfway across the globe?
(This might beneath lots of other reasons also be one of the main causes why we don't have flying cars yet in every garage.)
It seems like they'd want to be close together. Unless they hate each other for terrestrial nationalist reasons. But once you're on Mars, you're a Martian. You're not coming back to Earth. So why not make friends?
Hyperloop is too expensive on earth and we will not be on Mars for at least 30 years. Before we have two cities on Mars which are that far away that a Hyperloop would be needed to reduce travel time, it will most likely need 100 or more years.
... I think the cart is in the f'ing future...
This is like asking if maybe telepathy would work better on Uranus. Lets build the stupid hyperloop and see if it works anywhere... or build something on mars that you'd need high speed transit between... and then we can ask these questions.
As of now... the question baffles me.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Considering how much the US invested in a fighter plane that's barely usable, how much they invested in fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq... I don't know, seems 6 billion is a sum Obama regularly finds stuck between his couch cushions.
Also, my bicycle is less expensive than a Mercedes... but how the hell do I travel from one coast to the other without dying on the ruddy thing (be it of exhaustion or old age, I'll leave that for you to decide)? Seems to me there is a lot more to feasibility calculations beside initial cost.
I predict that settlements on Mars will be connected by trains instead of fancy hyperloops. Simple, proven technology (electrically powered), and it's easy to expand the system and add more stops if necessary.
the Mars One people. They'll have it up and running in 2017. Heck, they may event skip the rockets, why not build this thing from Los Angeles to the first city on mars?
Thake the tube to mars. How difficult can it be?
Only $6 billion to construct 380 miles of sci-fi-technology high speed rail using entirely new technology? Really?
When the UK government is prepared to spunk $45 billion on constructing 335 miles of bog standard railway track for HS2?
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
I expect many people would argue it to be worth the investment just to not have to deal with the airlines and the TSA.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
But surely we need a way to move soil samples around!
I think it may be a while before Mars has a commuter problem.
IIRC this is what connected the various "MarsDomes" on Babylon 5. I seem to remember them proving extremely resilient to getting blown up. See: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/...
Mars is already a giant partially evacuated tube. Why would you want to use a Hyperloop system? You could just use a regular maglev system and avoid all the issues of having to pump away the pressure wave that builds in front of the train due to it being stuck in a pointless tube. The novel part of Hyperloop is not the maglev propulsion it is the use of a tube.
More likely you would just use a sub-orbital rocket plane system to blast your way to the next town anyway. Any early mars colony is going to have a surplus of used rocket boosters lying around, and a rather large deficit of steel and concrete production facilities.
Any transportation system makes a lot more sense in the place where there are lots more people and lots more stuff to move around.
There's also a much easier and cheaper solution to the few and widely scattered martian settlements problem. Don't put them so far apart.
Since the title to this article is a question Betteridge's law states that the answer to the question must be no. So I have to come up with reasons:
1) There's nobody on Mars to ride on a Hyperloop system.
2) There's no manufacturing infrastructure on Mars to make one.
3) The whole point of the Hyperloop is to cut drag by running a train in a tube under a low pressure. Since Mars has a thin atmosphere already there is no need for the tube and hyperloop = train.
"Post-doc researcher Leon Vanstone thinks the Hyperloop may have more of a future on Mars than here on Earth."
Or no future at all.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Settlements on Mars are not cost effective in the first place. Even having one is a stretch of the imagination, and they'd be too busy just trying to survive to be concerned with how quick and comfortable their visit to the next hellhole settlement over.
The moon would certainly have the negligible atmospheric friction thing going for it, better than Mars, even... plus the moon is a whole lot closer, cheaper to get to, and has merits of its own for having a permanent base there at some point in the future anyways (such as a lower gravity well for spaceship launches to locations much further in space), so I cannot help but think it absurd to imagine that we would develop an infrastructure sufficiently complex on Mars that could accommodate something like this before we have something no less permanent and sophisticated installed on the moon.
Just because we've been there already does not mean there are no compelling reasons to go back.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But in places with little air and no fossil fuels, where you can't fly and there's little drag,
Wait, what?
I'm aware of several designs for heavier than air aircraft for flight on Mars. You can most certainly fly on Mars, you need a lot lower wing loading, so a much larger surface area, but other than that, theres not really any difference. Its just like flight high up in our own atmosphere.
Its not the moon or Pluto, it has an atmosphere. And by treating it as such, you've already show you're idea probably isn't worth discussing for the reasons your bringing it up.
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compared to the current £32 billion (way under estimated) budget for HS2 between London and Leeds / Manchester http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
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Whomever thinks this is a lot of money for a nationwide transportation network should definitely not look into what it cost to building interstate highway system (About $500B in todays dollars) or the US airport system (we spend $20 Billion *every year* on airports in the US - 80% of that on the 67 largest - just in capital costs).
Could they actually do it for that little money? That's the bigger question.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Conservative cost estimates for building a single Hyperloop track from Los Angeles to San Francisco come in at US$6 billion."
Is that supposed to sound expensive?
SFO's two terminals cost well over $1 billion each in inflation adjusted dollars. The new tower was $350 million. I can't find numbers on the physical plants, like the runways, but I suspect they're similar. I think $5 billion for the entire airport is not unreasonable. LAX is significantly larger and more expensive; they're spending $270 on elevator repairs alone.
A six-lane highway costs between $10 and $26 million per mile. It's 380 miles from LA to SF, so that's $3.8 to $9 billion.
The F-35 program is one trillion and counting.
Sorry, but this number seems fine to me.
All that's missing is the news that the whole lot will be 3D printed.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The hyperloop is the next new national travel phenomenon. Here's why:
1. Hyperloop uses electricty and can work fine without fossil fuels.
2. Because hyperloop cars can be made an arbitrary size, security demands are much less of an issue for a vehicle carrying, say, 10 people.
3. Because the cars travel in a tube as the technology advances they can travel at artbitrary speeds like 2k, 3k, 4k? M.P.H. With no noise impact.
So what if it costs 6 billion per route? The cars will probably be way cheaper to make than airplanes.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Last time I took a maths class, 6 was not "hundreds". If 6 billion isn't a typo, then the article is way out of whack, and the economics are actually heavily stacked in the hyperloop's favour, as 2 airports with terminals and a dozen 747s to shuttle between them would end up costing more than 6 billion.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
If the super big advantage of Hyperloop is that it goes through a near vacuum, and if Mars's atmosphere is a fraction of Earth's, why bother with the tunnel at all? Will it really save that much energy compared to the additional construction costs of a tube vs one or two thin metal strips?
The latter has the additional advantage that it can be used, using existing technologies and existing standards, to carry large amounts of cargo, and that cargo can be in units up to ten and a half feet wide. Which is fairly important, if you remember that the most probable reason for having locations several hundred or thousand miles away on Mars, would be to access differing resources.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Pylons. No grading necessary.
A train system designed to reduce friction has better metrics in a vacuum environment?
Mars is NOT without atmosphere. It's about 1/100th as dens as that of Earth, but that's still not trivial.
The moon has an atmosphere, too. It's density is 13 orders of magnitude down from that of Earth, which makes it a pretty good vacuum. But that's because it loses air more quickly - on GEOLOGICAL time scales - compared with Earth. On HUMAN time scales, on the other hand, things like oxygen, nitrogen, water, and carbon dioxide hang around for quite a long time. (I THINK the half-life is longer than human written history.)
The moon's surface escape velocity is more than a fifth that of earth, and a non-trivial multiple of the speed of sound at ordinary (or even lunar) temperatures, so the molecules aren't just going to fly off any time soon. It doesn't have a magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind and its associated magnetic fluctuations. So over time scales compared to continental drift the Moon is leaky. But on human time scales it's not. Exhaust a bottle of air on the surface of the moon when your child is born and most of it will still be around when he dies of old age (assuming only current medical technology. B-) )
This has been a planning issue for those considering lunar industrialization. Much science fiction has industrial processes on the lunar surface, for the "cheap vacuum". But both the industry itself and human habitation in general will "Pollute the Moon with Air", quickly rendering the vacuum too "dirty" for such things (though still good enough to eliminate the need for a "roughing pump" for at least decades, if that's the ONLY source of new atmosphere). That would also be very good for evacuated-passageway transport systems like Hyperloop - PROVIDED they're only using motors, not compressed air, for propulsion. B-) But...
The length of time air would hang around has led to proposals to terraform the Moon, giving it a breathable atmosphere by crashing a LOT of icy orbital objects into it. (This, of course, would put it back to the Earth's situation. B-) )
While it would be back to a pretty good vacuum in time scales comparable to the evolution of life, it wouldn't decay substantially for time scales comparable to A life. Even if it started to become noticeably (without sensitive instruments) thinner in a few centuries, any space-going civilization capable of GIVING it the atmosphere would be capable of maintaining it.
I think the leakage is slow enough for civilization to fall - to stone-age levels - and rise again (maybe from descendants of apes) before it would be an issue, but I'm not sure: Looking up the half life of Lunar air loss on the net is a tad complicated: It's not talked about much. But the plotline involving an artificial Lunar atmosphere, in the game Half Life, is talked about a LOT. B-)
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Low population density means shared transportation is less economically beneficial.
Chump change! Seriously, $6B LA to SF? Bargain! Start adding up what was and is spent on aviation infrastructure and 6B will soon look like a drop in the bucket. Such vehicles, however, only make sense on routes where there's a LOT of travel. Explains why there are fairly quick and on-time trains in the Northeast and pretty much nowhere else in the US.
There's no way to manufacture it.
$6B is too much for doing it on earth. How much do you think it would cost to do it on Mars?
...at least on earth. We can't even get proper funding for Amtrak or many other public transit organizations. The plans to build Transrapid lines across the continental US were ditched due to political unwillingness. Contrary, increasing the budget for the unsustainable and insanely expense Interstate system is not a problem. The US spends over 25 billion Dollars a year (!!!)) just for maintenance of the Interstate system, which cost in the 50s and 60s about 131 billion $ to build and law prohibits on most of the Interstates to collect toll. Spending 6 billion on a high capacity dedicated transport system between SF and LA seems not that expensive. Sure, initial expense would be big, but as a country we would be better served long term if we put down rails on one lane each direction of Interstates and have trains run. Especially freight will be a prime target which is still moved to 60% by trucks, which is incredibly expensive because trucks use more fuel and personnel than trains and are not faster long distance. Trucking will still be needed short distance, but that is where EVs come into play. A hyperloop connecting central hubs will make sense assuming that it has any significant economic benefit over rail and air travel aside from being fast. I wonder if designing low fuel consumption ultrasonic planes might be the better solution. The Concorde was popular, but expensive and with a few design flaws.
"Martian settlements – likely to be few in number and separated by large distances". One is also "few in number." The problem with these two edge cases (the above poster's zero, and my one) is the "separated by large distances" part.