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."

Comments

Wow

[philmarcracken]

A train system designed to reduce friction has better metrics in a vacuum environment?

You don't say.

Re:Wow

[Dutch Gun]

Also... because every single sci-fi movie *ever* has shown domed cities with tube-based vehicles shuttling people between them. It's not exactly the biggest mental leap to make.

Re: Wow

[VernonNemitz]

Either on Earth or Mars you need an evacuated tunnel for the train. That's because the plan on Earth is to remove 99.9% of atmospheric pressure, while in mars the pressure is only 99.4% less than that of Earth. So you still need to remove some of Mars' natural air pressure to let the hyperloop run as fast as they want it to run on Earth. Meanwhile there is a problem that might have a solution, in either case. That is the pressure build-up in front of the hyperloop vehicle. It defines a maximum speed --but note that because it is a pressure build-up, it should be possible for the vehicle to partly evacuate that pressure, and store it on-board ---and then dump it to the exterior of the tunnel when the vehicle docks at the passenger boarding/disembarking station. After enough vehicles in the tunnel have done that simple thing, pressure should no longer be a barrier to speed in the tunnel, either on Earth or Mars.

Re: Wow

[bill_mcgonigle]

A train in a vacuum is called a 'train', not a hyperloop. Nobody outside of journalism students thinks Musk was the first to have the idea, but perhaps he has the methodology to get it built.

Re: Wow

[gstoddart]

There's also no passengers either.

So, in the same way a roller coaster at the bottom of the Marianas Trench would be novel and have no competition ... debating how effective the hyper loop would be on Mars is kind of pointless.

We've never put a human on Mars. Let's not start planning the transportation grid.

Sorry, this is someone doing their post-doc work on science fiction, so I'm afraid I fail to see the point.

The cost of a single Airport.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:The cost of a single Airport.

[91degrees]

That is a pretty reasonable cost for high speed rail transit between two cities. The French LGV Est line cost about â4 billion ($4.41 billion), which is a similar price for a similar distance. I could have picked UK's HS2, which is several times the price.

Re:The cost of a single Airport.

[halltk1983]

Also, a single Boeing 777 is $320 million (source: google it. It's in huge numbers at the top, with a link to this USA today article: http://www.usatoday.com/story/... ).

A small airport hub's actual cost is $5.8 billion and a large one can be as much as $55 billion. Source: http://www.aci-na.org/static/e...

In short, AC is right. We've spent hundreds of billions on airline travel, why would its replacement be significantly cheaper? Why are we more worried about the approximately equivalent financial cost, and less worried about the significant positive impact on the environment that this would have?

Re:The cost of a single Airport.

[Anonymous Coward]

For SFO to LAX we'd probably fly in a 737 not a 777 because it's more optimized for short haul. Published fuel economy for a 737 is 2.31 liters/100 km/passenger or about 102 mpg.

We'll ignore the fact that airplanes are not always 100% full. We'll ignore the fact that an LAX to SFO trip won't realize that fuel economy--need a longer haul flight for that. We'll ignore all the other inefficiencies, like taxiing, routing, traffic, missed approaches, etc. We will also round up the distance from LAX to SFO from 543 km to 550.

At 2.31 l/100 km x 180 pax x 550 km we get a minimum fuel burn of 990 liters for one flight or 267 gallons. While this is certainly better than us all driving there in our SUVs, it's already half the efficiency of us all getting in Prius's and making the trip (fully loaded Prius at 50 MPG/vehicle = 200 mpg with 4 pax).

Hyperloop would almost certainly exceed the efficiency of our fully laden Prius. So if the infrastructure cost is the same, why wouldn't we want to build the more efficient choice? Hyperloop will have the advantage of dispatching in much smaller batches, so the occupancy factor should be higher than air travel. The convenience factor should be higher too. It's easy to imagine hyperloop sending a 'train' every 5 minutes. And since we don't need a massive airport with 2 mile long runways, hyperloop stations could be built in or near downtowns and main streets. Bury the last few miles of each line and you get the convenience of a subway, but it takes you directly to the downtown of another city. It's like European train travel, but better.

Bring the future brother Elon.

This is going nowhere

[prefec2]

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.

The cart is so far in front of the horse...

[Karmashock]

... 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.

Re:The cart is so far in front of the horse...

[dave420]

So you assume there is absolutely nothing of value in examining Hyperloop? Comparing it to telepathy is strange, as telepathy requires a complete rewriting of the sciences in order to exist, whereas Hyperloop is not doing anything particularly novel, it's a combination of well-tested techniques and technologies.

You don't sound very rational.

Re:Why would Martian cities be far apart?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mining and transportation of mined materials?

Unless you sell the idea to...

[DrTJ]

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?

Re:I'm willing to risk it!

[Mr D from 63]

Why would we place settlements on Mars far apart?

Worth it?

[damn_registrars]

I expect many people would argue it to be worth the investment just to not have to deal with the airlines and the TSA.

Only a few hundred billion?

[Overzeetop]

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.

Ok, and?

[Maury Markowitz]

"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.

Re:I'm willing to risk it!

[painandgreed]

Why would we place settlements on Mars far apart?

For some of the same reasons that settlements on Earth are far apart. Settlements will probably be based on natural resources, and it's doubtful you'll find them all close together. On Mars, it will probably be based on different mineral and ore mines, and they'll have to be mined where they can be found.

Air pollution.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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-)