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SpaceX Is Building a Hyperloop Test Track Near Los Angeles (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via TechCrunch: SpaceX appears to be hard at work building its Hyperloop test track through Hawthorne, a city in southwestern Los Angeles County, California. TechCrunch reports: "SpaceX is hosting a Hyperloop Pod Design Competition for student and engineering teams, and 23 winners were selected earlier this year to build their pod prototypes and race them on the test track, a 1-mile tube capable of achieving 99.8 percent vacuum. Said track was photographed by reddit user 42finder this week (via Electrek). Pod testing would be a big step for Hyperloop technology. The two main companies competing to build the first operational Hyperloop systems, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Hyperloop One, have yet to create pod tests. HyperloopOne has begun construction on its own test track in the Nevada desert, of course, but the SpaceX project looks considerably further along. Back when SpaceX first announced the competition, the timing of the final round which includes the actual test of final prototype pods was set for Summer 2016, but in July SpaceX announced that would slip to January of next year."
It may turn out to be safe!
As long as it can survive trip #2, it's all good...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I know, I'll leave the Hyperloop guys in the dust and revolutionize a specific, highly conditional transport capability.
Because it's hard to know what one means when they talk about "Hyperloop" anymore. The original Hyperloop Alpha document spelled out a very explicit concept. Then they held the student Hyperloop pod competition and the winners were absolutely nothing like what was laid out in Hyperloop Alpha.
It comes across to me that the main point of this competition is more to drive student interest in engineering rather than to build a viable transportation alternative. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Hyperloop One seem more focused on the latter.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
I hope...
Though I wouldn't want to be the first rider om this either. Wouldn't want to be among the first 1,000 riders, actually.
Holding your money, improperly automating your pilot, blowing up your satellites.
No thanks, Elon. Electric cars are developing fine without you, NASA was managing the private sector well until Reagan started fucking things up to push an ideology, and Paypal is Paypal.
Why build such stuff in earthquake prone areas.
...an historical account...
is correct use of an. ...an unilateral cease-fire...
is not correct use of an.
Don't get me started on smarties that ALWAYS use "... and I" when clearly me is needed: ...He came up to my wife and I...
is not correct. Remove "my wife" and say it again: ...He came up to I....
WRONG!
Like all Elon Musk companies. They need to get rockets into space, regularly, before anything else - even before trying ones that they can land and reuse. The Hyperloop stuff is just an enormous distraction, and also impractical. While it would be lovely to have hyperloops going all over the world the massive amount of capital investment in the infrastructure renders it a pipe dream.
In this era of jihad events, a hyperloop would function quite well as a destruction mechanism if just one person decided to sabotage it. Brilliant design for terrorizing Americans.
None of this is true.
Everything I type is false.
You believe it anyway.
... in an evacuated tube. What could possibly go wrong?
Thanks, but I'll stick to flying to go long distance. Its bad enough being stuck in a crowded metro train thats stopped in a tunnel, but at least you could walk out if you had to. Good luck doing that in a vacuum. As for travelling at thousands of mph a few feet from the walls , no thanks Mr Musk.
I am participating and using a NASA-designed EmDrive built by NASA scientists. It can theoretically go to 1c with no external power. We proved this in our NASA tests with NASA scientists. Once we deploy our NASA EmDrive we will unlock the power of the Hyperloop and you can travel from NYC to Los Angeles in under 10 minutes.
It's a bit depressing the way so many otherwise intelligent people get starry-eyed about this impractical pipe dream. I get that the idea of a vacuum tube travel is awesome to think about, particularly for long distances, but the hyperloop has all kinds of issues that must be overcome so that... what? So that we can travel at a measly 2x faster than existing Maglev trains on a path that's just a few hundred miles long, in a tube that is much more expensive than Maglev track and is much more vulnerable to accidents or terrorist attacks?
Meh. Wake me up when they've figured out how to (economically) build a tube that can convey vehicles at 5,000 MPH all the way to Beijing.
The whole hyperloop concept is a boondoggle. It'll never happen and it's a giant waste of money.
Let's just say this works and I'm sure it will, as the engineering of vacuum tubes has been known for nearly a century (for those of you older folks, this is just an evolution of the system we used before ATMs when you deposited your check at your drive-up bank into a vacuum tube system to the bank teller).
Then they try to build it. The infrastructure alone will cost $100B. I get that number because I anticipate that building a sealed tube is going to be a lot more expensive than high speed rail tracks, and the cost of the high speed rail project in California is now estimated at $68.4B. The steel alone will be very hard to come by, because while rail steel and ribar is made in tremendous volume, this requires plate steel that is then rolled by a steel fab. There's a decent infrastructure around this type of work supporting the wind energy business, but the capacity of this industry is probably 1/10th of what it needs to be to produce the volume of steel required for hundreds of miles.
Then there's the regional politics to deal with. Building a Hyperloop from LA to San Fran will run through the cities or counties of at least 6 and as many as 9 municipalities depending on the route you choose. Those cities/counties by law have complete control over permitting rights and every single one of them will deny a permit unless they get some benefit from the system; they will not allow a giant tube to run through their counties and their constituents see no benefit. The most likely scenario, and this is what is killing the high speed rail, is a station in each of their counties so that they're connected to the system and they gain the economic benefits of greater transportation. However, if you drop a station in each county, that means the Hyperloop would have to speed up and slow down 6 to 9 times before reaching LA or San Fran, so there's absolutely no way you can make the trip in 45 minutes. You could probably build side tracks for each one so they can leave the loop and not interfere with the direct travel pods, but that adds more infrastructure cost and will result in less economic impact to each county than if it made a full stop, so that means there's heavy negotiations. This is all to say nothing of the environmental impact studies and god knows what other studies.
Then there's the power. Musk likely dreams he can cover it in solar panels and power it with just sunlight but that's an extraordinarily unlikely scenario; the power needs on this are going to be tremendous. Accelerating the pods won't take much, but maintaining the vacuum will as will the cooling; running a giant steel tube for several hundred miles will make the thing so hot it'll roast the passengers alive. So the cooling needs will be tremendous. Theorhetically you could solve this with solar thermal power generation laid into the track, but then that adds additional cost.
Then there's the maintenance of such a long infrastructure; it'll be huge. Steel erodes in direct sunlight as anyone who's worked with solar panels in the desert knows, and corrosion protection just isn't up to snuff; cold spray is ok but it's not a panacea and it requires constant respraying to work. Let's be generous and assume 1% of the project cost per year to maintain it; you're still at $1B per year just in infrastructure maintenance.
So $100B plus around $1B per year in maintenance, a huge drain on the power grid, all to shave maybe an hour (when factoring airport wait times and flight time) off of a flight from LA to San Fran that costs $120 on Southwest, and you might not even save that time when you're done negotiating with the municipalities. Even at comparable prices to the lowest cost airfare, you need 8 to 10 million people using the system per year and you MIGHT break even on the maintenance costs, but you need at least 20 million people using the system to pay the maintenance and pay back the investment in infrastructure in at least 10 years.
The economics and politics of this simply don't make sense; it's never going to happen.
Apparently, the test track will be orange with banked curves and an actual loop.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Everything seems unsafe till its proven safe. High speed ground transport is needed. And this would be much more effececit then auto cars once they get the bugs out..
That's why they're building test tracks and not a full scale prijev