Slashdot Mirror
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."
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..."
Yes, please. Hyperloop should be safe, even IN earthquake prone areas.
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...
What about smarties who make exaggerated claims about other smarties just so they can show how smart they are?
"A hyperloop" is correct because it's how people talk, and that's how English comes about. There's no central organising body.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That's the current trend in things, technology for technology's sake. Not to solve any real problems.
home
What about smarties who spell "organizing" as "organising" just to prove how European they are? Learn to talk American! Love it or leave it!
... 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.
he's like the Tesla of this generation. 100 years from now there will be documentaries how he invented all this cool shit and stupid us didn't use it
Cool, so I am assuming you have done all these things and never has a single failure, I know NASA has never had a rocket blow up or crash...
The last time a NASA blew up on its landing pad was a Titan 1 in December 1959. Numerous other rockets have blown up in other situations, however on the launchpad during a pretest may be unprecedented.
I hope SpaceX find out what happened.
I will only comment on Hyperloop Alpha. The new "Hyperloops" in the competition have nothing in common with it, and I'm not going to bother with them.
Hyperloop is not a vactrain.
No, those are pneumatic tubes, which are neither nor vactubes nor Hyperloop.
Don't you think you should at least know what you're talking about before you start criticizing something?
1) Explain why rail tracks are the best analogy for building a Hyperloop tube, as opposed to, you know, actual long tubes.
2) Explain why Hyperloop should cost anywhere near that much when actual pipeline costs, per unit cross section, are well in line with Hyperloop.
There are of course, differences, but they fall on both sides. For example, comparing to oil pipeline, Hyperloop requires much greater straightness, high wall smoothness, and accelerator segments. An oil pipeline deals with a higher pressure differential, deals with much more challenging environmental/permitting issues, higher power pumps and has thermal management challenges not faced by Hyperloop. I could keep going on both sides, of course.
Rail isn't a pipeline.
If you want to go into some of the reasons for the differences in cost:
1) HSR does more. Hyperloop is a straight shot between two cities. HSR has stops. These stops involve going through towns. This is very expensive. It also means more stations. These too cost money. HSR is also higher capacity (although Hyperloop is in turn higher capacity than LA/SF air traffic, and significantly cheaper per ticket than both rail and air)
2) HSR is hurt by its path. A large portion of HSR's costs are permitting and right of way. Hyperloop minimizes these by using public right of way with elevation, on a premise of government buy-in to the concept (although other options not considered in the Alpha document are possible, such as rail right-of-ways). HSR's need to serve specific cities for political purposes limits where it can go.
3) HSR is limited by its weight. The cost of elevating a structure is directly proportional to its peak loadings. HSR's peak loadings are an order of magnitude higher than Hyperloop's.
Not in the very least. They budget several times the billet price, on the high end of the tonnage price for delivered tube segments. It's really not that much steel - subtract the inner cross section from the outer cross section and multiply the length if you don't believe me.
The word is "rebar". Rebar is irrelevant to this conversation. There is no single type of "rail steel", particularly when one is discussing HSR.
That is not how pipelines are made. Pipelines are made of extruded tubular steel segments, the same as "ribar" and "rail steel".
What do yo
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Apparently, the test track will be orange with banked curves and an actual loop.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yeah, that's right! I mean, there are only five fault lines within 3 miles of Hawthorne, and as EVERYONE in the Los Angeles region KNOWS, when an earthquake is more than a mile away, you can't feel it, it does nothing at all.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Not at all, criticizing someone that is accomplishing something without experience or knowledge of the subject is silly at best, criticizing a person for committing atrocities is not the same at all.
Any progress always is accompanied by some number of failures - Googles policy of fail often fail fast is one of the best development strategies every developed.
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..
Until you've actually read the proposal, which thusfar you have demonstrably not read, then you don't know one iota about the subject, and I'm not going to read another word you write. For the simple reason that I'm not going to waste my time arguing with a person about a subject that they can't be bothered to learn even the most fundamental aspects of..
Let me know when you've actually read it in its entirity, then get back here and we can talk.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Hi there, I live in Ventura, and whilst our fault lines are FARTHER away than yours, you can still feel earthquakes, you still get cracks in plaster, and there are still concerns. I guess, though, you think that having lots of faults around you but not IN your little tiny ZIP code means you're immune. Nope. Not true. And that's not including the bigger fault along Palos Verdes, just to your SW. And I go through Hawthorne weekly as I commute down to Costa Mesa once a week...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Oh, and there is a fault line that IS active in Hawthorne, and is capable of a 7.0 quake. It's just a matter of time. But that's OK, you PERSONALLY have never experienced it so you're all safe, right?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
an historical account...
is correct use of an
No, it's garbage. Would you say, "an house"? Then why would you say, "an historical"?
Coincidentally, a Chinese one exploded within hours of that incident. It just sounds like a shit luck day for the industry.
Ezekiel 23:20
Way to shift your goalposts. Proud of yourself for that one?
Didn't read the article I listed, did you? "In Hawthorne, firefighters were called after a lightpole on Chadron Avenue, near Crenshaw Boulevard, was damaged during the earthquake." There's a reason you post as AC - you've got a box of rocks for a brain...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Landing pad? "a NASA"? LOL
"Fail often, fail fast" is a horrible model for the space industry, though. Google's model explicitly includes taking mostly unproven ideas, shipping them in production, and seeing what sticks. Google can do this because the cost of a beta web application launch for Google is essentially zero: they just have to yank a few nodes of the Google Compute Engine cloud off the public cluster and allocate them to the new app. If the product doesn't improve their bottom line in the way they thought it would, they just shut it down and repurpose the hardware for something else.
You can't do this with rockets. There are external factors like planetary orbit and rotation, a finite number of suitable launch sites (safe, and in the right area of the planet to get it into the desired orbit), our distance from other bodies in the solar system, etc. Then the vehicle itself is stupendously expensive, and carries a lot of expensive payload (in the most extreme case, the payload has immeasurable value -- human lives).
The loss of a rocket and its payload is akin to a plane crash: if this were a smaller private space company, it would probably spell the end of the company from this singular event alone. But even the largest private space contractor in the world can only take a small number of these severe hits before it will go belly-up.
You have to mathematically prove out every stage of any rocket launch before you execute, and make sure that (literally) all the planets align to get it just right. If a rocket blows up or fails to complete its mission, it's not just, "oh well" -- it's a medium-term disaster for the company that requires from months to years of strategic corrective action to recover from.
Rocket science is hard, but the goal should remain "never fail, always get it exactly right" -- not just "let's launch and see if it works; if not, oh well". That kind of thinking is only expedient in software where there are no consequences for failure.
The Model S has no third row, it is a sedan.
https://www.tesla.com/models
Did you maybe mean the Model X?
https://www.tesla.com/modelx
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?