SpaceX Is Livestreaming A Hyperloop Pod Competition (spacex.com)

SpaceX is livestreaming a competition between hyperloop pods from outside their headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and at least one Los Angeles newspaper is also covering the event live on Facebook. "This competition is the first of its kind anywhere in the world," SpaceX writes, noting that 27 teams put their pods through a "litany" of pre-qualifying tests hoping to qualify for a run on the track on "Rocket Road". An anonymous reader writes: The mile-long track is "roughly half the width of a full-scale Hyperloop system," according to Fortune -- but it's still a near-total vacuum inside, making it possible for the magnetically-levitated pods to attain extremely high speeds. "The winning team will be the one that hits the highest top speed -- then stops before hitting the end of the tube. 'There'll be a bit of tension," Elon Musk mused. 'Will it brake in time?'" Sunday's event "will mark the first time anyone gets to see the Hyperloop pods in action," according to Business Insider, which has photos and descriptions of the 27 pods -- including the MIT Hyperloop and the crowdfunded non-profit rLoop, which crowdsourced their open source development effort on Reddit.
SpaceX engineers ultimately awarded the highest overall score to the team from Delft University and determined that the fastest pod came from the Technical University of Munich, Germany. But SpaceX will also be hosting a second competition this summer focused on one criterion: speed.

Comments

A bowl full of Meh.

[Rei]

I'm a big fan of the proposal laid out in the Hyperloop Alpha document. But these maglev vactrains in the "competition" have nothing interesting about them by comparison to the Hyperloop Alpha low pressure ground-effect train system. They throw the advantages of Alpha out the window, in favour of age-old concepts with economic problems (maintaining a hard vacuum, cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe, etc) that have similarly been known about for ages.

Re:A bowl full of Meh.

[Shane_Optima]

I'm a big fan of the proposal laid out in the Hyperloop Alpha document. But these maglev vactrains in the "competition" have nothing interesting about them by comparison to the Hyperloop Alpha low pressure ground-effect train system. They throw the advantages of Alpha out the window, in favour of age-old concepts with economic problems (maintaining a hard vacuum, cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe, etc) that have similarly been known about for ages.

Pssshhh, you're obviously just a one of those haters who doesn't want to admit that Musk is the most revolutionary innovator in the world today. You're like those guys over at Paypal who fired him as CEO because he wouldn't back down from his brilliant plan to move all of their *nix servers to Windows; you just can't handle his vision.

cost of maglev track vs. plain pipe

...

What 'plain pipe' were you thinking of, exactly? Plain joints, too?

Engineering education than step to production

[ZombieEngineer]

With the exception of one team this is largely a practical academic exercise.

The Hyperloop concept could be found in a physics text book circa 1990 (or earlier) as a thought exercise of how rail systems could achieve speeds equal or faster than air travel. Practical considerations of the cost to build such a large scale system (for example LA to NY) would be approaching a national commitment approaching that of the "Man on the Moon" of the late 60s (~2.5% of the USA national GDP for 10 years - effectively 1 in 40 people).

This competition is similar to the solar car challenges of the 1990s / 2000s where it exists to expose the engineering students to the large number of compromises needed to achieve the desired goal (weight, power, size, cost, etc). Ability to find an optimal solution while addressing the multitude of competing constraints is a key talent to be able to succeed in any engineering discipline - especially aerospace (talent identification for Space-X?).

Back to the issue of Hyperloop - we are probably 20 years away from a working system with a number of technologies still yet to be developed. Toyota released the Prius in 1997 as result of their development efforts towards a fully electric car. At the time the technology for a fully electric car was "not ready yet" and the release of a hybrid car was a bridging technology. As a development platform towards fully electric cars the hybrids have successfully filled its original role as a number of manufacturers sell plug-in electric cars (we have moved a step down the path to mainstream electric vehicle transport).

The rolling stock for Hyperloop is only one part of the problem (my guess is this will be resolved within 5 years) - the other monster that needs to be tamed is building the track and associated infrastructure cost effectively. For comparison: Railway sidings are $1-$2 million/mile, Highway $4-$10 million/mile, Light rail $35 million/mile, High speed rail (California) $56 million/mile.

What is required is an X-Prize style competition for building the Hyperloop track as the cost of the rolling stock is likely to pale into insignificance.

Re:Engineering education than step to production

[Shane_Optima]

The Hyperloop concept could be found in a physics text book circa 1990 (or earlier)

It's closer to the 1890s than 1990s. Vacuum tube trains are a very old idea. Sticking a jet engine on the front of the thing and making some use of a small remnant air pressure is a newer concept, but that has nothing to do with this competition, which (as someone else has already noted) is just maglev in a vacuum tube.

What is required is an X-Prize style competition for building the Hyperloop track as the cost of the rolling stock is likely to pale into insignificance.

Good luck with that. SpaceX is a successful company (in no small part because NASA has had all kinds of internal and external problems), but it's not like the X-Prize competition magically made spaceflight an order of magnitude cheaper or something. The challenges surrounding a 300 mile long length of pipe with airtight joints that can resist expansion and moderate seismic forces, elevated on pylons (that preferably should be sturdy enough to survive a hit from a tractor-trailer), seem similarly resistant to revolutionary cost reductions.

We could completely ditch the idea of going down the interstate median to perhaps save the money spent on pylons, but at that point it's probably more worthwhile/realistic to brainstorm to see if we can build a cheaper maglev track.

Re:Engineering education than step to production

[hey!]

but at that point it's probably more worthwhile/realistic to brainstorm to see if we can build a cheaper maglev track.

Well, that's a tall order, given that people have been noodling about maglev for decades, and working systems have even been built. People have been brainstorming; we're at the stage of needing more practical experience as grist for the brainstorming mill.

We know that maglev physically works, it just doesn't work economically yet.

On the other hand it seems to me that the challenges of building a Hyperloop track aren't quite as unbeatable as you suggest. We've been building pipelines for years, some of which have diameters in excess of 2m. In fact if that weren't SpaceX wouldn't be able to hold this competition -- their track is just stock large diameter welded steel pipe. Of course the Hyperloop would have to be man-rated, but then building a 42 inch diameter natural gas pipeline that will be pressurized to 1500 psi is no picnic either, but that has been done and at those pressures you'd better not have the thing fail catastrophically in an earthquake.

Syre, Hyperloop sounds ridiculous. But when you look closer at it... well, I grant you it still sounds ridiculous. But less ridiculous. And that makes it interesting.

Re:For as little as I've heard about Hyperloop

[0100010001010011]

you can never train for every scenario.

You can train it for more scenarios than you can train a human for. And the knowledge is cumulative. If one car in one place records "unseen data" you can roll that out to all cars next software update.

And they absolutely do work outside of their training set. I just did it with DIGITS/caffe: https://github.com/humphd/have...

Trained on 6 pictures of dolphins and sea horses it does a pretty good job of determining an unseen set of data. If you start with pre-trained data weights and tailor it to the 2 animals it's exactly perfect on unseen data.

And those are trivial and dumb neural nets.

Fuck You Facebook - cannot watch video w/out login

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook forces you to login before being able to see all of the video. Well Fuck You facebook -- I don't use facebook and will not give in to blackmail and extortion to be forced to agree to FB TOS.

Please stop posting links to FB. Please instead post link to public free links of the same content.

I'm pretty sure you're full of crap.

[Brannon]

1. SpaceX is pretty important. Tesla is pretty important. The gigafactory is a big deal. SolarCity is a good idea. Elon Musk has been involved with several pretty important things. People take Elon Musk seriously because he is, frankly, a pretty fucking serious guy. Your petty psychological need to reject anything that smells of hero-worship is way more disturbing than any actual instances of hero worship. There is absolutely nothing absurd about calling someone a tech visionary when they are clearly a tech visionary--doesn't mean that everything he proposes is going to work out, because obviously that is a stupid standard.

2. The fact that people have been "thinking about vacuum tubes for a hundred years" is irrelevant. Just as irrelevant of all the criticism about Apple because...blah blah blah Xerox had a demo of a tablet in 1968. Invention is the combination of existing technologies to make a new, useful technology. Every invention is arguably a short step from previous inventions.

3. You say the hyperloop is silly because of track costs. The Musk proposal talks about this--it estimates costs based on large above-ground oil pipelines, very similar in materials, air tightness, and various stresses--the numbers work out for several hundreds of miles.

Re:I'm pretty sure you're full of crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, hyperloop is *probably* not going to work. It is nice to see them try but they have some serious engineering challenges that they will not be able to get past no mater how much we like Elon. Thunderf00t on youtube makes some very compelling arguments why this is probably not going to work. If those can be addressed then yeah maybe. But still probably not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDwe2M-LDZQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk

People keep thinking this is 'low' pressure. This is near space pressure. Basically nonexistent. One small fracture *anywhere* in the system will be a catastrophic failure.

People have been working on this concept for a long time. It would be amazing if they could get it to consistently work. But more than likely it is not going to work. Their only existing demo is mostly a mediocre maglev 'train'.

Maglev in a vacuum sounds bad ass. But the near total vacuum their own papers say they will need will be a near showstopper.

The power positive spin they put on it is a bunch of solar cells. We can achieve the same thing and better with solar cells only. The quick times they rattle off are little better than what we can achieve today with airtravel. Most of our air travel time is now spent on the ground doing stupid things like pulling off our shoes. It used to be in the 1960s-1990s you could get on a plane in LAX and be in SAN in 40-60 mins. That same flight now takes you 3-4+ hours. The planes are better the landing strips are better the scheduling is better. Yet it takes more time. Because of DHS. Hyperloop *will* be subject to those same provisions.

Re:For as little as I've heard about Hyperloop

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm one who still dismisses Hyperloop as "vaporware", and I think the competition is a great idea for university students. It's perfect for that. It gets teams of students solving a diverse set of fun engineering problems in a low-pressure environment (ha), and maybe get to blow some stuff up. I'm actually warming to the idea of the Hyperloop project because of this.

It will, of course, never be an actual large-scale transportation system - maybe a novelty "future that never was" type of thing - but engineers can still apply lessons learned to actual systems, transportation or otherwise.