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'Elon Musk's Hyperloop Is Doomed For the Worst Reason' (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 quotes a Bloomberg column by Virginia Postrel:
What makes Musk's Hyperloop plan seem like fantasy isn't the high-tech part. Shooting passengers along at more than 700 miles per hour seems simple -- engineers pushed 200 miles-per-hour in a test this week -- compared to building a tunnel from New York to Washington. And even digging that enormously long tunnel -- twice as long as the longest currently in existence -- seems straightforward compared to navigating the necessary regulatory approvals... The eye-rolling comes less from the technical challenges than from the bureaucratic ones.
With his premature declaration, Musk is doing public debate a favor. He's reminding us of what the barriers to ambitious projects really are: not technology, not even money, but getting permission to try. "Permits harder than technology," Musk tweeted after talking with Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti about building a tunnel network. That's true for the public sector as well as the private... SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards. usk is betting that his salesmanship will have a similar effect on the ground. He's trying to get the public so excited that the political pressures to allow the Hyperloop to go forward become irresistible. He seems to believe that he can will the permission into being. If he succeeds, he'll upend not merely intercity transit but the bureaucratic process by which things get built. That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
With his premature declaration, Musk is doing public debate a favor. He's reminding us of what the barriers to ambitious projects really are: not technology, not even money, but getting permission to try. "Permits harder than technology," Musk tweeted after talking with Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti about building a tunnel network. That's true for the public sector as well as the private... SpaceX and its commercial-spaceflight competitors can experiment because Congress and President Barack Obama agreed to protect them from Federal Aviation Administration standards. usk is betting that his salesmanship will have a similar effect on the ground. He's trying to get the public so excited that the political pressures to allow the Hyperloop to go forward become irresistible. He seems to believe that he can will the permission into being. If he succeeds, he'll upend not merely intercity transit but the bureaucratic process by which things get built. That would be a true science-fiction scenario.
Yeah, the tunnel length alone. And then it needs to be almost airtight?
Technical difficulty will far outweigh the bureaucratic difficulty.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Hydro electric power used to be one of the darlings of the energy sector. It was clean, it was safe, it was renewable. The only draw back was the local environmental effects of the dam, changing the river flow, creating a lake; but those were deemed acceptable.
Now the environmental damage caused by building a dam is an all but insurmountable hurdle.
Not to mention labour costs and standards increases that price such megaprojects out of reach.
Oh... you probably wanted some cites right?
https://www.marketplace.org/20...
http://wizbangblog.com/2012/07...
http://thehill.com/regulation/...
What's sad is - there are people who think the Clean Water Act constitutes government overreach.
#DeleteChrome
Here's the vid, so everyone knows what we're talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... He's made others since, but that's the first and most comprehensive. TL:DW technical challenges:
* The tube would be the largest vacuum chamber in the world.
* Any maintenance whatsoever in the tube requires depressurization and shutting down the line.
* Vacuum seals must work repeatedly and reliably for passenger loading and unloading.
* If a vehicle dies out in the field, it's unclear how they plan to evacuate passengers from either the vehicle or the sealed, elevated steel tube.
* The tube has to deal with steel expansion in the daytime. The total expected variance (for the 370-mile California route) is three football fields, so you need lots of expansion joints (unless your loading platforms and pylons are going to be incredibly mobile), all of which must also be vacuum sealed. Also keep in mind the sun hits only the top of the tube so the expansion won't be uniform.
* A breach in the system is likely to be catastrophic, with a torrent of air rushing in and propelling the first vehicle it hits at great speed into the next one, since there's no air cushion between the vehicles.
* Anyone with a rifle along the impossible-to-guard 370-mile tube can cause one of those failures by penetrating the inch-thick steel.
If these crushing technical challenges have been addressed, please do give us a link, because so far it looks a lot like solar roadways or Onlive.
Yes, that information does exist.
And sometimes it's even accurate.