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Elon Musk Begins Digging a Hyperloop Tunnel In Maryland (baltimoresun.com)
Elon Musk has been granted permission by Maryland to start digging tunnels for his hyperoop transit system that he wants to build between New York and Washington. "Hogan administration officials said Thursday the state has issued a conditional utility permit to let Musk's tunneling firm, The Boring Co., dig a 10.3-mile tunnel beneath the state-owned portion of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, between the Baltimore city line and Maryland 175 in Hanover," reports Baltimore Sun. From the report: It would be the first portion of the underground system that Musk says could eventually ferry passengers from Washington to New York, with stops in Baltimore and Philadelphia, in just 29 minutes. Maryland's approval is the first step of many needed to complete the multibillion-dollar project. Gov. Larry Hogan toured a site in Hanover that aides said could become an entry point for the hyperloop. The state does not plan to contribute to the cost of the project, aides said. Administration officials said they will treat the hyperloop like a utility, and permitted it in the same way the state allows electric companies to burrow beneath public rights-of-way. It was not immediately clear Thursday what environmental review or other permitting procedures must be completed before the company breaks ground.
Title says "Begins Digging" yet he's only now been "granted permission"?
Wrong headline is wrong.
So many people making the same joke.
Okay, let's try to add something to the conversation. Here's what we know about the ideas behind Boring Company so far. First, the tangential aspect: the non-Hyperloop car sleds. Tunnel costs are almost linearly proportional to cross section. By having cars on sleds you don't need any lane margin around the vehicles and can use a much smaller (and thus cheaper) tunnel. Also by moving them at very high speeds you have a much higher throughput, and by computer control, you can space them closely (getting even higher throughput).
However, as for the boring itself: the rate at which a TBM bores is proportional to how fast the head is rotated. In hard rock boring they generally also spend a large portion of the time stopped; a new casing segment is set up to both support the walls and for the TBM to push off of. During downtime, maintenance tasks such as replacing cutting disks are conducted.
When you read through literature on the topic, you find that the answer to "how fast can you X?" or "Is it possible to Y" are frequently "We don't know - contractors are payed to complete a given task and generally have little incentive to experiment with new approaches." Boring company seeks to focus on all of them at once. First off, the cutting disks: if the TBM rotates too quickly, the disks heat too much and their (already short) lifetime is greatly reduced. Boring Company is looking to do three things: one, use more advanced alloys (cost more to replace, but nothing compared to the cost savings of faster boring); two, use active cooling on the cutting disks; and three, have them hot swappable so the TBM doesn't have to be stopped. All of these things together in theory should allow the TBM to be run many times faster (so long as everything else associated with the excavation is also correspondingly sped up). It's also being modified to not need to stop for casing; downtimes are only to be for when something is physically broken or there are issues with the geology that need to be dealt with.
Many of the complicating issues with boring, such as unpredictable geology, unmapped buried hardware in urban areas, etc, Boring Company's approach will not eliminate. But the goal (whether they can reach it or not) is to ensure that when they are boring, they're doing so very quickly.
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!
Wow so much hype with this project.
Okay, I am an Electrical Engineer with well over 35 years experience so what would I know when there is so much pseudo-science associated with the Hyperloop project. No country and I repeat no country has ever built a vacuum tube that even comes close to the length and diameter that is proposed for the Hyperloop when all you need is one rupture in the tube and you have human jelly jam. Snake Oil sale at it's best especially when you consider that the "laughable" Hyperloop test winner was a 200 mph (320kph) electric car that could not carry any passenger since it was too small and did not depend on the vacuum.
Rather than me go into details why the project is stupid please view (there are others) the following YouTube Hyperloop debunk. In case you think the guy is a crackpot he does have a Ph.D. in science but then again human gullibility knows no bounds especially when something sounds attractive (ie. Solar Freaking Roadways) but can be proven by Science and Engineering that they are impractical.
What next for Elon Musk? A proposal for "Tourist trips to mars using cold-fusion powered flying saucers?"
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
First wrong assumption is that the 1st stage, which is what we're recovering, achieves orbital velocity. It doesn't. You now have to completely redo your numbers.