Slashdot Mirror
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.
But we don't know what we dig 'em for
Title says "Begins Digging" yet he's only now been "granted permission"?
Wrong headline is wrong.
More likely someone else is doing the actual digging and planning
Endeavor to persevere. quote: We thought about it for a long time, "Endeavor to persevere." And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union.
Abandoned tunnels are a good place to grow mushrooms. I imagine the chefs in higher-end resturants in the DC area will be enthusiastic about this news in a decade or so.
That's interesting, because it would seem to mitigate one of the problems with the hyperloop concept. Namely, if the tunnel ruptures, there's a fast-moving wall of air rushing at anyone inside the tunnel.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/07...
If the tube is in a tunnel, there would be much less air available to create such a pressure wave. Or if it's bored through rock there would be almost no air at all inside the tunnel but outside the tube. I think this would mean there would be, at worst, a much less severe pressure wave followed by a more gradual repressurization. Am I wrong?
While there is existing technology, the mag lift, in use, that can move two hundred plus people at a time on a monorail (cheaper then a tunnel) at speeds up to 400 km per hour.
The future of transportation is moving a large number of people fast and efficiently, I would love to see the business plan on this tunnel, how many people can be moved in a 24 hour period? whats the cost per passenger? whats the maintenance cost? the cost to maintain the vacuum in a ten mile line, yes it’s underground, but your going to need a lot of emergency exit points along the route, and each air lock is another potential vacuum breach.
The Concord showed us fast is not always profitable.
What subsidies do you envision existing for tunnel boring?
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!
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!
which will necessitate airport levels of security.
29 minutes huh? So does that mean passengers get 10 minutes to board/deboard this thing????? It's gonna have to be quickly loaded. Leaving 9 minutes of travel time?
What if a hyperpod can't leave on time? Are the margins of error such that it can be squeezed in prior to the next hyperpod? Or will that hyperpod need to be retired and the passengers put on another hyperpod. What does that do to scheduling passengers?
And how are passengers going to react to the acceleration/deceleration necessary to achieve a 9 minute travel time? To keep the math simple assuming a 226 mile distance between Washington and NYC at 226 MPH it would take one hour to get there. At 452 MPH it would take 30 minutes to get there. .... A non-changing speed of 1506 MPH will cover the distance in 9 minutes.
Based on the above limits I'm just not sure this thing has really been thought through.
Tell me oh /. Masters of the Universe where I am wrong?
Caution: Contents under pressure
The Inter-County Connector intersects with the BWI Parkway about five miles away. Getting that highway built took fifty years, got hung up for years on environmental studies and the Federal Government withheld funding. The state house is dominated by Democrats and Hogan is a Republican. Oh, and the Feds won't approve it's construction into DC? I doubt this is going to get done with little more than a few utility permits. Good luck though.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
10 miles is a stunt. It would take most of this distance to accelerate and decelerate to the touted speeds. Lots of people are going to lose lots of money on this stupidity.
Just wondering where the environmentalist are? And the environmental Impact studies that take years. The years of jumping through hoops to get government approval, etc etc, etc
;)
Or is the fact that (WunderKind) Elon Musk owns the company doing this, means that nothing harmful or bad could ever come out of this.
Just to make it clear I am not against this, it just seems to be moving amazingly fast
Yay! The subsidies comment guy.
You are like the cool-aid jug crashing though the wall whenever Elon's name is mentioned.
The spacing at low speeds is actually the limiting factor. I suspect the experience will be like loading onto the 8 person gondolas at a ski resort. Which have a capacity of about 1.1 person per second which is entirely limited by the ability for humans to get in and out of the gondolas. For reference a highway lane has a maximum throughput of 0.5 vehicles per second.
New York to DC is about three hours by train; who cares if that gets cut down to 30 minutes?
Basically any person who has to travel from New York to DC on a regular basis. It may sound strange to you, but for most people out there time is valuable.
lucm, indeed.
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.
The tech isn't practical, nor will it be preferred to air travel if similarly delayed by security. However the "abandoned tunnels" will become brand new state of the art bunkers for the military.
How can Musk get so much government subsidies? This is how.
But the tech is practical if you have the mind of a troglodyte. What are they teaching people in the schools nowadays can't people detect the Snake Oil?
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Rocket scientists (way above your level of expertise) used to say landing rockets vertically and reusing them afterwards was never going to work, for all sorts of reasons that an idiot like Musk obviously wouldn't know about. And landing them on barges in the ocean, come on, you've got to be kidding, that's totally ridiculous, nobody would even think of attempting that. Elon Musk is a fool. (That last phrase is a literal quote from a conversation I personally had with an ESA rocket scientist).
Also, making an electric car that people actually want to buy? Just a few years ago almost all engineers in the automobile industry (including, and especially those with well over 35 years of experience) would have told you that was impossible too. Let alone cars that would outperform the fastest supercars while having 5 seats and plenty of room for luggage. You've got to be kidding, that's a totally impossible thing to even attempt. Elon Musk is a fool, it will never work, nobody will ever buy them.
And setting up huge battery installations to make reusable energy viable for countries that were historically suffering from frequent outages? That will never work either, for all sorts of reasons that an idiot like Musk wouldn't know about. Any electrical engineer with well over 35 years of experience can tell you that, but never mind them.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, effectively not minding those "experts", and unhindered by any "knowledge" on any of these subjects, is on track for a 50% market share in rocket launches in 2018, with more and more of those using actual reused boosters. The last 18 landings were all successful, including some very high energy ones. His Tesla Model S and X are a huge success, and model 3 has almost 500,000 preorders (yes, I know it's delayed a bit on its agressive rollout schedule, but not nearly as much as previous models, months rather than years). O, and that solar battery installation in South Australia seems to be coming together just fine, with another huge installation in Puerto Rico on the way.
Maybe it's time for some of these dinosaurs with well over 35 years of experience to retire if all they can do is say "ok, maybe you got lucky on that first thing we said couldn't be done, but you definitely cannot do this other thing... ok, maybe you got lucky there too, but this third thing, that's definitely impossible... o, wait...". Seriously, you lost all credibility.
No rocket scientist said that. As they did it in the past, such statement would be redicilous. Have a look at the moon landing. However, the landing approach was considered economically not feasible, as you cannot use alle the fuel for lift and you have to carry the landing fuel up and down again.
If you want to see working mass transfer t systems, visit any other developed country. We already have that. Unfortunately, the stuff was not invented by an US American.
Echo the other response so far, great post, thanks.
What I wonder about is that the original Hyperloop white paper said "tubes mounted on pylons elevated" over things like farm fields. Now, they're digging tunnels, much more expensive. I just wonder what was wrong with tubes and pylons.
C'mon, the "landing fuel" is miniscule since the great mass of the rocket at launch is the "lift fuel" which is gone after the rocket does its primary function. The thing that lands is a hollow, comparatively lightweight tube requiring a slight amount of fuel to accomplish the landing.
OK, you're an EE with 35 yrs of experience, and Elon Musk is a real-world Tony Stark who builds rockets and electric cars. I choose not to underestimate Mr Musk / Stark.
Yeah, it works in relatively small countries with high population densities. Notice that they're proposing this in the NE Corridor, which is geographically limited and has a high population density. This ain't for Kansas. A universal solution for the USA to mass transit is likely never happening due to the expense of building such a system and having 3 people debark at Kansas City each time a train comes thru. Therefore, using public money to build any of these things is fundamentally unfair to those in Kansas and the rest of the wide open spaces since they'll never get any benefit from it.
Build it to carry passengers, vehicles, and cargo, THEN maybe its useful in Kansas, and would be a better candidate for public money spending. That might make it more deployable.
You still have to lift it, which reduces the total mass to orbit. The key question is: Is the reduction in lift off mass less costly and a reusable rocket less expensive than a single use rocket?
Anyway, ESA experiments with a reusable engine (without the tank), as this is the mist costly part of all.
True. It makes no sense to have such system in Kansas or North Dakota. Except for Bismark itself, maybe. However, it would work in both costal regions which would fix a lot of transport issues.
The Outlaw, Josey Wales.
Good film!
Do you have any Engineering proof that Elon Musk's proposed Hyperloop is feasible? There seems to be a lot of hype and little real Science and Engineering. You know the disciplines that get things done in reality.
I have not looked at the proposed solar battery installation in South Australia but since I am well aware of power systems design and of Elon Musk's hype I think it will most likely be a lemon although I am open to changing my mind. Basically, the SA Government screwed up big time and I am thankful I don't live in that state. When designing an electronic grid everything is up for grabs in the feasibility stage but you also have to be practical and look at the economics as well. Just going solar using photovoltaic cells is plain stupid since you then will have to consider how the store the energy when the sun goes down and batteries just can't cut it at least not economically. Although if you can show an Engineering proof I am amenable to a change of mind.
Landing a rocket tail first? You do know that any rocket can be designed to land tail first it is just not economically viable to do that especially when you consider that the chances of a failure are so much higher than if you came to land like an aircraft or use a parachute. Like it or not rocket flight is expensive and the chance of getting into orbit is reasonably high at 92% but landing is a totally different matter. I will let you research that since us dinosaurs are incapable of using a four-function calculator much less run a Google search.
Personally, I don't mind admitting I am wrong and taking it on board if you can show I am wrong but calling someone a dinosaur and name calling when you don't even know them that is the sort of thing an SJW would say and for your sake I would refrain from saying things like that in the boardroom where us raptors reside.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
After following way too many 18 wheelers, and being run off the road 3 times in 1 year by big rigs changing lanes without looking (I always respond to "automated trucks" with the question, "Will they also not look when changing lanes?) I fantasize about a hyperloop big enough and powerful enough to accept an 18 wheeler, or several cars and rocket them to their next destination up to 300 miles away, thus relieving a massive amount of traffic from the interstate highway system which is in the process of failing due to overuse / undercapacity. Well, that's my dream, anyway...
I imagine the answer lies somewhere between NIMBY and fragility.
Whatever, it shows Mr. Musk is practical. If the "Sci-Fi novel" version of an idea doesn't work, use the one that does.
No sig today...
In Europe, they put trailors and trucks on trains which can go up to 160 km/h. They use them also for Alpes transit to relieve roads. On distances above 100km this is a faster mode of transportation. With some improvements in the loading process this could even be feasible for shorter distances.
The original Hyperloop Alpha plan budgeted standard rates for tunneling for the sections that required it. Musk however began looking into tunneling after Hyperloop came out and found (the same thing I found when I looked into it) that today's tunneling market and contract structures disincentivise radical innovations to reduce costs, and that there's many things that people in the industry already suspect could radically increase tunneling speeds (and thus reduce costs) but have not yet been attempted. Hence he decided to try it himself (and also came up with the concept of the "intermediary" system of car sleds but ambient pressure). The big thing about tunnels is that they give you much better possibilities of getting into town (rather than the periphery like airports, as Hyperloop Alpha did) and maintain straightness in rough terrain. In the northeast corridor that they're working on now, an elevated Hyperloop would be passing through far too much built up land to maintain straightness, speed, and low right-of-way costs.
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!
As others stated the \. Headline is WRONG or at best very misleading. Please fix and stop such tactics to build traffic. I enjoy many of the intelligent as well as amusing posters but loath to support such a poorly administered site.
C'mon, the "landing fuel" is miniscule since the great mass of the rocket at launch is the "lift fuel" which is gone after the rocket does its primary function. The thing that lands is a hollow, comparatively lightweight tube requiring a slight amount of fuel to accomplish the landing.
Really. Have you done the calculations?
Here is a fairly simple calculation to reach the international space station which is 408 km above the earth. Plugin the number 408 into the Orbit of a satellite Calculator and you will get an Orbital radius of 6,786.14 km, a Flight velocity of 7.66 km/s and an Orbital period 01:32 (Yes I have rounded the numbers).
Now consider you have to get your rocket from an orbital velocity of approximately 7.66 km/s through the Earth's atmosphere which will heat any exposed surface to incandescence and at the same time hoping you have enough fuel to slow the rocket down to a point where it can land tail first. This is not to say it can't be done since it can but the chance of failure is significantly higher than if it landed as the space shuttle did or by parachute.
Yes, I am aware of Elon Musk's proposal for a rocket flight from the US to other countries. It does sound great if you don't think it though hence hype but that type of hype is going to cost ridiculous amounts of money and somehow I think a 10 to 15 hours comfortable flight in a reliable aircraft is not a bad price to pay.
Also while we are considering rocket space flight how about a simple calculation of the "g-forces" on the human body since the so-called rocket plane will have to achieve near orbital velocity while at the same time being careful of fuel consumption. For acceptable human comfort, you would have to allow for 3g (Space shuttle) or less although you could go higher I very much doubt that you would get the average passenger to accept that.
Yes, it does get more complicated but when human lives are at stake I do have a tendency to err on the side of caution and until we develop anti-gravity where a Nobel prize, fame and money is waiting for the first person to develop this, although "cold-fusion" proponents need not apply.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
After the Channel Tunnel was built the train line was extended, in stages, all the way into central London. Large parts of this track run variously on viaducts over rivers, roads and other rail lines and in tunnels under roads, buildings, and other rail lines. The trains that run on these tracks weigh 700 tonnes and travel up to 300 km/h (albeit they do slow down in some sections).
These trains have been running for closing 15 years now, and, as far as I know, no building has yet collapsed because of them, no cars have skidded on the road, no person has fallen over / suffered stress fractures / died / etc. due to the vibrations.
If a 700 tonne train doesn't cause problems I'd be pretty surprised if a 26 tonne hyperloop (vehicle) capsule did. More so because the tubes are intended to have shock absorbers between them and whatever they're resting on.
Rei is definitely an astroturfer. In a way his posts are interesting in that they seem to give us some inside knowlege of the project, sanitised of course. OTOH he cannot stand the slightest criticism of Hyperloop, much of which he answers on the lines that something will turn up to cover the problem.
All that stuff in his post above about cutting tunnels faster than ever before with the aid of blade cooling etc is really quite irrelevant to the practicality of the Hyperloop concept. Is he smoke-screening something?
He made me laugh here, and gets this week's award for the bleedin' obvious :
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.
Railway builders had that brainwave over 150 years ago. Unfortunately in the UK they made the tunnels too small and too cheap, something UK railway engineers have regretted ever since, and other nations learned from.
What I wonder about is that the original Hyperloop white paper said "tubes mounted on pylons elevated" over things like farm fields. Now, they're digging tunnels, much more expensive.
They realised or discovered that not everyone in the World is a Musk fan, and is not going to give his eyesore a free pass over their land or house, on pylons or not. The early Hyperloop publicity implied that people would.
Also, whether it is cheaper depends on what is on the surface. It used only to be cheaper to tunnel in cities, but for example the UK in the South East is now so built-up that a large proportion of the Channel Tunnel railway link was built underground.
The big thing about tunnels is that they give you much better possibilities of getting into town (rather than the periphery like airports, as Hyperloop Alpha did) and maintain straightness in rough terrain. ... an elevated Hyperloop would be passing through far too much built up land to maintain straightness, speed, and low right-of-way costs.
These are obvious problems with an elevated Hyperloop that I and others pointed out here a long time ago (while OTOH many Hyperloop fans were claiming it would be cheap like an oil pipe line). Why has it taken Musk so long to realise it?
OK, you're an EE with 35 yrs of experience, and Elon Musk is a real-world Tony Stark who builds rockets and electric cars. I choose not to underestimate Mr Musk / Stark.
Oh, I am still waiting for my flying car or cost-effective jetpack.
It's very easy to compare Elon Musk to Tony Stark but I have yet to see a flying suit that can take a hit from the Hulk much less fly at Mach speed. Yes, Elon Musk has got his Engineers to build the Tesla electric car which is not that cheap although I will admit it does have an EPA-rated range of 335 miles (540 km) on a full charge compared to other electric cars which have half that range but at a third of the price.
Yes, rockets are great but they are expensive and not that reliable (about 92%) however I notice that Elon Musk's rockets have yet to be manned. I am discounting Space X since that did not achieve orbital velocity.
Therein lies the problem when confronted by hype if you are a sub-professional, professional or a scientist you should always choose not to believe until you can see the evidence. In fact the more hype (especially on media) the more skeptical you should be. There is a saying "If something sounds too good to be true it most likely is". Taking all into account I chose not to overestimate Elon Musk.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Yeah, the SpaceX business model is not viable, you can't possibly make money sending up rockets with extra fuel and a landing gear. I guess that's why they are doing more launches than any space agency, for a much lower price, and still making plenty of profit to pour into development of a Mars mission.
Right now their boosters still need a lot of refurbishment between flights, limiting the gains somewhat, but this did allow them to identify the weak spots and improve them. Block 5, flying soon, should hardly need any work between flights (which is something you definitely couldn't say about the Space Shuttle). And 18 out of 18 past landings seems to be a wee bit higher than 92%. Jeez, they're doing GTO launches with reused boosters landing them on the bull's eye of a drone ship and you STILL say the extra weight is too limiting to make it viable, and the chance of failure is too high?
I'm going to stop discussing this now, this is getting silly, feel free to contact me in a few years and admit you were wrong.
(Of course by then you'll insist that, even though Hyperloop turned out to work after all and the BFR seems to take off and land like clockwork, everything else that will be in the pipeline at that point will be bound to fail because it can't possibly work)
While you can do these things, what are the economics?
It is simply not clear to me that reusing a rocket is cost effective.
Compare the price of a SpaceX launch to the launch cost of their competitors. Actually, no need to do that, launch customers already have, which is why SpaceX is projected to have a 50% market share next year.
And they haven't even reached maximum efficiency yet. The current generation of Falcon 9 still needs a lot of refurbishment between flights, so the benefit of reusability is still quite limited, but even then they are already outperforming their competitors. Looks like the cost of reusability isn't so high after all. Now imagine what block 5 will be like, where they have incorporated everything they learned so far to turn the boosters around with hardly any refurbishment between flights.
Your argument would be a little more persuasive if you expressed it using correct English grammar.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
There are even more examples of technology that has proven ineffective or downright bogus. Dean drive, for example.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
He created a car company from scratch that actively builds cars that are decades ahead of every other car company on the planet. I'm going to go ahead and trust what he has to say over an EE, who, as far as I know, hasn't created a car company from scratch that makes cars decades ahead of the competition.
I don't respond to AC's.
That percentage was the average for the number of rocket launches for the world. So far Elon Musk has done ok but there may be problems ahead with his proposal for heavy lifting items into orbit. So far Space X has had 10 successful launches of their Falcon 9 rockets.
No, I don't hate Elon Musk since I don't know him, all I am interested in is feasibility and not hype. If I am wrong then fine I don't mind and I have learned something new but just believing the hype without valid evidence is plain stupid.
Of course by then you'll insist that, even though Hyperloop turned out to work after all and the BFR seems to take off and land like clockwork, everything else that will be in the pipeline at that point will be bound to fail because it can't possibly work
See there you go jumping to conclusions. Where is your evidence for what you just said? I personally don't have any evidence for success or failure although I have pointed out concerns. So far you seem to think that everything is going to work fine. I am sorry but science is not in the business of miracles otherwise we would all have jetpacks and flying cars by now.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Also, making an electric car that people actually want to buy? Just a few years ago almost all engineers in the automobile industry (including, and especially those with well over 35 years of experience) would have told you that was impossible too.
And those engineers would have been fools themselves for completely ignoring all the other companie who have been successful at building electric vehicles, some of them for 35 years or more too.
(Random example : Citroen has been making electric trucks and minivan used by the french postal service - the extremely frequent strart/stops and the rather short distances make EV way better than ICE. Even on the only NiCd battery tech available back then)
(Other random example : a few swiss mountain touristic regions have been completely closed to cars, and have been using electrical vehicles instead for several decade already).
Elon Musk didn't really start a revolution here. Actually what he managed was to take a concept and tweak it enough to make it palatable to the very peculiar north American market. Which by itself is no small feat.
But nearly everyone speaking against EV is completely ignoring past successes.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Your argument would be a little more persuasive if you expressed it using correct English grammar.
Which English? UK English or US English?
If you wish to correct my grammar then fine but please point out where my grammar is incorrect and why so I may learn from what I have incorrectly said.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
So far Space X has had 10 successful launches of their Falcon 9 rockets.
Actually, that number is 41. Try to keep up.
Of course by then you'll insist that, even though Hyperloop turned out to work after all and the BFR seems to take off and land like clockwork, everything else that will be in the pipeline at that point will be bound to fail because it can't possibly work
See there you go jumping to conclusions. Where is your evidence for what you just said? I personally don't have any evidence for success or failure although I have pointed out concerns. So far you seem to think that everything is going to work fine. I am sorry but science is not in the business of miracles otherwise we would all have jetpacks and flying cars by now.
Obviously I don't have evidence for future events. It's just a prediction based on the abysmal track record of people saying that Elon Musk would fail in pretty much everything he attempted.
The original Hyperloop plan was to not go into town at all, so it didn't apply.
It also, however, meant that it wasn't as convenient.
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!
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.
Rocket scientists (way above your level of expertise) used to say landing rockets vertically and reusing them afterwards was never going to work
Leading up to the first time it was done(by Blue Origin), it wasn't that people in the industry didn't think it was possible. It was that there was doubt it would meaningfully reduce the cost of launches. Which is still an open question.
and model 3 has almost 500,000 preorders
Given how loose(that's being kind) Musk is with his numbers and how off he has been with his projections(his Model 3 delivery numbers were off by a whopping 83%!), I take the line reservation numbers with a huge grain of salt. And that's what they are, a $1000 refundable deposit to hold a position in line. They are not pre-orders. And given the continuing delay of a functional, fully tested production line, do you think that number(whatever it truly is), is going up or down as the delay continues?
(yes, I know it's delayed a bit on its agressive rollout schedule,
The Model 3 was originally supposed to be released in 2016. It's now late 2017 and is still being built by hand and beta tested. The roll-out party in July was a facade, but not a surprise given that Musk's option milestone vesting is based on the start of Model 3 production and made up gross margin numbers.
but not nearly as much as previous models, months rather than years)
How do you know since the delay is still continuing?
Why people still give the guy credibility when it comes to numbers is beyond me - he said years ago Tesla wouldn't need to access the capital markets again and look how many have happened since. The last one was selling of junk bonds and there's going to be another raise needed that will be declared either later this quarter or early next. Q3 numbers are going to be a blood bath and the worse yet. Analysts are starting to revise their numbers to a loss at over $7 a share!
Tesla is circling the drain, but don't worry, Musk will still walk away with billions. Are you going to be among the ones left holding the bag?
Maybe you don't know him that well. I suggest to read this story from joelonsoftware:
Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done.
[...]
In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates. I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office in preparation for the review. It was basically one ream of laser-printed paper. I rushed to get the spec printed and sent it over to his office.
[...]
I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the margin!
Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before.
He was asking questions. I was answering them. They were pretty easy, but I can’t for the life of me remember what they were, because I couldn’t stop noticing that he was flipping through the spec
He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]
and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
He Read The Whole Thing!
https://www.joelonsoftware.com...
Bill Gates was the real thing.
lucm, indeed.
The biggest thing most people complain about with the feasibility of Hyperloop is the vacuum seal. Musk has stated that in order to seal against the water table you have to have something good up to about 5-6 atmospheres. To go to vacuum or near vacuum you only need 1 atmosphere, so if they can seal to the water table, then they can seal to vacuum.
Following the Tsiolkovsky equation, rockets do most of their acceleration when they are almost empty, see this graphics for the Saturn V. NASA actually had to turn off one of the Saturn V engine towards the end of the first stage burn otherwise acceleration would have been too great for the astronauts. So the last few minutes of the burn are important.
Basically the Musk approach is that you have to lift some of the fuel, which is not used for lifting but for landing. It may be more costly than it looks. Science is not alway "obvious", you have to crunch the numbers and see.
Now the Musk approach may work because his rocket first stages have many small engines and using only one for landing is enough. Most other rockets have a small number of large engines. It may be that other agencies did they math correctly but for their own rockets, which are not as well suited to returning and landing than Musk's.
In 2017 they have so far launched 14 vehicles, which is a lot better than the 8 successful and one failure they had in 2016. The R-7 (Russia) has launched 11 and the Ariane (Europe) 5, so they are definitely competitive. At the same time there were 60 successful (and no failure) R-7 launches in communist USSR in 1974.
Not so much the seal, the cost of actually pumping that air out of a huge, long tunnel.
No, but they have just put a big curse on the project, thats some big oops to come.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
Just a bit of paranoid speculation that perhaps all this hyper-loop stuff is essentially a money laundering scheme for the government to subsidize and fund Musk's other projects (Rockets, Cars, Batteries) without seemingly doing it directly which might have political ramifications. This type of project is the kind of thing easily in the many many billions, and will take decades to complete, both of which could be inflated at cost and length of time, essentially providing Musks ventures (which haven't or won't show much positive profit income for some time to come) cash to keep developing and improving for a long time to come. Maybe I just watch too much Ozark...
Speaking of snake oil...this whole video is selling FUD and is all speculation nonsense.
The guy can have all the PHDs he wants but the nonsense 'can't work' claims are idiotic. His implication that making a long vacuum tube is impossible...is idiotic. If we can make one 100m segment, that can be repeated 1000x and you have 100km.
The "vacuum energy" he goes on about? Well yeah, if you use tanks meant to contain liquids under high vacuum as your 'how easy it is to break' example then you're just an idiot trying to fear monger. It's trivial to design a tube that can withstand a hard vacuum...material science is well in advance of that. (ahem, submarines)
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Is the reduction in lift off mass less costly and a reusable rocket less expensive than a single use rocket?
Considering the refueling costs are a couple hundred grand plus a minor refurb/recert cost vs. $60ish million for a whole rocket I'd say yes. There have been a few instances where they needed the max payload and the rocket had to be expended. The Falcon heavy solves that problem (well, up to it's max launch payload of course).
The tank (and related systems) are not trivial cost either...plus you have to either hard-land that engine or bring fuel along to soft-land it anyhow. That sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
And have you actually calculated the energy cost for doing so?
Considering (major maintenance aside) it's a one-time effort with minor maintenance to cover the inevitable minor leaks which is technically reversible if you chose....I pulled up some basic info which says it which 'costs' about 100kJ to empty 1 m^3 at sea level. (plus inefficiencies of your pumping system)
Let's take a 5m diameter, 100km tunnel...about 8x10^6 m^3 so 800GJ or 222MWh
The energy needed is large, but not unreasonable.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Tesla is circling the train? Oh...yeah...ok. Let me buy that tesla stock from you then since it's practically worthless anyhow. Take $10 a share?
Your doom and gloom doesn't match the reality that's actually happening.
SpaceX is the only entity launching and landing cargo rockets. BO is great and all, but their rocket was/is a little toy in comparison and does not put any meaningful payload into orbit. As for the cost savings - this has been demonstrated. Not sure what planet you're on but a couple hundred grand in fuel and some refurb costs is less than the estimated 'wholesale' ~$35m cost of the rocket in my book.
Model 3 shipment numbers are about one month behind targets. Boo hoo. Other than those eagerly waiting their turn to buy one no one else seems overly worried about this.
I'll wait for the Q3 'blood bath' and see what happens to the stock price. *Giggle*
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Tesla is circling the train? Oh...yeah...ok. Let me buy that tesla stock from you then since it's practically worthless anyhow. Take $10 a share?
The only argument I hear to Tesla being successful is its stock price. People said that about Enron, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and many dot.com stocks back in 2000.
Model 3 shipment numbers are about one month behind targets.
http://www.businessinsider.com... "The company plans to produce 1,500 Model 3 sedans in September and grow that to 20,000 vehicles a month by December." A total of 220 have been delivered. All have been returned to the factory for replacement parts because the car is still being developed and tested! There won't be 1500 total deliveries by September, much less in September alone, and there sure won't be 20K by December.