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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!
It's fun and rewarding to be a bird of ill omen, no? Sit there like a know-it-all and piss on people who are trying to make things happen?
Not so long ago "electric car" meant a shitty golf cart that reached maybe 15mph. Now we have access to electric cars that do the driving for you and can do 0-60mph in 3 sec. Also not so long ago, sending shit to space was obscenely expensive and was mostly a one-way trip for the rocket; now there's reusable rockets and the cost of sending shit to space is 4x lower than what the NASA or Air Force used to pay.
What the fuck more do you need to be amazed by that guy.
lucm, indeed.
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.