Colorado Company Says It Plans To Test Hyperloop Transport System

Freshly Exhumed writes "Elon Musk's dream of a hyperloop transport system seems to be closer to reality than he anticipated. Hyperloop transportation, referred to by Musk as a "cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table", is a tubular pneumatic transport system with the theoretical capability of carrying passengers from New York to L.A. in about 30 minutes at velocities near 4,000 miles per hour, while maintaining a near-continuous G force of 1. Colorado-based company ET3 is planning to build and test its own version of such a hyperloop system, Yahoo reports." A more critical article would point out that the numbers presented seem absurdly optimistic; $100 for a 4,000mph cross country trip may be "projected," but construction of a cross-country train tube is a long way off, and so are ticket sales.

Yes, and Howard Hughes had a dream

[Anonymous Coward]

of a Spruce Goose. And? Every time Musk says something we latch on to it and hype it. Besides, I'm sure the progress of 3D printing means we'll be able to 3D print ourselves at the destination. After all, the first modems only had 300 baud, look how fast they are now, therefore anything is possible. Especially when comparing two completely different things.

Send packages first

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see how fast it gets fresh salmon from Seattle to Kansas. Build a six inch wide tube or something. If that works out, then maybe think about humans.

Train accidents are bad enough already. 4000 mph? Would there even be anything left for the NTSB to sift through? What happens if the tube decompresses? Musk has some great ideas; but I think he's gone off the rails on this one.

Re:Send packages first

[ATMAvatar]

That's not entirely true. Tesla had its first profitable quarter this year [yahoo.com], though admittedly that was due to selling emissions credits pushing them into the black. Over time, the company has continually driven down the cost of production, and you can see from the financials that revenue and gross profit is growing, so it looks promising that it might finally be able to stand on its own soon.

Re:If this was possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

Japanese developed usable electric cars if you define usable by affordable and available to the population, unlike the Teslas. USA gave a try earlier in our century, but it was killed by your greed and capitalist system (see the documentary "who killed the electric car").

Private spaceflight occurs mainly in Russia. They were also the first to have a usable space station up there (skylab was a bad joke). NASA are experts in developing and sending probes and robots, I give you that. But again, greed and paranoia impedes NASA and I don't see much space development in the near future of the USA. Which is sad, really, because competition from the USA would drive Russia or China big time to improve its presence in space, maybe even getting another space race?

The USA developed the basics of the Internet backbone, but look at the current customer situation (which is all that matters, really), you can have 100mbps symmetrical in Japan, Slovakia, Estonia for 10-15$/month. In the USA you can have 10mbps with a 300GB cap for 40$/month. Again, your greed impedes innovation. A lot, most, of the optic fiber dropped in the oceans are operated by foreign countries.

The problem with innovation is that it is driven by passion or competition. Since passion is limited by a small budget, most of the time, only competition can bring up things. Companies do it either to improve their countrie's image (see HTC) or to be the richest company(See Samsung), it doesn't matter. If one country does something innovative, other countries will follow and try to beat them. See the smartphone market, for example.

Re:Trans continental railway

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, true, underground. But of course there is maintenance. And maintenance access ways. And roads to get to those maintenance access ways. And buildings with security perimeters around those access ways. All of which are above ground. You don't think for a minute that there wouldn't be access hatches for maintenance at a minimum of every ten miles do you? BTW, this type of "hyperloop" is sort of a silly name for something postulated and described in Robert Heinlein's fiction many many years ago as a ballistic tube.

Re:This may be Elon Musk's dream, but...

[whit3]

credit for the invention belongs to Dr. Joseph V. Foa who was awarded US Patent 3213802 for a "train in a tube" in 1965. This was the basis for a number of years of research into the concept at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1960s.

It's far older than that, of course. Isambard Bunuel was tinkering with 'atmospheric railway' hardware a century and a half ago. Patents issued in Britain, 1838.

Re:Discovery channel?

[avgjoe62]

"Sir! The tornado breached the mag-lev pneumatic tube in Los Angeles and now the sharks are heading to Des Moines at 4,000 MPH!"

Re:Why would you build this in an earthquake zone?

[Teancum]

Also, Musk's idea is to run inside a vacuum tube. A leak caused by an earthquake would let in air, which, if you hit it at 4000 mph, would be like hitting a brick wall.

I'm really curious about what details you happen to know about this hyperloop system. Are you a SpaceX or Tesla employee that has had a couple of cool ones with the boss to get him to spill his guts about the idea?

Otherwise, I don't think anybody but Musk has a bloody clue about how his system works. I've seen the interviews and public statements about the idea, but frankly neither this particular article nor any other shows anything other than another high-speed transport system. I'll agree that vacuum tube transport systems seem to fit the concept of hyperloops from the perspective of "this is the best thing that fits the idea", but all of that is pure guess work. There are other possibilities too, but the real point is that nobody has a clue.

It seems, based on some statements by Musk, that some actual engineering R&D work has gone into the idea (aka there might be some people at either Tesla and/or SpaceX that have helped Elon with some calculations and fleshing out the concept) but he certainly has made no public statements about the concept in any level of detail.... including even if there will be vacuum tubes involved in any part of the system. When asked explicitly if it was an underground vacuum tube system, Elon Musk even said "No".

In other words, this whole article is just a bunch of BS.