Elon Musk's 'Hyperloop': More Details Revealed 533
astroengine writes "Entrepreneur Elon Musk revealed details today about his concept for a high-speed transportation system he calls the Hyperloop. After tweeting that he'd pulled an all-nighter preparing for the announcement, Musk told Businessweek that the design could transport people as well as cars inside aluminum pods that move up to 800 miles per hour through a tube. The tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, not interfering with land needs because it would essentially follow major highways, such as I-75 in California."
Cool but probably not feasible... (Score:3, Insightful)
Better for freight carrier replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:very unfeasible (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like one could deter people from walking across the rails with some sort of symbolic notification device? To not reinvent the wheel, we could reuse the old inventions of "words" on a "sign":
WARNING
TRAINS GO THROUGH HERE
THEY GO REALLY FAST
IF THEY HIT YOU YOU'RE DEAD
EVEN IF YOU'RE DRUNK
or something.
We haven't roped off every cliff in the mountains, even though people die there. We've not even put warning signs on a lot of dangerous things ("WARNING: THIS IS A BEAR. DO NOT POKE IT. IT IS BIGGER THAN YOU. EVEN IF YOU'RE DRUNK.") Why do we need derp-proof railways?
I love the obvious technologies (Score:5, Insightful)
But there is huge problem with this system. Being so cheap and simple there is little room for massive companies to lobby/sell their complicated overpriced technologies. Tubes? How long is the list of companies that could build tubes? Pylons? How long is the list of companies that can build pylons? The train cars are a bit more limited but again not being maglev that list is still pretty long. Land purchases? I suspect that a bunch of insiders had land all lined up to sell.
Then you get other technocrats who don't like that their territory is being infringed. The rail people are probably scared that this might be independently run.
And lastly you get the aviation related interests that are far larger than most people might think. You have the oil refineries who will be unhappy to sell less fuel to both planes and cars, you have taxi drivers who run people to the airports, you of course have the airlines themselves, and you have the airports who will be unhappy to have fewer landings and takeoffs. Plus the no-doubt 50 unions who run the airports among others.
A tube system like this would be pure evil as far as those people are concerned dropping people off right down-town, how dare they.
Re:Cool but probably not feasible... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I see with this is while it's nice to dream about 800 mph travel, I can't imagine that it would be feasible to construct a track or tube that could follow the terrain at that speed and still maintain passenger comfort. If you are building above-ground supports, you don't want them to be 500 ft tall as would probably be required in order to keep the tube straight enough for passenger comfort and safety.
Luckily, advancement doesn't have to wait for the average guy's imagination to catch up. Have you actually read the proposal or are you just doing the usual slashdot thing?
The guy runs two companies, one in the space business and one that makes electric cars. I'm sure he'll need to ask a construction company for advice about the pillars, etc, but is there any reason to suppose he hasn't run this past the best engineers in those two companies? I'm sure his cost estimates are off, they can only be estimates this early in a design study, but it's not like he doesn't have engineers that know aerodynamics and vehicle design.
I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until real rebuttal arrives, say from someone who can point out actual errors in the proposal.
Re:Cheaper than high-speed rail??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Common sense would tell you that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun rotates around it.
Re:And so it begins (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because he can hire enough experts to do what has already been done or mostly done... doesn't mean he can do everything or anything. This isn't Paypal, which took existing technology and convinced people to use him rather than the banks. Nor is this SpaceX, which has taken existing technology and may (someday) provide commercial space travel by hiring existing experts. Nor is this Tesla, which took existing technology... I think you see the pattern.
(Seriously, if you believe that someones ability to eat a banana proves that that can ride a tricycle across a tightrope, you'd abandoned all common sense.)
Re:Cool but probably not feasible... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me he has absolutely NO idea about the very real engineering challenges to something like this.
As opposed to some smartass cunt on the Internet.
By your logic we should be hand-carrying water buckets around to wash our ass with. FUCK I wish this site would go back to what it once was.
Preach it brother! I once read the comments on a regular basis because there used to be a bit of informed comment. But the rot started to set in with the "no wirelss, less space than a Nomad, lame" episode. Now it's just a bunch of basement-dwelling know-it-alls who think they know better than the man who made a fortune on the internet, started an electric car company, and is on the edge of establishing commercial space flight for tourists! And these dickheads truly think they know better than him even though they didn't bother their sorry asses reading TFA! It beggars belief.
Kudos on your choice of language. "Smartass cunt" just about sums up the typical /. commenter these days.
Re:I-75? (Score:5, Insightful)
The odds of surviving a crash don't much matter here - The odds of a crash do, for two reasons.
First, because the accident rate matters. You have made an argument appealing to the fatality rate, while ignoring whether or not tubes would have more or less total (fatal) accidents. If fewer than 350 100-passenger tube-pods crash per year, you have a net improvement vs cars. Comparing that to flying, if we had an average of one packed airplane going down in flames every day - We'd see commercial aviation end almost overnight. More to the point, people die in car accidents largely because people fail, not because their cars fail.
And second, bad things happen in car accidents beyond "death". Things (IMO) worse than death happen. And don't forget all the high-cost but not-worse-than-death injuries (broken limbs, major surgeries needed, etc). Yes, an 800MPH accident pretty much means trying to ID the bodies by searching for teeth with a sieve; that doesn't mean you get to just ignore all the "not quite dead" car accidents, which far outnumber the actual fatal ones.
/ And hey, if I really end up dying in an accident some day - I'll gladly take "you need to look for teeth with a sieve" over "watching myself and my family slowly bleed to death as paramedics try to cut us out".
Re:And so it begins (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Mr. Musk has demonstrated four times now that he is the financial equivalent of riding a unicycle across a tightrope while juggling bananas. Existing technology is useless if it never leaves the bench. (And Slashdot has 10394856 solar cell stories to prove it.) Elon Musk takes technology that's been languishing on the bench and turns it into viable companies. This is not exactly a trivial talent, or it would happen more frequently. His ability to put together a functional team of experts, then direct and fund them to success, is quite unusual. Doing it all on a budget 1/10th the size of other organizations (that still fail to deliver) is what really makes for an impressive performance.
Yes, I do see a pattern. I see a pattern of rather startling success, that "anybody" could have done. Except. They didn't.
Re:very unfeasible (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're assuming that this guy, who has spent $zillions on engineers for his successful SpaceX endeavour (including ones who _really_ understand both subsonic and supersonic airflow and boundary layer effects, which are all critical elements of rocket design), and for his successful Tesla venture, has not spent dime one on engineers to work out the details? Hmm.
Re:He said "up to 4,000 MPH" (Score:2, Insightful)
People like him are the reason the middle class no longer exists.
...They all got up and made successful internet startups or car companies or space companies? Is that where the middle class went?
Or do you mean they no longer exist because they all stopped working at North American factories like Tesla or SpaceX?
Or do you mean they went somewhere else because they were no longer were inspired to be entrepreneurial because no-one had the spirit anymore or could prove it was possible to grow a successful business?
Re:I-75? (Score:4, Insightful)
kind of like trains? we have those here in CA too, and have been successfully operating them through '89 Loma Prieta, Northridge in '94, and a plethora of smaller quakes.
nevermind all the local commuter trains like BART which include the transbay tube that runs for 4 miles on the BOTTOM of SF Bay and carries 400k commuters/day. was the only direct link to the east bay after Loma Prieta because the Bay Bridge broke.
Californians know how to deal with earthquakes. the building I'm sitting in right now rests on giant ball bearings so the ground can move under the building.
This has a huge up side. (Score:5, Insightful)
Feasibility: No new technology needs to be developed. It uses no exotic technology or materials. Think about the components: steel tubing, concrete pylons, solar cells, batteries, compressors, conventional electromagnets (no superconducting or rare earth magnets). It is an engineering and system integration problem. It is no where near as hard as what SpaceX and Tesla have already done. Tesla can supply the expertise for batteries and linear motor design based on their current experience.
Economy: The claimed price is $6 billion US. The price could be off by a factor of 3 and it would still cost half as much as the existing rail proposal. More then enough room for cost overruns. Musk experienced this already on SpaceX and it did not kill the company.
Benefits: It leapfrogs all existing high speed rail technology. It's a complete game changer. A successful outcome would immediately generate a world wide demand. There is a staggering amount of money to be made. In addition, it is ecologically very sound. The worst aspect is likely the amount of energy required for the concrete pylons, and that seems less then an equivilant roadway. Plus solar power is getting cheaper, so some of the price will go down in the long run.
If the US had any real capitalists around, they would jump at this opportunity. I expect without Musk it will go nowhere, because most big capital expects automatic government guaranteed profit. Although there have been some modest examples of innovative capitalism in the last couple of decades, for the most part capitalism in the US is non-existent, except for a few lone individuals.
Re:Cool but probably not feasible... (Score:5, Insightful)
What part of the science is not clear enough? It's a new combination of technologies, but every aspect of it is reasonably well understood physics. And what's wrong with hyping a fairly dramatic new idea that needs a lot of input and momentum to reach fruition?
This rest of my comment isn't directed at you, but so far I've seen a hundred critiques of this thing, and each one would be eliminated with reading comprehension. Expensive? Likely cheaper. Necessary? Voters already approved a more expensive, less functional system. Eminent domain? Less of an issue than current plans. G forces? Calculated. Air resistance? They cover that. Maintaining vacuum? They cover that too (or rather, they don't, because it's not a vacuum). Earthquakes? General Safety? Failure modes? They touch on each in the paper. It's a well thought out starting point for a new mode of travel. Of course it needs work - he says that right up front. But this is a hell of a kickoff. I can already hear the people who, after saying it was impossible, finally going through the paper and understanding it, jumping straight to "well it's not that amazing, it's all kind of basic". It's like people desperately need to bolster their self image by shitting on things.
Actually I'm curious to hear some intellegent criticism because it would be interesting to consider, but all the criticism so far is either a) ignorant idiocy or b) even more vague than his proposal.
For heaven's sake people, if this paper doesn't get you at least a little excited, you really ought to turn in your geek card and pick up a boring naysayer card in exchange.