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."
I-75? (Score:5, Informative)
. . . it would essentially follow major highways, such as I-75 in California.
Let the record show that TFA correctly states "I-5". Somebody in Michigan needs to watch his typos.
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And here I was thinking that it also folded space-time!
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Let the record show that TFA correctly states "I-5". Somebody in Michigan needs to watch his typos.
Not the first link. At least not as of the time I read it. The Slashdot summary is a pure cut and paste (with links restored) of the first paragraph from the Discovery News article.
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People are excited over all kinds of shit too easily. Bullet trains--high-speed rail--get a lot of attention for "efficiency", but the truth is they're subject to aerodynamic drag, braking force loss, etc. Regenerative braking isn't a magic bullet, bringing back 20%-50% of the energy lost from trying to accelerate your balls off and keep that speed in the face of air resistance; but people talk like regenerative braking generates electricity (i.e. if the Prius got 5%--rather than its 20-25%--people would
Re:I-75? (Score:5, Funny)
. . . it would essentially follow major highways, such as I-75 in California.
Let the record show that TFA correctly states "I-5". Somebody in Michigan needs to watch his typos.
They used xerox copy/paste
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Evidently you have never driven on the 101 in California, High speed and earthquakes is a California tradition.
Evidently you are from Southern California or not from California at all. ;)
Re:I-75? (Score:5, Informative)
Lets see... build a system where one small misalignment will mean crashes that kill passengers, in a state that has more earthquakes than anywhere else in the US... Riiiiiiiiiiiight...
The faultlines are mostly along the coast. The hyperloop would run mostly through the central valley. Even if there was a big quake, the seismic waves would take time to propagate, so there would be time to react.
It doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be an improvement on the alternatives. If you look at the current plan for high speed rail between SF to LA, almost anything would be an improvement.
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I would add to this that it should be within the range of possibility to build the system with enough motion tolerance and damping to allow the vehicles to slow down. Total motion in an earthquake is rarely more than a few feet - in fact rarely more than a few inches. That's in the range that modern jetliners encounter in bumpy air, at 500 MPH. I'm just guesstimating, of course but I can imagine suspending the tube in a framework that allows it to stay relatively motionless while the framework itself mov
Re:I-75? (Score:4, Informative)
Musk's design document (the PDF he provided) calls for three dampeners per pylon to mitigate earthquake damage.
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.
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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".
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While I would agree that "driver errors" including having 16 year olds who still have wet ink on their first driver's licenses operating vehicles traveling at 75 mph at night, there are other things that can cause highway fatalities. Some vehicles are poorly maintained and can fail (I know of several highway deaths due to vehicle malfunctions), poor highway maintenance, and even random events like somebody "going postal" or even a cow or deer wandering onto the road when it isn't expected. Poor highway ma
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I suspect that the accident rate will be much lower than even trains
1) because of the lack of other stuff in the tube so there just wont be anything to run into accept other pods which might have stopped, no trees falling on to tracks or cars at level crossing etc.
2) because the pods are meant to have the air sucked out of them. If anything happens to the tube which breaks the structure of the tube (tree falling onto it for example, then air is going to rush
Re:I-75? (Score:4)
You also missed a rather brilliant failsafe as well - let's say the tube fails and thus, the vacuum fails. Your pod now has to battle onrushing air and is also being "sucked" backwards, thus forming a natural brake.
That's if the tube section ahead of you fails.
If it fails behind you, the onrushing air pushes you away from the broken section.
So safety is enhanced because your pod will end up being pushed away from the broken section.
Of course, there's a chance that you might run into the pod behind or ahead of you (depending if the broken section is ahead or behind you, respectively), but given some "leakage" of air around your pod, an air cushion could form that likewise slows your approach ahead. Assuming the pods weren't spaced out to begin with..
Cool but probably not feasible... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Go slower in curvier areas? Those areas are probably stops anyway. In rural areas straightening the path is easier.
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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.
Have you ever driven through California's Central Valley? It is completely flat for hundreds of miles.
Re:very unfeasible (Score:5, Interesting)
That's actually a problem past a certain speed. At least in the U.S., they don't allow trains to travel at high speeds in populated areas because they can't usefully stop if somebody walks across the rail. They can't stop because there is very little friction possible. With a closed tube, you don't have that risk, so you can shoot through downtown L.A. doing 250 MPH.
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It would be a LOT cheaper to build an access control fence then to build a tube that will hold good vacuum.
You can't stop a train _anywhere_ when someone walks across the rail. That's just evolution in action. I just hope they haven't bred when I hear about things like that.
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No, you can't, but the faster the train is moving, the greater the danger, because the less warning you have before it gets there. Hence, speed is severely limited when traveling through populated eras, even with access control fences.
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Most areas are populated. Some just not very densely.
I'm fine with losing the kind of morons that climb fences onto high speed rail tracks. In fact I think the fences are unneeded.
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The article explicitly states that the tube does not hold a vacuum, and thus greatly reduces costs.
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Then he's completely insane and doesn't understand. Likely never heard of boundary layers or looked at how they pump gasses down existing pipelines.
Of course I didn't RTFA. Are you new here?
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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:very unfeasible (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously you didn't RTFA as a ordinary idiot. Part of the proposal is to turn that boundary layer problem into an advantage by turning it into an air bearing and having a turbo fan engine (electrically powered... another of Elon Musk's ideas he has toyed with so far as to make electrically powered airplanes) suck up the air in front of the pod and blast it out of the back of the pod.
The air itself in the tube isn't really moving. The tube is kept at a partial vacuum, but it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum. Essentially, the pod is "flying" through the tube in a fashion similar to an airplane.
At least download the PDF file and make some intelligent comments rather than suggesting the guy is insane based upon wild ass speculation of what folks thought the concept might be prior to Musk's announcement.
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Also, you can't climb hills with rail. Standard rails max out at a single-digit percent grade. If you want to climb more than five or six feet per hundred feet, rail can't do the job. That severely limits where you can run it; in particular, it is not practical to run a rail alongside most roads that go through mountains, much less run one at anything approaching a high speed.
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?
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A sign like this becomes a magnet to suicidal people, who I think represent the majority of people killed by train impact. The tube pretty much removes any chance of such suicides taking place.
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The drivers will be extremely upset by it, needing counselling and often quitting their job afterwards, many passengers may be similarly scarred,
Only a problem until people adjust. The "emotional scarring" is a side effect of people being completely detached from the reality that people's actions have consequences. Once they realize that it's no big deal when an idiot snuffs it due to their own choices, we'll be better off.
and in the short term the time and money costs of the damage to the train/track and delays
Sounds to me like maybe we should invest in research into high-speed cowcatchers.
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That would be why the rail is usually grade separated at that speed, i.e. roads run under or over the tracks. Hell, even mainlines here in Sweden are mostly grade-separated, and where they are not there are systems in place to detect obstacles and stop the train before the train driver can physically see the obstruction. And we only have trains running 200 kph, you can be pretty sure that railways that allow trains to run at over 300 kph are entirely grade separated.
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That's actually a problem past a certain speed. At least in the U.S., they don't allow trains to travel at high speeds in populated areas because they can't usefully stop if somebody walks across the rail. They can't stop because there is very little friction possible. With a closed tube, you don't have that risk, so you can shoot through downtown L.A. doing 250 MPH.
So put up a chain link/plexiglass fence around it. Or better yet, worry less about drunks. Build the fence for cows anyway though.
In populated areas, the residents will look at the fence as an eyesore and file endless lawsuits to stop it. If you elevate, they will still file endless lawsuits. The only way to satisfy the nimbys is to build it underground. This costs a fortune but it would be exact same for Hyperloop.
Hyperloop doesn't solve any of the land use issues. It just removes the option to lay simple track on bare ground. Going down the unpopulated parts of the I5 corridor is the easy part for both Hyperloop and High Speed
Re:very unfeasible (Score:5, Informative)
Amtrak spent $80 million back in the 1980s on a plan to build a high speed rail from LA to San Diego. Every little burg between the two cities sued to stop it. They finally sold the plans to somebody for $5 million.
Re:very unfeasible (Score:4, Interesting)
We missed the opportunity to fix this back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the railroads were pretty much all bankrupt. The fix would have been to buy the mainline trackage (everything except the maintenance yards) from the railroads and give them a 20 year free ride to help pay for the deal; then run the railroads as part of the National Highway System. Then the railroads could have become the customers rather than the vendors, and the government, which generally does infrastructure pretty well, could have made the rails a viable solution while the railroad companies, which could then compete on an equal basis, could do the business things, which they do pretty well. And new companies could enter the market to provide passenger train service on an entrpreneurial basis.
Alas, instead we had a huge bailout of railroad companies, and the creation of the bastard stepchild Amtrak, which was designed and intended to fail, but has continued to survive despite the best efforts of the government and the railroads to kill it.
Re:Cool but probably not feasible... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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.
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I'm not sure why you think Taco was wrong. The iPod was a technological step backwards in many ways, but it eventually sold well because it had better advertising. As geeks I thought we preferred technological superiority over marketing.
Other than that I agree with you. Musk often seems to be the target of this kind of stupidity - clearly no-one would want an electric car that can only do 300 miles and takes 50 minutes to charge because some idiot got a job 151 miles from his house.
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.
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Everything you say is true, but Space X isn't done either. I think you'd have to admit they've done better than many people predicted. What is strange is how with each milestone they pass, people move the goalposts and withhold respect. Same with Tesla, though that's starting to change a little now. Not saying that's what you're doing, but it does make me wonder what the motivation is when people do that.
"You don't want to live in Tube Land." (Score:2)
Speak for yourself, Musk. Tube Land sounds awesome.
Better for freight carrier replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
Tubes (Score:5, Funny)
Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?
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Only if there's a series of them.
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Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?
Sure, just back it up on tape, and send it on its way...
How safe would this be? (Score:2)
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A fast deceleration caused by what? Most fast-decelerations that planes suffer are imposed at 9.8m/s^2 and kill a good chunk of the passengers as they slam into the ground, so I don't see how accidents could be much worse given how few people ride per pod.
Re:How safe would this be? (Score:4, Informative)
A fast deceleration caused by what?
Like detecting a crack or fault in the tube structure shortly ahead of the current location and it needs to come to an immediate stop.
Most fast-decelerations that planes suffer are imposed at 9.8m/s^2...
Actually almost None do, a plane becomes a glider when it's engines quits and glides to the ground. 9.8 m/s^2 would imply that it descends straight down like a rock with no air resistance. When engines fail planes can glide to a landing and then skid on the ground with the resistance of the ground slowing the plane down during the "slapdown"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Impact_Demonstration
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That's different from an impact-style deceleration, which all of your examples involve. I suppose it depends on what kind of fault is in the tube, unfortunately there are so many that there are a number of different scenarios including: not stopping, allowing the increase in air pressure to slow the car, slamming into a fractured tube and crashing, etc.
Re:How safe would this be? (Score:5, Informative)
The target speed was never 4000 MPH (I think you're confusing this with ET3's proposal). For deceleration: emergency brakes and the cars have wheels for emergencies. One question that should be asked is, what is it going to crash into? Not other capsules, they're moving away from you and have a huge safety margin of distance between them. Not the station, it's a passive system that handles deceleration (no power required). If the capsule needs to decelerate themselves for some reason, you're going from a maximum of 760 MPH to 0 MPH using the capsule's mechanical emergency breaking system. At the same deceleration as the capsules would accelerate, that's about seventy seconds over roughly seven and a half miles. Which is much faster than a high-speed train can do the same thing.
The document Must posted does cover several emergency scenarios. Passenger health emergency? Best thing is to keep going to next station as scheduled, with a maximum trip length of 35 minutes it's the fastest way to get an active response, and much faster than you can get emergency services to an in-flight aircraft. Major depressurization of a car? Actuate emergency breaks on all cars and rapidly re-pressurize the entire tube. Major earthquake (beyond the ability of the pylon dampers to handle)? Emergency break all the capsules and wait it out. Power outage? The system has many times more stored battery capacity to complete all in-progress journeys. Power failure of system itself? Cars are self-powered, so can coast a decent distance themselves, and then the batteries normally used to power the turbine can be used instead to power motors on the emergency wheels to get the capsules either to the station at the end of the line or the closest emergency exit location. I'm sure there are tons of possibilities that haven't been accounted for, but many are.
Re:How safe would this be? (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider first that sufficiently large deflection would result in the immediate emergency breaking of all capsules. There is also the consideration that earthquakes don't travel instantaneously, which means there is some advanced warning between an earthquake being detected and an earthquake reaching the hypertube. There is also the capability of the dampers on the pylons to absorb a certain amount of movement. These things combine to give sufficient time to decelerate the vehicles.
Consider this: earthquakes are a far larger problem in Japan (both in intensity and frequency), and there are similar consequences to deflecting the rail of a high speed train (the danger there is derailment). Even a stationary train can topple in an earthquake, much less of a concern on the hyperloop. Japan has never suffered a fatality on a shinkansen due to earthquakes, over the past half century. The hyperloop's emergency stopping distance would be vaguely similar to that of the shinkansen. The shinkansen emergency braking from top speed takes about 40 seconds by my math, and the *normal* deceleration from top speed of the hyperloop would take 70. If it decelerates faster than normal for emergency braking, it could potentially even stop faster than the shinkansen.
I've seen this before (Score:2)
“The pods would be mounted on thin skis made out of inconel, a trusted alloy of SpaceX that can withstand high pressure and heat,” Vance wrote. Air would get pumped through tiny holes in the inconel skis to create an air cushion, and it would get there via an electric turbo compressor. An electromagnetic pulse would each pod an initial thrust.
I saw this described almost exactly the same in a popular science magazine in Australia in the mid '70's . I can still picture the cover illustration, but damned if I can remember the title of the magazine ("Scientific Australia"????)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starman_Jones [wikipedia.org]
And so it begins (Score:5, Funny)
All the /. experts come out of their caves to debunk a paper by a guy that brought us internet payments, commercial space travel, and luxury electric cars.
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He already said he's not going to do this one ... yet. He's giving the world a chance to chime in first. Then, in a couple years, if someone else hasn't picked up the ball, he says he'll pursue it himself.
Given Musk's history, I'm going to think of this project as vaporware that has a decent chance of condensing into a liquid someday.
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All the /. experts come out of their caves
I'm not coming out of my cave. It's the only place with decent WiFi coverage...
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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 t
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.
What makes him think this can be done? (Score:2)
Ok, building an electric car is one thing, since public utilities, like roads, don't need to be heavily modified; but dreaming of a high speed rail... quite a bit needs to be done for that. Why are we even posting this? There's plenty of people dreaming, my 6 old daughter thinks there should be an emergency slide to get from a space station back to earth. Where's her article?
Given that California has been struggling since the 80s to establish high speed rail between LA and SF... I doubt this will get any
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There's plenty of people dreaming, my 6 old daughter thinks there should be an emergency slide to get from a space station back to earth. Where's her article?
That's my question too, why haven't you gotten her to write it? People might actually be interested in that.
I also dream of having a gold plated urinal in my Ferrari filled garage but like Elon, that's just dreaming.
Just so you know, a gold plated urinal would probably cost less than $1000. Gold plating is surprisingly inexpensive.
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Because it's interesting, and the guy who thought of it has a decent track record?
Because your daughter's idea is an uneducated flight of fancy. Given she's 6, it's forgivable. This is hypothetical, but not as silly as an emergency slide from the ISS to the ground.
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I understand your view and to an extent I agree with it, but a lot of people thought Musk was crazy for thinking that he could build rockets basically from the ground up for a few hundred million dollars. There were many who said that such a program would need billions just to get the first launch, but he came up with a way to do it for far less than most expected. He might have something here, though whether it's possible at any price in the current California political environment is a very good questio
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Another person who didn't read the paper. Sigh. Is this really what Slashdot is now?
The reason we're posting this is because it isn't just dreaming. He laid out a specific plan with some reasonable numbers. Did your daughter calculate the the drag effects for moving through a low pressure tube at mach 1? Did she spec out the size of batteries it would take to power the turbofan that moves the air from the front of the system to the back while creating a suspension cushion? What about how the lateral g force
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.
Magnetic fields for passengers (Score:4, Interesting)
The one thing I did not see is what the expected magnetic field levels will be for passengers.
Many folks with implanted medical devices are told to stay away from significant RF and magnetic fields. It is possible that the pod could be magnetically shielded enough, but it would be great if he added that info.
Otherwise, I say scrap the Cali High Speed Rail and build Hyperloop instead!
(The truth is that I bet the Casinos would throw in the first billion to build one from LA to Vegas...they dumped $650 million on the Las Vegas monorail).
Re:Magnetic fields for passengers (Score:4, Informative)
Read the paper [teslamotors.com] [PDF] not the article. There are no magnetic fields impinging on the cabin space. The proposal is to use pressurized air as the suspension medium, not magnetic levitation. The turbine used to pressurize enough air fast enough is electric, but it keeps its fields tightly inside itself, as with all good electric motors.
Remarkably Cheap! (Score:2)
The one thing that bothers me is how cheap he estimates it to be. Just 6-7 billion which is about 10 percent of the cost of the competing design. Just the steel for the tube (and being thick enough to not crush under atmospheric pressure) has got to be crazy expensive. He estimates 4 or 5 billion (depending on diameter size), but that seems low? Anybody know the cost of steel on projects of this magnitude?
Re:Remarkably Cheap! (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the paper in detail, you'll find some numbers. Since it's not a really hard vacuum inside the tube, and since it's cylindrical, the tube isn't as thick as you'd think. The tube walls are 20 to 23 mm thick (0.8 to 0.9 inches). That thickness can handle the load of the pressure differential, the torsion of its own weight between pillars, and the loading caused by the passing of the capsules, as well as standing up to quite a bit of seismic activity. Steel is pretty strong stuff. Cost for just the tube in the passenger-only model is $650 million. Upgrade the width to allow it to transport cars and light trucks and the tube costs somewhat less than twice that. $1.2 billion or so. That includes fabrication.
Surprisingly enough, the pillars cost more than the tube. Steel reinforced concrete with height adjustment gear should run around $2.55 billion for the passenger-only version or $3.15 billion for the vehicle version.
I suspect the competing design is spending more on real estate than the entire Hyperloop system. Hyperloop can use much of the I-5 route, saving a fortune in real estate costs, an option not available for heavy rail on the ground.
Launch System (Score:3, Funny)
We don't need to build all the intervening tubes, do we? Just get it up to speed, then launch it every 5 miles or so; I'm sure we can catch them safely.
Don't forget passenger comfort (Score:3)
If there are not windows, its a no go, this solution forgets that you are moving people.
A mere 300mph is fine if it has car like comfort, Instead build:
- Some type of track that can handle a small 2-4 passenger pod at 300mph, and transfer energy to the electric drive.
- Elevate track for reasons given by Musk
- Build canopy over track covered in solar cells to get as close as possible to zero net energy
- Track canopy protects track from most weather
- Cars that can handle a 300mph crash without killing occupants (big crumple zones)
- Side windows, and a big screen in front for entertainment and possible operator interaction
- On / Off ramps and terminals about every 30 miles. You are never more than 6 minutes or so from a terminal.
- Computer can space cars for airflow efficiency (think Nascar drafting), and make gaps when cars need to switch tracks.
- Build a hub and spoke network across the US, with the first track from the East Coast to the West Coast.
Select a route with an app on your phone or touchscreen in a terminal. It shifts the nearest empty car to you (think elevator). You get in, select your in car entertainment. If you need to stop for bathroom just let the computer know, or perhaps push a button, and your car will stop at the next terminal. When you are ready you get back in and continue your journey. All the while watching something close to low level flight out the window.
This is doable today.
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.
why not start smaller? (Score:5, Interesting)
Building a hyperloop from San Francisco to Sacramento, or San Francisco to San Jose, would be useful and much shorter and cheaper.
excellent criticism from knowledgable rail expert (Score:3)
There is a great discussion from Alon Levy at Pedestrian Observations [wordpress.com]. Alon is a mathematician who is very knowledgable about transit issues and rail alignments in particular.
In stark contrast to most media (which seems incapable or disinterested in addressing the engineering issues and is basically repeating a press release) he has a number of specific issues:
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Real prices vs. fantasy prices (Score:2)
It's simple: there's no way of knowing exactly what the hyperloop would really cost to build, since one has never been built. He's comparing real-world prices to fantasy prices.
it's much like how pharmaceuticals that haven't been released yet always seem to promise "no side effects."
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Elon Musk has done some preliminary engineering and at least modeled the concepts to come up with some pretty reasonable guesses for the prices. Keep in mind that SpaceX (one of the companies he runs) happens to make aluminum tubes of about the diameter he is proposing with the hyperloop and knows to the penny how much they cost to build and to ensure the quality needed for a project like this. Land acquisition costs are something that numerous studies by the California Department of Transportation alone
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I'm just curious how he is going to deal with the expansion issues of an metal tube that is 1000 miles long in various different temperatures and weather. The pipeline industry has been struggling with it for decades. It would seem that his designs are going to need some fairly close tolerances to work and with the various thermal coefficients involved it will be interesting to see how he plans to deal with it.
Re:Real prices vs. fantasy prices (Score:5, Informative)
The pipeline industry has been solving it for decades. There's even an oil pipeline over a fault in Alaska that moved by ten metres in an earthquake which survived because of a clever design of a couple of bends over the fault. For extreme thermal expansion problems look at power station pipework, and something like this is not so limited to materials that can withstand high temperatures and pressures. Great big compressible plastic rings are used between segments of some water pipelines for instance.
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:Cheaper than high-speed rail??? (Score:5, Informative)
"this will be cheaper than a high-speed rail?"
Red tape? ROW restrictions? Sound Pollution? Grade restrictions? base material restrictions? etc. High speed rail has some pretty significant drawbacks that limit its use and increase its costs. There are some pretty significant advantages to elevating the "tubeway", decreasing the size of the footprint (ROW in this case) and simplifying the "cars". Not saying its going to be a walk in the park, but with high speed rails mounting costs ($65-117 Billion and climbing) for Californians HSR project alone and ever distant completion times (2040 at the earliest) alternatives should be considered.
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Red tape could be a helper here.
They should be acquiring rights of way with _all_ of the initial money. Then start building when the population has grown to the point where it can run at break even.
But politically it was a non-starter without money for the construction unions.
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Probably not. Taken a good look recently on how much red tape you need to go through for even the most simple building projects in the US? Hell at my place down in Florida, it took me nearly 2 years go get a live oak cut down. That was *after* it had been hit by lightening, caught on fire, was infested with ants, and was leaning on the neighbors house.
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We don't want them building yet. We want them to buy up as much land as reasonably possible before real estate recovers.
That way in 50 years, when it actually makes sense to build HSR, the land will not be too expensive.
Flori-duh is special. Like the special Olympics. I would have 'trimmed it for safety' rather aggressively. Gotten rid of the 'live' issue, then dealt with what was left.
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It's been over 5 years since money was initially dumped into the California high speed rail project. After 5 years and 15 billion dollars we still don't have a single foot of track. If we can't even get two pieces of metal in the ground, what makes it believable that miles of metal tubes would be any easier and cheaper.
Well, presumably it'd be someone other than California doing the project.
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Because it was the gov'ment that is doing the high speed rail, while the hyperloop would likely be done by a private company, and only after the cities involved had agreed to get the hell out of way.
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Have you ever driven on the fun side of 100mph? If you had, you would not suggest this. Many people have a hard time keeping their brakes serviced and think that tires that hold air are good by definition.
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Yes, and I would suggest it. But only for cars designed to actually go that fast. No, your supercharged smartfortwo doesn't count.
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Then your ether an idiot or (even more then me) are a believer in active, every day evolution.
Do you know what kind of pavement you need to drive 200mph? What kind of tires? How long these tires last in use?
It's just a stupid suggestion. Rubber tires on pavement is at it's limits at 200mph. The only ones that go faster then that last about 1/2 mile (half slowing down) and are thrown away after one use.
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I look forward to the day I can commute via trebuchet and parachute.
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He never promised anything remotely near 4,000 MPH. He promised about a half hour between LA and SF. Proposal does it in 35 minutes, which is indeed about a half hour.
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Cue the pack of bleating neckbearded Mythbusters-humping assholes screaming "IT WILL NEVER WORK BECAUSE I AM SCIENTIST!" before they go back to their bongs and gripe because there are no jobs and there's no reason to go to college any more.
Now mod it down because you're a butthurt crying bitch.
You forgot the part where some country elsewhere does it first, then we all get to complain around the lack of investments into our own infrastructure. Or, if it succeeds, we get to complain that he's an inventor of nothing and merely stood on the shoulders of others. That's the awesome things about /., we always get to win regardless of the outcome!
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Musk had a supply of good crack that week. Also thinks anything he doesn't understand is easy.
He has a solid track record of getting stuff done.
Even things that others didn't think were feasible.
And he has done so repeatedly.
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The actual PDF with his plans does mention this briefly. It has a massive air compressor in the front, and the air that's in the hyperloop tubes is just ordinary air that leaked in. There's compressed air tanks inside the front of the car, and so basically some of that compressed air gets injected through tiny holes in the skies, and some of that air is pumped into the cabin, with the exhaust air pumped out the back.
If the car loses pressure, those exact same plastic masks that fall from the ceiling they
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