Elon Musk Plans To Build Hyperloop Test Track 165
An anonymous reader writes that Elon Musk wants to speed up the development of his proposed 800-mph tube transport. "Billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk is getting more hands-on with the Hyperloop. Musk, who heads up both space transportation outfit SpaceX and electric-vehicle maker Tesla Motors, casually announced via Twitter on Thursday that he's decided to help accelerate development of his vision for near-supersonic tube transportation, first outlined in August 2013. Musk said he will build a five-mile test track for the still-theoretical system for students and companies to use. A possible location would be Texas, he added, where presumably there is plenty of flat land to go around."
"plenty of flat land to go around (Score:2)
Too bad there's not much flat ground where it would do some good.
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And where exactly would a five mile test loop do some good? Keep in mind that this is *not* a technology suitable for short-haul applications, the car is probably going to have to do a dozen laps just to get up to speed.
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What's the purpose of developing a technology which we *know* is WILDLY impractical beyond the Pneumatic Tube Transport developed for local delivery of small items. See the Wikipedia entry on "Pneumatic tube".
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Re:"plenty of flat land to go around (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy has actually designed and built rockets that go to space and can land safely back on Earth. You think he's so out of touch with reality that a fucking Wiki page is standing between what he says and what reality is?
Musk may not ever perfect the Hyperloop, but if he doesn't, it won't be because of anything you think you know. It'll be because he's too busy revolutionizing the automobile, space travel, and power industries simultaneously. What a stunning display of arrogance to sit where you sit and toss trivial criticisms like "we know it's impractical because I read a Wiki article about it" at a guy who launches shit into space for a living while he's not building electric tank-cars or spreading affordable solar power or raising his kids. The day you know more than Musk about -anything- is the day he has a fuckin' tag on his toe.
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I don't see his Solar City work as particularly revolutionary. But SpaceX and Tesla have achieved some pretty darned impressive results thusfar which were widely ridiculed as fantasy several years ago. "Tens of thousands of annual sales of $60k electric vehicles that go hundreds of miles on a charge and getting the highest ranking Consumer Reports has ever given for a car? In your fevered dreams!" "Beating Ares 1 to the ISS for 2% of the development cost, on a rocket cheaper than the Russians and the Chi
Re:"plenty of flat land to go around (Score:5, Funny)
"Look, Musk is not some sort of demigod."
Citation needed.
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I worship him...therefore he is a demigod :)
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For what it's worth, the founding of SolarCity with his two cousins have caused a gigawatt of solar to be installed in the last 8 years, and a massive manufacturing plant to be built in Buffalo, NY to create manufacturing jobs in the US, and give China some competition for solar panels.
No, it's not a complete game changer, but it's also not the square root of jack shit.
Re:"plenty of flat land to go around (Score:5, Informative)
Given that the previous longest range before Tesla came around was in the ballpark of 40% that far and was produced by the hundreds, not the tens of thousands, and that the model S outperforms the BMW 535i, and has higher customer satisfaction ratings, and the whole teensy detail that no new US manufacturer that has anywhere near that order of sales for any type of car (let alone a radical new one) has been established since 1925... yes, that is damned impressive.
Where'd you get the impression that the Merlin was designed by someone else? Merlin is the most from-scratch engine design for an orbital launch vehicle in the US since the 1950s. It shares a few parts with older engines, such as the pintle injectors, but the vast majority of the engine is of brand-new design. The engine shares some similarities with work done at TRW, but it's not a TRW engine (doesn't even burn the same fuels). The reason that it's sometimes referred to as a descendent of work done at TRW is because TRW's former chief engineer is SpaceX's head of propulsion. He was tinkering on rocket engines in his garage that he felt he couldn't get support for at TRW when Musk picked him up; he proceeded to use his new position to create what became the Merlin series.
Nice dodge: let me repeat: #Beating Ares 1 to the ISS for 2% of the development cost, on a rocket cheaper than the Russians and the Chinese, *without* the reuse that it was designed for": how the heck is that not bloody amazing and something to be celebrated? If it's so easy, then why hasn't everyone been doing it? And yes, people like you were all over the place here a few years ago saying they'll never get off the ground.
No, something that's "really game changing" is dramatic reductions in the price of getting to orbit, with serious potential for even more significant drops if reuse works out. That is bloody game changing if the term "game changing" has any meaning. The propellent mix is irrelevant. You can have the highest ISP fuel mix on earth and still cost a bloody fortune to get to orbit if it's not economical. The Russians beat the US for the longest time with much lower performance engines for that reason.
Any more difficult challenge than that and you might as well just call it "magic". You don't get much harder in the rocketry world than something like that. Rocketry *is* engineering, and adding the word "mere" is just an insult.
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I've been around long enough to know when an idea is a crock of shit.
Arrogant and self-obsessed. When you're around a little longer, you'll come to realize that you don't actually know everything. Or perhaps you won't as some never achieve significant emotional maturation.
he's too busy revolutionizing the automobile, space travel, and power industries simultaneously.
Wow, you have drunk the Kool Aid!!
First to create a workable, marketable, functional-in-the-real-world electric cars and created the first new successful car company in the US in decades to design, build, and sell them. Designed and built reusable rockets that run good reliably to the ISS for a fraction of the cost of any other solution eve
Re:"plenty of flat land to go around (Score:5, Informative)
If you think this is like a pneumatic tube, then you know absolutely nothing about this.
Hyperloop is a system involving partially evacuated (not hard vacuum) tubes. The reason is that hard vacuum is much more difficult to achieve and maintain. The very low (but not vacuum) pressures offer little resistance, but do present a problem: you can't allow air to build up in front of the craft. Hyperloop solves this by a system of watercooled battery-powered compressors.
A pneumatic tube is propelled by pressurized air behind the projectile expanding, with lower pressure in front of the projectile. Hyperloop involves nothing of the sort - it involves magnetic accelerator segments for propulsion. Only a few reboosts would be needed over the length of an LA to SF run due to the low air resistance.
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Hyperloop is a system involving partially evacuated (not hard vacuum) tubes.
The air on the outside is still going to *aggressively* want to rush in through any little crack.
it involves magnetic accelerator segments for propulsion.
Let me see if I've got this straight: we can't build regular maglev trains because they're super-expensive (the engineering, construction and maintenance would be incredibly difficult), so... we'll just make it that much harder by wrapping a (partial) vacuum tube around it???
You've got to understand that as much as Europe loves it's trains, there's a reason why high-speed trains aren't draped across the continen
Re:"plenty of flat land to go around (Score:5, Informative)
Air is not magical. You can't put a pinprick in a partially evacuated tube and have it just suddenly equalize. Viscosity on the order of the size of small cracks highly limits the rate at which air can migrate in. A little crack or a leaky seal is simply not enough to overcome an air compressor.
To put it another way: the pressure differential here is approximately one atmosphere. Large trunk natural gas pipelines have a pressure differential of about 13 atmospheres. By your logic, a natural gas distribution infrastructure is utterly impossible because "the natural gas on the inside is still going to *aggressively* want to rush out through any little crack".
First off, let's make this clear. Hyperloop is not Maglev. In fact, the design document notes that they could use Maglev, but dismisses it as too expensive: "A viable technical solution is magnetic levitation; however the cost associated with material and construction is prohibitive." Hyperloop uses air bearings - skis operating in ground effect with the pipe.
Maglev trains are expensive for many reasons. The cost of having the track be able to provide forward propulsion however usually represents only the tiniest fraction thereof. First off, you have the reasons that rail is expensive, period (right of way costs, environmental reviews, and all of the other overhead). Then you have to have the entire route be able to lift up a multi-dozen to multi-hundred-tonne train. Not just propel, but actually hold it stably in the air, which is a far more difficult challenge for many reasons than propulsion - you either have to have an extremely precise computer-controlled fluctuating magnetic field in a train with hanging magnets, or you have to have the entire track be magnetized or be able to magnetize, in a manner that resists dynamic instability.
Hyperloop only involves propulsion, and the accelerators represent just a few percent of the length of the track. It's a tried and tested technology, use around the world, and their budget for it is in-line with industry norms. There are all sorts of trains today that use linear accelerators, almost all of which represent way more length of accelerator than Hyperloop needs. Examples include
Airport Express in Beijing (opened 2008)
AirTrain JFK in New York (opened 2003)
Detroit People Mover in Detroit (using ICTS) opened 1987
EverLine Rapid Transit System in Yongin (opened 2013)
Kelana Jaya Line in Kuala Lumpur (opened 1998)
Scarborough RT in Toronto (using UTDC's (predecessor) ICTS technology - opened 1985)
UTDC ICTS test track in Millhaven, Ontario
SkyTrain in Vancouver (Expo Line (using ITCS) opened 1985 and Millennium Line opened in 2002)
Limtrain in Saitama (short-lived demonstration track, 1988)
Nagahori Tsurumi-ryokuchi Line in Osaka (opened 1990)
Toei edo Line in Tokyo (opened 2000)
Kaigan Line in Kobe (opened 2001)
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An amusement park. People pay good money to go on roller coasters, and scraping the speed of sound in a little capsule-tube-thing would be a huge attraction.
Test the tech, and recoup some expense at the same time.
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It's funny, but there's really three analogies I use to explain the "whats" and "whys" of the hyperloop concept, and one of them is a roller coaster (the other two being the "super-high altitude airplane" analogy and the "building a pipeline" analogy).
Compare a roller coaster ride with going on a train. Are roller coasters built suchly that you have to wait half an hour or more between rides because they haul many hundreds of people at once? Do you have to spend 5 minutes boarding and later 5 minutes disemb
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Which brings up a question: why does Musk insist on running Hyperloop on columns down its entire route in California, even though a lrge portion of it is on the die-straight, perfectly flat median of I-5 through the San Joaquin Valley?
Re:"plenty of flat land to go around (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a few reasons. But the biggest ones involve not having to use new land - not out some sort of idealist reasons, but pure economic practicality. First off, you need right-of-way. This is expensive. Also really ticks off land owners if you have to use eminent domain. These things almost always get tangled up in the courts. For in-town legs it'd be even harder. Secondly, all new projects have to go through a series of impact reviews. If you're building over a highway median, you're in an area that's already passed review - you still have to defend your incremental changes, but you don't have to pass as much of a barrier.
Also, most people overestimate the cost of the columns, comparing them to the cost of rail bridges. Just ignoring that by their very nature rail bridges are generally only built over difficult areas, and are going to be extremely price, It's important to note that one of the key cost-saving measures designed into Hyperloop vs. rail is often overlooked: weight. Hyperloop vehicles are more than an order of magnitude lighter than a passenger train, and only spend a brief period over any given segment; consequently the required structural strength is dramatically lower than for a rail bridge. I did some quick calculations, including tube mass, and found that and Hyperloop loadings should be similar to that of Disney's monorail. So think columns like this [wordpress.com], not this [abc.net.au].
While I do have criticisms for Hyperloop, I found that a lot of the criticisms levied against it on the net were seriously misguided, using ridiculous cost comparisons (another one is comparing the cost of Hyperloop tunnel boring to that of boring tunnels over an order of magnitude larger). I dug up "comparable" projects for each step of the project, and I really have to say, Hyperloop's numbers don't actually look to be that unrealistic. The keys of right-of-way reuse and low point loadings offer serious cost savings.
That said, I think Musk's positioning of the concept was stupid. By putting it in competition to an already-controversial high speed rail project, he both invited the rage of rail fans (who are used to feeling as if they're under attack), as well as inviting the expectation that it can do everything rail can (including, for example, making many stops along the way). It really is, as it was billed, an intermediary alternative between high speed rail and air travel - in speed, in throughput, in ability to make stops, etc. Consequently he should have proposed the first major project of it to be LA to Vegas. Then he wouldn't have encountered opposition from high speed rail fans, and the route doesn't have much population along the way to service. Plus, he could probably get tons of private backing for such a project, as Vegas is always desperate to better connect itself with customers in California.
I also think that for the current proposal, Musk should have positioned the LA station further into town. He's thinking "airport", and of course you can have local train / bus service to the station wherever it is, but airports are only on the outskirts because they *have* to be, mass transit is really ideally located more in-town. And there's no reason that he can't continue into town - the roads get a bit curvy but there's some nice straight rail lines that they could go over straight into the heart of town, and that'd probably be even easier to get approval for than for over road.
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This still doesn't address my question. I fully appreciate the value of columns in crossing private land and especially when entering cities, where it could cut costs an order of magnitude. But since Musk intends to use the I-5 median on the long straight San Joaquin stretch, why will he use columns that entire distance?
And given that he will be using columns to save cost in urban areas, why not come right imto the city? Bringing it to the vicinity of Union Station would be a powerful selling point.
The columns are engineered for earthquakes (Score:2)
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I'm not sure what you're not understanding here. You have two seven-foot diameter pipes here, where are you picturing they should go if not "up"? I doubt anyone would approve of you eating up the entire median the whole way, if they'd even fit to begin with. If you're thinking about expanding the road, that takes land acquisition and all sorts of added hassle. Also, as straigh
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The i-5 median is wide enough for most of the distance through the San Joaquin to comfoertably accommodate two tubes of ths diameter side by side, cut-and-covered to just under the surface. In Tokyo (where I once lived) which is ten times as earthquake prone as Californis, buried concrete tubes are the most robust of all manmade structures when a Big One hits. Go ahead and rise the line to columns where it crosses the tectonic plate boundary of the San Andreas, where a really significant horizontal displace
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Thanks for the analysis, but why would it be lighter than a conventional train?
You compare it to the monorail, but at the least it's going to have to support the tube plus the train cars itself. The tube is static rather than dynamic load, which will make things a bit easier, but it still seems like the pillars will have to be a good deal stronger than the ones in the picture. Is it simply that new materials and not having to share tracks with existing trains allow for different, lighter construction? Or th
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The main reason is that hyperloop isn't designed to achieve throughput by bundling everyone together into (proportionally) rarely launched trains, but by frequently launching smaller trains fully under computer control - spacing on the order of a few minutes instead of a half hour or so. There's only 28 passengers per pod. That launch rate is easier than many other computer controlled transportation systems, mind you, because there's no intersections -
Nevada (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevada would likely be a better choice than Texas because of it's high altitude and large flat areas. Of course there are likely other states that would be even better.
My guess is he's trying to get Texas to let him sell Tesla's directly in the state. That's why he's dangling this carrot in front of them.
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What does altitude have to do with anything? When you're shooting for a relatively strong vacuum a drop of a few percent in the ambient pressure isn't particularly useful, especially after you add in the human-exposure safety margins.
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The hyperloop doesn't use a strong vacuum. It uses a weak vacuum, avoiding the Kantrowitz limit by using fans to move air from in front to behind it.
And the original proposal was for a route which would run from the NoCal to SoCal. There are only a handful of places in the country where such a system could possibly be economically feasible. That route runs mostly at sea level, as do most routes where this might make sense--Northeast, Texas, Florida.
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Actually, a great location would be fermi-lab in Batavia, IL. Plenty of space there considering they built it for the large collider, in fact, he could probably build it right above the collider ring and there should be very little no/resistance and no environmental impact. Not to mention the near access to some of the countries best minds right on campus.
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He didn't say that (Score:5, Insightful)
"where presumably there is plenty of flat land to go around"
Other states have plenty of room for a 5 mile test track. I'd bet a dollar that Rhode Island could find room for it. I wonder why California didn't pop to mind, especially since he lives there.
He said Texas because they will be glad to see it, and get him some building permits quickly. In other states, some more than others, it takes a long time to get approval for these things. Not just business-wise; impact studies and environmental studies and social studies... And a good chance that your project would become a political football in the meantime.
It wasn't because of flat land.
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Those studies were funded by people who hope it won't be economically viable, so their findings aren't surprising.
That's true. Creating an alternative to driving won't necessarily reduce driving. The real purpose of HSR is to be a vastly cheaper way of moving people around than highways and airports. For example, spending $68.4 billion on HSR will fulfill th
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All you have to do is assume 100% utilization of HSR, no HSR ongoing subsidies, HSR coming in on budget, no switching to larger airplanes and not allowing existing lanes to carry more traffic.
Talk about getting what study funders want.
HSR project should proceed by buying right of way. Not starting to build.
It should end at the furthest spur of existing local rail (cal train or capital corridor amtrak for SF for example) and not run to city centers.
Politics make that impossible. Billions must be spe
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It should end at the furthest spur of existing local rail (cal train or capital corridor amtrak for SF for example) and not run to city centers.
Why add an hour+ to HSR by stoping in Gilroy instead of downtown SF and make passengers transfer to already crowded commuter trains? Unless your goal is to kill HSR, that seems unreasonable -- people don't want to transfer among 3 modes of transit (which is inconvenient and adds unnecessary time).
I'd be a lot less likely to take HSR if I had to fight commute hours loads on Caltrain with my 2 suitcases.
Politics make that impossible. Billions must be spent running HSR (at low speeds) into the centers of cities to get votes.
HSR must be run in the center of cities to get passengers.
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Airports must be built in the center of cities to get passengers.
Do you see how stupid that is?
HSR going into the cities is a payoff, pure and simple. After the cities burn through 'their share' of the money the plan will go back to existing routes.
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Airports must be built in the center of cities to get passengers.
Do you see how stupid that is?
HSR going into the cities is a payoff, pure and simple. After the cities burn through 'their share' of the money the plan will go back to existing routes.
Airports are fundamentally different than trains. When a plane takes 90 minutes for a trip and a train takes 4 hours, getting the train to where the people want to go (or start from) is what's going to get them to take the train. If you stop the train at the far end of existing transit lines and the trip takes 6 hours and requires making 2 connections, few would take it, especially when it only takes about 6 hours to drive.
The only way people will take transit is if it's more convenient than the alternativ
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Is jumping from one train to another really that much of a problem? As you say the big $ train will be delivering CalTrain like performance in SF anyhow. You do it to get to south Oakland (better to get _out_ of S Oakland) on BART for fucks sake.
I think after SF exhausts 'it's share' (on endless environmental and NIMBY lawsuits) that's where it will end anyhow. Like I say, a payoff for support.
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Is jumping from one train to another really that much of a problem? As you say the big $ train will be delivering CalTrain like performance in SF anyhow. You do it to get to south Oakland (better to get _out_ of S Oakland) on BART for fucks sake.
Have you ever used public transit or trains? Changing trains *is* a big deal... for most of the same reasons people avoid connecting flights, I'll happily pay more money to avoid a flight connection.
First, it makes the trip longer (even if the connecting train is waiting and ready to go, the dwell time is limited by the slowest person to make the transfer, so figure at least 15 minutes for everyone to gather their luggage and move across the platform). But, and probably worse, it interupts whatever you're d
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The SF peninsula is a dead end (short of dedicating a couple of lanes of the golden gate; which only gets HSR on to more super expensive real estate). HSR should eventually proceed more or less up the I-5 corridor. Eventually making it to Seattle and Vancouver. SF is a sideshow, truer words were never typed ;-).
Everybody is going to change modes at the end of their journey anyhow. Putting the terminus in downtown SF on makes things more convenient for residents of downtown. Is that worth billions? SF has
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In principle I agree with you. But the original proposal required bulldozing substantial portions of downtowns on the peninsula to add the extra trackage. It proved politically untenable. The compromise was to stop short of San Francisco, but to _upgrade_ the existing CalTrain. This has been the impetus for CalTrain to fund electrification, and it's why CalTrain will be extended to run underground to the new TransBay Transit Center being built near 1st and Mission.
I believe the plan is to run HSR on the Caltrain tracks all the way to the new Transbay building, which does require electrifying and upgrading caltrain tracks (and tunnelling up to the Transbay Terminal).
I live in the Outer Richmind, and while I support HSR, what I really care about is not having to spent 45 minutes to an hour on the bus, *each* *way*, commuting to and from downtown. Theoretically I chose to live in the city so I didn't have to waste so much time commuting. (Until recently I lived close enough to downtown to walk to work.) The Geary Bus Rapid Transit project isn't schedule to begin service until 2019, and it's still going to be at least 30 minutes downtown. WTF!? Build a mother-fscking subway underneath Geary, already!
It takes the Muni Metro L line at least 15 minutes to travel underground from the Forest Hill station to downtown and that's not nearly as far as traveling from the outer Richmond, so even if they spent billions of dollars digging a light rail subway for the 38, you're still not going to see much better tr
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Every commercial airport in the USA pays its own way and spins off significant local payments. You are simply wrong about that.
For decades gas taxes more than paid for roads and also paid for amtrak etc. That has changed recently with better gas mileage cars and needs to be fixed. Don't believe the BS, I've seen morons claiming gas taxes are a road subsidy.
Gates are typically built to handle the largest airplane the runway can handle. In any case just assuming the same mix of airplanes then claiming to
Re:He didn't say that (Score:4, Insightful)
Does any airport pay property taxes on land used for airport operations? In fact, did any airport pay for the land it sits on? Has an airline ever built an airport?
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Airports are paid for using parking fees from the passengers. They are built with bonds, usually issued by a non-profit airport authority, not the city. $10/day parking is the largest source of revenue for airports. They do typically get a law preventing private parking operators from undercutting them and make public transit access a low priority.
Any study that only looks at landing fees is obvious BS serving an agenda. Same as looking at CHP cost vs tickets while excluding the most expensive tickets th
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The real purpose of HSR is to be a vastly cheaper way of moving people around than highways and airports.
The problem is, HSR tickets are likely to be more expensive than plane tickets or gas money... and that means few people are going to use it, which means you still have to pay for the highways and airports.
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I live in FL. Rick Scott turned down that money and you guys were 2nd in line.
Basically, he said it would end up being a curse. Was he right?
Good luck.
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Well, he's the elected governor here, and has the power to turn down big Federal money for high speed rail (and that's all it can be used for).
So we care. And some of us, that want to see reality for what it is, and not what the news tells us it is; are now curious if he turns out to be right in saying no thanks. It was a big deal here.
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I'm in the Tampa Bay area. They were considering Orlando - Clearwater, as a beach is the only thing Orlando doesn't have.
"skeptical of high-speed rail in Florida"
So was I. Why did we need a ultra modern and expensive bad-ass foreign train that got there in 45 minutes, when a regular train for a fifth of the money would get you there in an hour and a half? One has all kinds of strings attached to years of smothering debt; the other, anybody could build, and possibly make money, although they would have alrea
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Quick! Tell California to stop the groundbreaking on their $60B high speed rail boondoggle which is only $10B funded right now.
Don't get me wrong, I support the idea of high-speed rail, but this project is "off the rails" and multiple studies have shown it will neither be economically viable nor a practical solution for its intended purpose of getting people off the highways (mostly because of the complete lack of the all-important "last mile" solution in California).
I thought it was supposed to compete with airlines where the "last 20 mile" problem has already been solved -- the HSR is even better in that it can go closer to downtown areas.
I'd be more likely to take the train to LA rather than fly if it really makes the trip in less then 4 hours. It takes me 30 minutes to get to the airport (an hour early to make sure I can get through security), then 90 minutes to make the flight (add 30 minutes if I checked a bag), then an hour to get to my destination from the aipo
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Someone should tell the airlines that commercially available passenger flight will never work because of the complete lack of the all-important "last mile" solution.
That's been solved already, long ago.
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I wonder why California didn't pop to mind, especially since he lives there.
Looking at CA solar plant permitting processes, it generally takes about 2 years to get a permit now - unless you get turned down.
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get him some building permits quickly
and more importantly, look the other way if the whole thing explodes killing a dozen people.
all he has to do is promise to load up the location with a few thousand pounds of explosive fertilizer and texas will give him a huge tax rebate.
Finally (Score:3)
Finally a use for that giant abandoned circular tunnel that's been sitting out in Texas for the last few decades.
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What location are you speaking of?
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the "SeaFox Home For Retarded People".
he's referring to the SSC. it was kind of a big deal.
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the "SeaFox Home For Retarded People".
he's referring to the SSC. it was kind of a big deal.
I apologize, asshole.
Some of us aren't as obsessed with basement structures as you, and I don't make a point of remembering every failed government project.
Especially ones that are a almost a decade gone.
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dude, this is supposed to be a tech site. if you can't figure out what "SSC" refers to in regards to "a giant ring in texas" you need to have your head examined.
i dunno, maybe you're 13 years old. in which case congratulations on discovering the internet! please be careful.
Re: Finally (Score:2)
That's funny, googling "SSC Texas ring" brings up pages of links all about the superconducting supercollider. Nothing about any sports complex.
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Thanks AC.
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Except that it's over 10x too long for the proposed test track.
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Except that it's over 10x too long for the proposed test track.
That and I don't' believe the tunnels where completed all the way around... Anybody know?
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Build it anyway, we could get a supercollider yet!
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it's only almost a third of a circle, they stopped at 14.6 miles out of 51
Digital Age? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought in the digital age we were meant to be working on less reasons for travel. Tourism, sure fun and nice and an economic bonus when it is not let get out of hand because tourism is really kind of a bad idea. You know, sucks up huge amounts resources and generates large levels of pollution, denies access to locals at the tourist venues and is only seasonal creating an abandoned work force or another immigrant workforce, for 'er' way poorer tourists. Want to invest money in something new, consider the Arcology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org], a place where many can live, work and play, year round with minimal total impact and where people do not feel the need to escape from a regular intervals. The arcology is really cool because of course it is the needed stepping stone to a space colony. The importance of recycling, conservation of resources, energy balancing, habitability, nutritional sources, safety issues, leisure activities all can be tested in the arcology. Stop looking to tweaking the past and start looking to preparing for the future and virtual digital travel is far more likely the future, rather than trying to pretend you are the idle rich for only two weeks in every year.
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Want to invest money in something new, consider the Arcology ...
I'd definitely want to visit it, maybe spend a week, see how it works, perhaps take a tour. Why I bet you'd be able to fund it with tourism.
("your head asplode")
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bullshit, less than 14% of humans travel outside their country.
Re:Digital Age? (Score:4, Interesting)
Past provincial, I'd go hermit, if I could get a window apartment in that arcology. But then, everybody would want one.
So apartments are in 4-plex pods that rotate, giving each apartment 6 hours of frontage. Or maybe 5, to break it up and everybody gets a sunrise now and then.
That'd be cool.
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Windows are grossly inefficient, poor insulators and not enough light. What was needed to make it work was very large screen high definition displays in every main room, so you get a view of your choice. Realistically the external skin would be used for solar panels and air-conditioning heat exchangers and the lowest levels for waste treatment and methane recovery and combustion and energy generation. Add in aquaponics for fresh locally produced food and you are part way there. Then you add in the correct
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Windows are very efficient at letting me look outside. And my skin making vitamin D is a more valuable use of exterior walls than a few free electrons.
In the land of arcologies, electricity needed to be cheap in the first place.
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Want to invest money in something new, consider the Arcology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A [wikipedia.org]..., a place where many can live, work and play, year round with minimal total impact and where people do not feel the need to escape from a regular intervals.
The digital age should give us the opportunity to live anywhere on earth, even in very remote areas, and still be able to do productive work. Not pile ourselves like sardines. If that's the future I don't want to be part of it.
Looks like a prison to me. I would rather die than live in one of these abomination.
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It is about easy access to everything you need. Work, play, food, leisure activities and people are not sardines, even for me an introvert they are still fun. So it really just represents the ultimate in walk ability and as I said an essential in space colonisation. Don't want to be part of it, simply don't more into one, I really don't understand your problem. They will not be cheap and it's very unlikely they will ever fit into the welfare accommodation category or low income either accommodation or empl
cost? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was hoping Elon would be content to just publishing his idea. Lots of people have thought about low pressure transportation tubes, for over a century, and none have been built for a reason. It will be very expensive.
High speed rail is just 2 steel rails, on top of cement blocks, on top of a bunch of rocks. Now, they are all high quality, and precisely laid. But the point is that, in spite of using cheap building materials, instead of something like titanium, double track, high speed rail lines are at least ~$40 million a mile. Imagine how much a vacuum tube, that carries people, will cost per mile.
But, high speed rail ultimately wins on volume. A high speed rail line can run 30 trains per hour. Each train could carry 1,600, or more people. Can hyperloop reach those volumes? Will the hyperloop tube stay intact for decades? Will hyperloop be too expensive to maintain?
I personally think Elon Musk is overhyped. I argue that the SpaceX cofounder, Tom Mueller, was more important that Elon Musk. If Mueller had the money, he could have founded SpaceX.
Re:cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally think Elon Musk is overhyped. I argue that the SpaceX cofounder, Tom Mueller, was more important that Elon Musk. If Mueller had the money, he could have founded SpaceX.
Overhyped or not, at least the man is using his money to move humanity forward towards the future we as children believed we would have been a part of by adulthood. The United States government would rather waste it on fighting undeclared wars around the globe than invest in good science. The other 1% would rather "fight" malaria, buy up entertainment companies, or let it sit in offshore accounts or floating around in the stock market where in reality its not doing anything productive.
If more of the 1% were like Musk, society would be much better off.
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"Imagine how much a vacuum tube, that carries people, will cost per mile"
Huh. A lot of plexiglass, some plastic, steel and concrete. No titanium needed. Caulk, air pumps and valves. Big fans maybe. But decently expensive (to develop, not to mass produce) electronics; granted.
I imagined it. It's not that much. The third one is practically cheap.
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Vacuum systems are really really really really expensive.
Really? [harborfreight.com] And that does 75 microns. Which translates to slightly better than a 99.99% vacuum. The Hyperloop is expected to operate at about 1000 microns. The extra superlatives apply when you're trying to build a giant particle accelerator, but Elon Musk specifically chose the point on the vacuum pump curve where that reduced pressure is achievable without falling off a cliff in terms of cost. Expensive, yes. But not vastly more expensive than any other part of the system.
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Notice that the pump you reference has a 2.5 CFM air capacity. The tube will have leaks and the pumps will have to be powerful enough to move enough air.
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Congratulations, Citizen, I have good news! You don't have to put a pump every 5 meters all down California! Even the *pylons* are, as per the design, 100 meters apart. And the tube is only even *capable* of being opened once every several dozen kilometers. The positioning for the pumps is described as "several locations" (aka, not millions like you're picturing), and the total estimated
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As to Musk being overhyped, he sold a game he programmed at age 12, was founder or co-founder of zip2, PayPal, spacex, tesla, and is credited with the concept of SolarCity. The only other person I can think of with that kind of diversity is Richard Branson. Maybe Paul Allen, but everything he's touched since Microsoft has failed.
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Even more, the air in the tubes passing through the compressors is going to heat it. Now, you've got a lot of uninsulated surface area for the tube... on the other hand, air at such low pressures is itself a pretty good insulator. I wonder if you'd have a measurable impact on the air temperature? Or, if you wanted to, whether you could *deliberately* (and practically) raise the air temperature (insulated tube, etc)?
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Hmm, another thought: if instead of air you maintained a sparse methane atmosphere, you could get a 140% the speed you could in air. More challenging to maintain such an environment, of course, since leaks into the pipeline would be air (unless the pipeline was surrounded by a thin methane sheath). At least it wouldn't be flammable - at such low partial pressures, there's no amount of air that could leak in that would lead to a flammable mixture.
Ammonia has similar performance to methane, but it's corrosive
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"I was hoping Elon would be content to just publishing his idea."
Why? It is hardly your money he is spending on testing this idea.
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Yes. But the cost of the steel in the track in a high speed rail project is only a tiny fraction of the total costs. BTW, you can double check Musk's tube estimate (I did), they're quite realistic compared to other "large pressuretight steel tube" project costs. He's basically building a pipeline, but instead of pumping oil or water through it, he's shooting people through it.
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True. Although to be fair oil pipelines often have to be built in places where the ground is terrible - for example, permafrost, bogs, etc, vs. the median of an already-built highway.
Hyperloop does have deflection calculations worked into the proposal. The uniformity of the interior surface proposed to be accomplished by mounting a rotating buffing disk to a pipe-crawling robot (like those already in use for sewer and water pipe maintenance), having it grind and polish out the welds and any irregularities i
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To make the loading difference clear: here's the max loading for a 100 meter span (the spacing of the pillars) for different techs:
* Hyperloop capsule, loaded: 26 tonnes
* HSR train, loaded: Several hundred tonnes (caltrain locomotives alone weigh 190 tonnes [google.is])
* Oil pipeline: 332 tonnes (850kg/m * 100m * pi * (2.23m/2))
By spreading the loads out into many smaller, fast moving capsules, Hyperloop greatly reduces its track's required structural strength.
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Hmm, apparently Slashdot eats "to the second power" marks also. Hooray for Slashdot's excellent unicode support!
an almost SuperSonic 5 miles? (Score:2)
I love this man. (Score:2)
Really.
Here's 54 miles of hole in Texas... (Score:2)
I have some concerns about this project... (Score:2)
1) I would imagine this train would be quite loud.
2) How strong will the track have to be? Is there a chance it could bend?
3) So many primary roads are in a terrible state of disrepair, with cracks and potholes.
4) How will this program benefit those of us who lack a college education or proper hygiene?
5) Was Elon Musk sent here by the devil?
6) The ring came off my pudding can!
Florida Needs Musk (Score:2)
Re:Los Angeles to San Francisco in 28 minutes. (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, you should be comparing it to other fictional forms of transportation.
Re:Los Angeles to San Francisco in 28 minutes. (Score:4, Funny)
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He could build it in the Super Conducting Super Collider. That's already dug out and a giant circle, right?
I don't believe the tunnels where fully finished and as another poster pointed out, it's about 10X what he is looking for in size.
As a resident of Texas, I'd be more than wiling to let him have it though...
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They had only dug a little more than a quarter of the ring when it was cancelled.
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no, no it's not mostly built. but if you want to accelerate people hard for 15 miles around an arc that dead ends, for the sake of hilarity....
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There are two proposals in the initial Hyperloop document. One is for a passenger-only version. The other is for a passenger + vehicle version. The passenger-only version's estimate is $6B, while the passenger + vehicle version's estimate is $7,5B.
The estimated ticket price for a seat in the passenger-only version is $20 (amortizing the $6B cost over the number of passengers). No cost for transporting a vehicle is mentioned, but we can attempt to calculate it: if they have to amortize an extra $1,5B and the
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Better price than Amtrack's VA to FL car train, that thing costs more than driving and paying for the hotel half way.