Elon Musk Inspired an Industry of Hyperloop Startups. Now He's Building His Own (bloomberg.com) 153
An anonymous reader shares a report: Elon Musk introduced his vision for a futuristic mode of tube-based transportation called the hyperloop in 2013. In an exhaustive white paper, he laid out a body of research conducted with his team at Space Exploration Technologies demonstrating the system's viability and seemingly offered it as a gift to the entrepreneurial community. "I don't have any plan to execute because I must remain focused on SpaceX and Tesla," he said in a conference call at the time. He apparently changed his mind. Last month, the SpaceX and Tesla chief executive officer revealed on Twitter that he'd received "verbal government approval" to build a hyperloop capable of ferrying passengers between New York and Washington, D.C., in 29 minutes. The tweet came as a shock to executives at the various startups racing to develop their own hyperloops based on Musk's specifications. Several of them initially expressed hope that Musk would simply dig the tunnels and perhaps choose one of their startups to create the physical infrastructure, which involves a tube-encased train traveling at speeds faster than an airplane. Nope. A person close to Musk said his plan is to build the entire thing, including the hyperloop system. Musk also holds a trademark for "Hyperloop" through SpaceX, which could be used to prevent other companies from using the term, according to U.S. public records. The billionaire's unexpected entry into the hyperloop business could threaten the ambitions of three startups, which have raised about $200 million combined from venture backers. "There's probably a finite amount of capital willing to bet on this space -- and bet against him," said Jonathan Silver, the former loan programs director at the U.S. Department of Energy. Silver learned not to underestimate Musk after overseeing a 2010 loan of $465 million to Tesla, which the electric carmaker paid back, with interest, nine years ahead of schedule.
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You forgot the solar business and energy storage business (both now part of Tesla) and tunnel boring business (Boring Company) ;) And he's involved in OpenAI. And started Neuralink. I wonder when he's going to get around to his electric airplane plans, too.
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Good Luck keeping the trademark on Hyperloop (Score:2)
I doubt he'll hold onto the trademark for Hyperloop very long. It's already used generically by enough people who don't think of it as a company-specific term.
Trying to hold onto the Hyperloop trademark will cause headaches. Perhaps Musk will need some asprin.
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Yet, since those generally have been defended well enough, you can't just go claiming you sell kleenexes or tivos.
Re:Good Luck keeping the trademark on Hyperloop (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of the problem that will come up is that they never made any indication that its use was trademarked previously, and repeatedly stressed that they're describing an "open source transportation concept". They may have trouble on defense.
Really, I can't imagine how all of these other companies and their backers must feel. It's like they got punk'd by Elon.
That said... Hyperloop One, the furthest along, has just turned it into some uninteresting maglev-train-in-a-pipe concept. Hyperloop Alpha specifically was designed to avoid maglev because of how expensive it is; it's one of the fundamental design features that sets the concept apart. So I'm more interested in Elon's work here.
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Really, I can't imagine how all of these other companies and their backers must feel. It's like they got punk'd by Elon.
Who cares? Revolutionizing transportation is more important than a few VCs making a buck. If they can't handle competition, it is unlikely they would have been successful anyway.
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Running a maglev train in a pipe is actually a great idea, aside from the Hyperloop application. You can achieve high speeds without the threat of 'derailing' from a guideway. Pipes can be run underground in densely populated places where land is expensive and over long free spans above ground.
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HYPERMUSK
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Nah, he'll probably keep it.
Kleenex, Band-Aid, TiVo, DustBuster, Jell-O, Dumpster, Thermos, Realtor, Port-a-potties, escalator, Tylenol, Tums, Photoshop, etc.
All generic trademarks. However, trademark erosion is a real threat.
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Styrofoam.
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Ahahahaha (Score:1)
So he basically tricked a bunch of hacks with money into pursuing his idea instead of their own, then joined it late in the game able to rip off their R&D while holding all the marketing/branding power?
I'm no Musk fan, but as far as Silicon Valley marketing/sales people go he's no all-bad this time around. (his borderline sweatshop of engineers with low pay in constant burn-out mode withstanding)
Re: Ahahahaha (Score:2)
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Not so much that. I think it's more that he's seen Hyperloop One use the name Hyperloop for a different system. Hyperloop One are doing mag-lev in a near vacuum. Musk's Hyperloop idea was air-bearings (like an air hockey table) in a low pressure tube, with the pod collecting rarefied air in a fan at the front and pushing it through holes in the bottom of the capsule.
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This isn't about Boring Company, which has up to this point just ostensibly been about tunnels. This is about Musk building a Hyperloop himself.
Musk's companies are juggernauts, and he raises capital with ease. This is going to be a tough wave for the other startups to weather.
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Musk's companies are juggernauts, and he raises capital with ease. This is going to be a tough wave for the other startups to weather.
Musk has competition, sees what the other startups do, does whatever looks best. But he won't be building every meter of the system, so there's still plenty of opportunity around the world, and the startups get to see what he does and improve on it.
Not invented by Elon Musk (Score:1)
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Except if you knew anything about Hyperloop and had read the Alpha document you'd realize that not only is it not "a vacuum transport tube", the capsules wouldn't even work in a hard vacuum. It's a linear air bearing, avoiding the need for maglev (which is very expensive), operating akin to an extreme ground-effect aircraft in a very rarified atmosphere - and getting around the air buildup problem via a compressor. No, this concept is not old. No, it does not resemble ET3. It's specifically designed to avo
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if you knew anything about Hyperloop and had read the Alpha document you'd realize that not only is it not "a vacuum transport tube"
I think it's worth quoting the alpha document to get an idea what Musk has in mind.
The approach that I believe would overcome the Kantrowitz limit is to mount an electric compressor fan on the nose of the pod that actively transfers high pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel. This is like having a pump in the head of the syringe actively relieving pressure.
It would also simultaneously solve another problem, which is how to create a low friction suspension system when traveling at over 700 mph. Wheels don’t work very well at that sort of speed, but a cushion of air does. Air bearings, which use the same basic principle as an air hockey table, have been demonstrated to work at speeds of Mach 1.1 with very low friction. In this case, however, it is the pod that is producing the air cushion, rather than the tube, as it is important to make the tube as low cost and simple as possible.
http://www.spacex.com/sites/sp... [spacex.com]
Whether it works and is economically viable... Well, I am not the one with a few successful multi-billion dollar companies that turned the impossible and uneconomical into reality.
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Tell that to the stock market [slashdot.org].
You're a funny little troll. Aren't you?
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And now we add in the second thing people routinely confuse with Hyperloop (pneumatic tubes). Let's be clear:
Pneumatic train != Maglev-in-a-tube != Hyperloop Alpha
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I suppose in every crowd there has to be someone as illiterate and slow as you. I thought someone of average intelligence was capable of figuring out that the idea of "air pressured propulsion in a tube" inspired "magnetic levitation propulsion in a vacuum tube". The latter (not the former) is found in many science fiction stories.
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Sure,
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Technically, Hyperloop isn't even limited to those speeds. The main limitation is that you can't get too close to the speed of sound, as it causes a lot of problems with the concept. But the speed of sound is not a universal constant. It can be raised either by increasing temperature (which may well happen on its own; rarified atmospheres are terrible heat conductors) or by using light gases in the tube rather than leaked air. The latter means better pumping requirements, but the amount of gases involved (H
He needs to deliver an actual functional prototype (Score:1)
I'm tired of all the hype about "Hyperloop".
The science behind it is iffy, at best right now.
They haven't even had a successful run of the full test track yet. Even with their proprietary pod.
But he's prancing around as if it were a fully realized product, getting handshake deals for building hyperloops all over the place.
It's looking a lot like ship-and-patch to me.
Which means, with something like this, people are going to have to DIE before someone takes a serious look at it and sees what a boondoggle is
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The science behind it is iffy, at best right now.
In which way?
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Thunderfoot did a good job of debunking the hyperloop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
Passenger rail died out due to being more expensive and a miserable experience. When you could fly for $120 and be there in a day but a train took almost 3 days and cost $250; people took flights and ignored the passenger rail. (1968 prices for trip from Mississippi to Baltimore.) Remember, this was a day when a meat and two veg lunch ran 25 cents. The cost difference was a budget breaker.
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There is no way to "debunk" the hyperloop concept.
If you don't grasp it, you are very bad in physics.
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The science behind it is iffy, at best right now.
Actually, the science is pretty well understood. Even the engineering is pretty well understood. The biggest issues with hyperloop are the scale and the cargo.
There've been pretty impressive systems of "pneumatic tubes" that have been built for sending things around [si.edu]. Of course, those tubes were fairly small and they carried inanimate objects. Now we want to make them travel much further and be much bigger and carry people at high speeds, so there's bunches of issues there that need to be figured out.
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Sorry, but trying to build a miles-long vacuum chamber out of thin-wall steel tubing, and pushing people through it at high rates of speed?
The science behind his CHOSEN SOLUTION is iffy.
Sure it can be brute-forced to work. But there are several major points of failure that are simply ignored. And actual safety systems haven't even been discussed.
The fact is, this thing is supposed to be carrying people. People generally object to being worse-than-killed on a business commute.
Good luck, buddy! (Score:2)
There's no way he could get enough space to run a giant tube over the land. He'd have to do something crazy like dig giant tunnels everywhere. Good luck finding someone who can do that without breaking your budget. ;)
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Good luck finding someone who can do that without breaking your budget. ;)
He'll find someone who can do the boring; companies are everywhere.
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Someone like the Boring Company [wikipedia.org], perhaps?
i like the way they say that (Score:1)
Re:Hyperloop misses the forest for the trees (Score:5, Informative)
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Here's hoping it stays that way.
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Re:Hyperloop misses the forest for the trees (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did people stop using trains in the mid 20th century? Because cars came about! Why do people like cars better than trains? Because cars don't have a set schedule that must be followed to the minute.
As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it. Nobody wanted to be a slave to the train schedule 100 years ago, and nobody will want to go back to being a slave to the train schedule again, either. Thinking otherwise is a fools errand.
That ignores the whole part about building it. It took 90 years and 4 billion dollars to get an additional 2 miles of subway track added to new york city. Philadelphia has been trying to make their subway 8 city blocks longer for over 50 years now and has gotten absolutely nowhere. But we're supposed to believe that a 400 mile long tube is just gonna magically show up across the I 95 corridor overnight? With that kind of thinking I might as well start going to church again.
Nobody?
There are millions of people in Chicago and New York alone that are a "slave to a train/bus" every single day and have been for decades.. Many of them don't even own cars... So, "nobody" is a false assertion by far.
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>Driving sucks. I'd much rather fly, but it's too expensive
I hear that a lot. Personally, I don't get it. Could you elaborate on why you feel this way?
For me, driving doesn't involve TSA (big plus), lets me stop at a restaurant of my choice (big plus), I can bring nearly unlimited cargo (big plus), I can bring drinks (big plus), it is more comfortable (big plus), and I can set the cabin temperature as I like (big plus). Oh, I also get to kick off any passengers I can't stand. All my drives are direct
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Re: Hyperloop misses the forest for the trees (Score:2)
Most people outside of the US take trains regularly.
The fact that trains are shit is a specific problem to the US.
Re:Hyperloop misses the forest for the trees (Score:5, Interesting)
Yea... I live in NYC and despite the MTAs shortcomings I find that the subway gives me *more* freedom. It doesn't run on a fixed schedule, you just go and wait and eventually a train shows up to take you where you need to go. It's cheap, $2.50 to go anywhere and I don't get harassed by the police looking to bolster their budgets. I can go out to the bars, get shit-faced, and get home without having to worry about where I parked my car or paying for a taxi. I don't have to pay car insurance or maintain a pile of metal and plastic that's slowly decaying.
I dream of NYC banning personal vehicles all together and leave half the local streets to taxis and delivery vehicles and the other half for bikes/parks/walkways.
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I lived in Singapore for a few years and had to use public transportation (busses and subway). Personally, I thought it was miserable. The main issue was infectious disease. Everyone was always sick. I got really tired of being coughed and sneezed on by sick people. But there was also the general issue of "personal space" - having some guy lean over and scrape the dandruff out of his hair all over my shoes when it was too crowded to move away. Or having the guy in the seat next to me pick his nose or his ac
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Actually, the MTA subway does run on a fixed schedule. Nobody cares, though, because a 1 minute wait during peak hours and 5 minutes or so during off-peak means we just show up and wait (well, in Manhattan, anyway.)
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Yes, airline scheduling is so much better, where the wait in line is twice as long as the trip itself. It seems that people are willing to suffer through a great deal. It's their patriotic duty.
Re:Hyperloop misses the forest for the trees (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it
Hyperloop uses many small independent pods rather than a single long train. So on a busy route such as NYC to DC, a pod would launch every minute or so. Rather than a fixed schedule, it would make more sense to just launch each pod as it filled up.
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yeah, as long as you don't care about the destination
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Airplanes to all destinations all queue to use a (usually) single fixed resource of the runway. They have to book slots.
With hyperloop there is no such bottleneck. Each tube is separate. They can literally go as soon as pod is full, or after the first passenger on the pod has waited a certain time. No slots.
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big airports can have more than one runway, just like hyperloops can have multiple boarding tubes
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Hence why I said "(usually)".
Thing is they only get multiple runways when the slots on the existing runway has already been full for years. So the sharing of a bottleneck resource is still the same.
It will never be the same as hyperloop which idoesn't have to share anything between tubes.
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In a complex hyperloop system with multiple destinations (I know, we are being theoretical here), most likely the boarding tubes would be shared for different destinations, just like airports gates or runways can be used by different planes.
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Doubt it. The more complicated you make it, the harder it is to maintain the low pressure.
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You could board in a high pressure area and then some airlock before entering the low pressure tube. The passengers have to get in and out one way or another. Especially in a city mid point, it would be stupid to block the main tube while people get in and out.
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Trains were used, because they offered something that couldn't be rivalled until cars came along. Hyperloop is not a straight replacement for the outdated train model - it offers a massive speed increase over the current (i.e. car) model.
Re:Hyperloop misses the forest for the trees (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think you understand anything about Hyperloop (like 98% of the people who complain about the concept).
* Hyperloop pods leave every few minutes. There is no "schedule" like with trains.
* Hyperloop pods in the "large" variant carry cars. And that seems to be the variant that Musk is pursuing.
* As for cost (and this gets very tedious having to go into this on every thread): the reason for the costs in Hyperloop Alpha being low vs. HSR are.. first, the fundamentals:
1) Hyperloop costs are budgeted at rates similar to (but more expensive than) pipelines, on a "length times cross section" basis. Because it is a pipeline, not a railroad. It has a number of aspects that make it more expensive than a pipeline (greater straightness requirements, interior polishing, higher elevation, human factors, partial-vacuum pumping) and cheaper (low pressure is easier to resist than high, vastly lower pumping energy requirements, no risk of environmental contamination making approval expensive, vastly lower mass loadings, little to no thermal management needs, etc).
2) The cost to elevate something (like a rail viaduct) is almost linearly proportional to peak loading. Hyperloop pods are an order of magnitude lighter than HSR trains. The peak loadings are also much more transient, which is much easier to resist.
3) Because the elevation cost is reduced, it lets them build the whole thing elevated over public right-of-ways (assuming the government has buy-in - which for getting a high speed transport system at no cost to them, is not an unrealistic expectation), greatly reducing acquisition costs. This is limited by bending radii.
4) While permitting is still required, building over a public right-of-way - something already permitted for much noisier and more polluting operation - is much cheaper than permitting for greenfield development.
Now for the cheats in the Alpha document:
5) Hyperloop serves fewer passenger trips than CA-HSR - it's in-between HSR numbers and air passenger numbers.
6) It stops in fewer locations - it's just a direct LA-SF route.
7) It doesn't go into town. It's far more expensive to build in-town than out of town. The document excuses this on the premise that airports are located out of town - but airports are located there because they often must be, not because people want them there.
8) To get government permission to use right-of-ways, they should be expected to have impositions for more stops (just like HSR had to) and/or in-town terminals (as HSR has to pay for).
A note about the cost: there are small tunneling sections in Hyperloop Alpha; however, none of them are in-town (which is very expensive). They're budgeted at standard tunneling rates per unit length times cross section (the tube is very low cross section compared to road and water tunnels). However, this ignores what Musk is trying to achieve with Boring Company (major reductions in tunneling cost); if Boring Company succeeds, then this portion of Hyperloop Alpha is overbudgeted.
That is all.
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I don't think you understand anything about Hyperloop ... Hyperloop pods leave every few minutes. There is no "schedule" like with trains.
Well that will depend on the traffic level. Trains at my nearest station run every 2 hours, but there is no technical reason why they could not run every 2 minutes - the London Underground railway does. They don't only because there are not enough passengers to justify it economically.
1) Hyperloop costs are budgeted at rates similar to .. pipelines, on a "length times cross section" basis. It has a number of aspects that make it more expensive than a pipeline ([such as] greater straightness requirements ... ).
(My bold) You can say that again. The Hyperloop will have to be very straight indeed to avoid unacceptable lateral and vertical accelerations on the passengers. Oil pipelines can hug the contours and abruptly go round obst
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Except that they don't. So their peak loadings are higher. So viaducts must be able to support the higher peak loads.
The amount of towers, tunnels, etc is all laid out in Hyperloop Alpha.
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It doesn't make sense to you because you don't understand physics and/or math. Positive internal pressure makes shapes want to become more round - like the toy balloon you are confused about. So high pressure hoses, etc, work. Positive external pressure makes round things flatten: the physics works against you, amplifying any departure from roundness. So vacuum hoses need structural reinfor
Re: Hyperloop misses the forest for the trees (Score:2)
... Umm... No, no... They understand math, physics, engineering, and this concept - very well. Read the history of their posts. You could probably just bail on the thread, and nobody will notice. You could also just say sorry and ask them to help you learn.
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Wish I had mod points - you are explaining reality well.
Passenger rail (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did people stop using trains in the mid 20th century?
They didn't in much of the world. Passenger rail is alive and well.
Why do people like cars better than trains? Because cars don't have a set schedule that must be followed to the minute.
Strawman. People don't necessarily like cars better. In many parts of the US they simply don't have a choice. I've lived in cities where passenger rail was an option and it was hugely useful and I generally preferred it to driving in many cases. (traffic jams suck) Whether cars or trains are advantageous is circumstance dependent. It also depends on what infrastructure has been invested in. Trains are economically efficient for a certain set of conditions. They are widely used in Europe and Asia. Honestly I would happily ride a train to work if it were feasible where I live.
As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it.
People all around the world ride trains and airplanes and even boats on fixed schedules. Including in the US. The fact that the schedule is fixed is not necessarily a disadvantage, especially when it is as reliable as the trains in Japan. The primary advantage of cars is that they can go point to point rather than having their start and end points fixed. The lack of a schedule with cars is usually a much more minor advantage in the presence of a well functioning passenger rail system. Go to a city like NYC or Chicago and odds are you'll park the car and ride the light rail system + taxis to get around.
It took 90 years and 4 billion dollars to get an additional 2 miles of subway track added to new york city.
Which is irrelevant regarding whether hyperloop systems would be cost efficient. A subway in one of the most densely populated cities in the world isn't really a good comparison. If you want to make a proper comparison consider the efforts to put in high speed rail in the US. A lot of land will need to be purchased and right of ways obtained. The reason passenger rail struggles in the US is precisely because 1) we didn't invest in obtaining the right of ways years ago when it would have been cheaper and 2) population density in large parts of the country. But in places where the infrastructure exists and the population density is sufficient, like in the Northeast Corridor or in much of Europe and Japan, trains are popular and heavily used for transport.
I have my doubts that a hyperloop system will make economic sense. I suspect it will fail for much the same reason monorails never really caught on. But there may be specific cases where it makes a lot of sense so I'm withholding judgement until there is more data to work with. Worst case is that it's kind of a nifty technology that might have interesting applications down the road.
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1) we didn't invest in obtaining the right of ways years ago when it would have been cheaper
Actually, we had plenty of rights-of-way back in the day, but we gave them up in the post-war era as cars and interstate highways became ubiquitous. My parents grew up in Sterling, Nebraska in the 30s and 40s (population 1500 back then, more like 700 now), and they had regular, daily passenger rail service. Truman's famous whistle-stop campaign in 1948 would not have been possible otherwise.
In my home town, Cedar Falls, Iowa, there is an extra-wide street (Seerley Blvd.) which seems out of place in its resi
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People in most countries haven't stopped using trains; the USA is the exception.
A fixed schedule is not a problem as long as trains run frequently enough. The route I use most has a train leaving every 15 minutes, so no matter when I arrive at the station, it's never a long wait. Having trains at 15-minute intervals will only be profitable in densely populated areas, so this is not a solution that can be applied everywhere.
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I suspect that, should a hyperloop actually ever be created, the scheduling would likely be done electronically in a somewhat uber-like fashion. It would be easy to set up an algorithm where the users indicate when they want to leave, and they get scheduled at a time that's convenient for the most users for each pod. Perhaps charging more if nobody else wants to go, and less if you're packing the pod to capacity.
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As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it.
That depends on the schedule. If there's enough trips, then it will still be useful. If not, then it won't.
we're supposed to believe that a 400 mile long tube is just gonna magically show up across the I 95 corridor overnight?
Yes, overnight. That's exactly what was claimed. You sure did find the fatal flaw in the argument there, Holmes.
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Man, where to even begin?
1) People still take trains (and other fixed-schedule transports, like buses) all the time. Your post acts like public transit isn't a thing (and then proceeds to mention subways...)
2) Trains for long distance travel between cities (and countries!) are still very popular in many places in the world, like Europe. Let me guess, you're American and are only familiar with cities that are designed to be car-centric.
3) Expanding an underground subway line inside a dense city is not at a
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Automated cars will improve the usability of mass transit, rather than killing it off. You give your driving app a destination and let the server algorithm figure out whether you are in for a local point to point drive in one car, or whether the car will deliver you to a train at a place where one going your way is about to pass through. You will then be directed by the app to get off at a designated station and jump into another car to finish the trip. All handled seamlessly and billed by the month.
Re: Hyperloop misses the forest for the trees (Score:2)
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Re:the ego on this clown (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy wants to be Steve Jobs so bad it's fucking comical. Steve Jobs was unduly idolized and poor musk wants the same thing so badly. You've nor your company have innovated anything. The US Tax Pay funded both Tesla and SolarShitty. Now you think a train is a technological marvel...
Well, in all fairness, he's already done more to help mankind so far than Jobs did. Jobs made some great commercial electronics but nothing revolutionary. The iPhone was a well put together piece of equipment and his best contribution, but it's not like there weren't already similar products before, and co-currently being worked on by other teams. His was just better than anything else in the beginning... the smart phone revolution was dawning anyway- he just made it better and maybe sped it up a year or two.
Musk on the other hand has single handedly pulled the world up and made electric cars a reality. It's not the fringe technology we might develop 20 years from now, in perpetuity any more.
His impact is so big, countries are beginning to mandate electric cars in the future His impact with electric cars has also spurred a battery revolution for solar panels- solar panels were coming anyway, so were home batteries- but he's made big impacts there.
He has leapstarted self driving vehicles. Whilst Google has been floundering for a decade- Tesla has gone ahead and done it and made it a reality. Maybe not whole-hog, maybe not even close, but his baby steps towards self-driving has made the technology a reality and other automanufacturers are taking note.
He's also been leading the only really successful team for privatized space. Sure Virgin Galactic, and a few others are looking promising, but he's pretty much spurred a whole second space-age.
If Hyperloop works and doesn't turn into vapour, it promises to be a massive change on how we think about transport. I'm less optimistic for hyperloop than his other ventures, but it could potentially be a big shaker.
So yeah, Jobs had some nice consumer electronics, but Musk has already done more that is useful to mankind. He's not just turning over a profit, he's doing useful stuff that betters man. He long since overshot Jobs.
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Musk on the other hand has single handedly pulled the world up and made electric cars a reality. It's not the fringe technology we might develop 20 years from now, in perpetuity any more... His impact is so big, countries are beginning to mandate electric cars in the future.
What a load of BS, unless you are fishing for "Funny" mods. You do know that Tesla existed before Musk's involvement and he just bought into it? The UK, where I am, has begun to mandate electic cars in the future but that is nothing to do with Musk, and people here do not especially think of Musk when they think of electric cars. That seems to be an Americanism
If Musk wanted to be the next Steve Jobs then at least he has succeded in that, which I do not mean as a compliment. Like Jobs, he is primarily a suc
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Like Jobs, he is primarily a successful salesman, using the device of creating a cult following.
Why the hate? It's an undeniable fact that Musk's companies are revolutionizing industries where many, many others have tried and failed. Self-landing rockets weren't even on anybody's radar until Musk proved it could be done with SpaceX. That's a bigger step towards reusability than any space corporation or national program has been able to pull off in all of history, and that isn't for a lack of trying.
There are legitimate criticisms of Musk to make. He's got a reputation for burning through employees at
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Musk on the other hand has single handedly
That's a big "fuck you" to all the engineers, scientists, investors who have been working on the project, even before Musk ever came along. Or do you think that each Tesla is personally designed and hand-made by Musk himself?
He's also been leading the only really successful team for privatized space.
SpaceX is no more private than ULA . SpaceX has some interesting engineering concepts to improve costs, but the business model isn't any different than any other contractor.
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I'm a fan of Musk, but the same reasons you shun Jobs also apply to Musk. Without either person what they had accomplished would have eventually been accomplished by others, which can be said about any human endeavor other than art. What makes both of them visionaries is how they both pushed boundaries ahead of their times, to glimpse a piece of the future and bring it to the present via exemplar leadership abilities. I will agree though that what Musk has accomplished to date greatly exceeds what Jobs has
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Right, which is why VDUs and the lines that feed them are constantly catastrophically imploding, right?
Sorry, but engineering for vacuum is no harder than engineering for pressure, and a lot safer in the event of a failure. Let me tell you, given the choice between a problem in a VDU and a hydrocracker, you'd much rather be working on the VDU. Of course you can make an im
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Rei, I think the salient difference is that nobody works inside a VDU.
There has been relatively little focus on the details of car/capsule design. The design of a capsule able to withstand multiple trips per day in near-space conditions, providing life support while maintaining a near-zero failure rate, would be in my estimation more impressive than evacuating a long pipeline to 0.001 bar. I wish them luck, because the design of the doors alone would be of great benefit for space technology.
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The capsules should be relatively easy to design. The pressures we'd be containing are very minimal compared to stuff that is used constantly already in everyday life. At the very highest pressures you're talking about sea level atmospheric numbers plus a little if the weather is nice, so maybe 18psi. Compare that to commercially available pressure vessels that hold contents at over 100psi. The vacuum isn't what makes space difficult, it is the exposure to radiation and extremes of temperature. In a hyperlo
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