Virgin Hyperloop Hits an Important Milestone: the First Human Passenger Test (theverge.com) 93
Virgin Hyperloop announced that for the first time it has conducted a test of its ultra-fast transportation system with human passengers. From a report: The test took place on Sunday afternoon at the company's DevLoop test track in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada. The first two passengers were Virgin Hyperloop's chief technology officer and co-founder, Josh Giegel, and head of passenger experience, Sara Luchian. After strapping into their seats in the company's gleaming white and red hyperloop pod, dubbed Pegasus, they were transferred into an airlock as the air inside the enclosed vacuum tube was removed. The pod then accelerated to a brisk 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) down the length of the track, before slowing down to a stop. It's an important achievement for Virgin Hyperloop, which was founded in 2014 on the premise of making Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's vision of a futuristic transportation system of magnetically levitating pods traveling through nearly airless tubes at speeds of up to 760 mph (1,223 km/h) a reality.
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500 m Track Length (Score:3)
0 to 100 to 0 (mph) in 500 meters.
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For normal human transport, I would expect acceleration should be less than 1G of force on the person.
"Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing."
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That's a quite important point, not all humans can cope with high levels of acceleration. If this was in public operation there might be requirements for things like disabled access etc.
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Normal useful trains accelerate at somewhat less than one mile per hour per second. That's about 0.045G. Subjecting regular people to 10x that is nuts.
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You're welcome to take the train, bus or horse buggy, while the 99% of us who doesn't mind, or even prefer the sensation can go on and ride on our fantasy hyperloops
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0 to 100 to 0 (mph) in 500 meters.
Not that big a deal. My Charger Hellcat has a 200kph (124mph) braking distance of 132m. And will hit 169kph (105 mph) in 200m. So, in under 324m, a car available to the public can do this, with air-resistance. It's a heck of a rush, but given the Hyperloop's got at least an extra 176m to play with (literally half the distance the car needs to do the task), it's... kind of mellow.
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And how many times per hour have you been able to do that before your body collapses?
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And how many times per hour have you been able to do that before your body collapses?
I don't understand the implication of the question. The OP expressed what appeared - to me - to be some amount of awe at the rate of acceleration and deceleration. I just put it into real-world terms. It's well under 1G. It's equivalent to a moderately powered sportscar.
Now if you're just asking what you're asking... very, very few. After two or three repetitions within a couple minutes, dizziness is a serious threat. But for Hyperloop... a couple times a day for commute purposes? Non-issue.
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Awe? Where do you get that? You do not speak for the OP. I just happened to read the summary and cited article, then provided information I had wondered about, as no-one had posted yet. I considered it relevant.
Further the acceleration is easily calculated and is very reasonable for what is envisioned.
Third, I assume it's likely that a) the pod was not subjected to max acceleration; b) the trial was not run the full length of the test track (500 m, not specified if strait or round, assume straight); and c)
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I know, let's build a vacuum tube hundreds of miles long in an earthquake prone area.
What could go wrong? :-)
Re: 500 m Track Length (Score:2)
Your vacuum seal breaks and you learn effective measures to seal and detect such leaks...
Hyperloop is great for cargo, not for people (Score:1)
I want windows to see the landscape zooming by
Re: Hyperloop is great for cargo, not for people (Score:2)
If the trip time can be cut sufficiently then who cares? Most people will be watching their phones anyway. I like to look out the window too, but I will only really miss it on long trips.
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It's not the proper way to travel, and besides, all the "security" crap will destroy any time advantage. Use it for cargo and as a pipeline for whatever fluids need to be transported.
Re: Hyperloop is great for cargo, not for people (Score:5, Funny)
It's not the proper way to travel,
Roughly 1.3 billion Londoners per year disagree with you (and there's only 15 million of us).
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:-) Yeah, they hardly like windows on their buildings.
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You will probably have windows, only they won't be windows. They'll be Displays of terrain or star fields or something.
We humans will accept substitutions for actual windows.
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They'll be Displays of terrain or star fields or something.
The "displays" will be advertisements and advisories against pissing in the aisles.
Yeah, I know most people don't care or even prefer no windows. I stand alone...
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I think you're about a hundred and fifty years out of date. Would people prefer windows? Sure. Do subways exist? You betcha. So "proper" or millions of people ride underground every day.
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Absolutely, but you can take long segments of trips underground in NYC, London, Paris etc for which the windows show you nothing but a wall a few feet away flashing by. No reason you couldn't do that here also, and maybe it makes sense for the stations. The chunnel crossing is a half hour or so, and not much to see there, so for the 40 minutes of SF -> LA I don't see it as a crucial thing.
Then don't use it because (Score:2)
the primary purpose of transportation underground is not entertainment.
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Yes, god forbid we should be allowed to enjoy ourselves in transit. I suppose asking for a seat will be too much. Such a drab world only serves the rat race to the bottom.
100mph (Score:3)
Not sure how exciting 160 km/h is when the Shanghai Maglev can go 430 km/h and has been in operation for 16 years. Two people - working for the company - sitting in it in 2020, for the first time, means what for proliferation?
Re:100mph (Score:5, Funny)
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With live webcams at exits, to laugh at tourists.
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So tubes made of sapphire then?
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I think you need to realize that this test track length is very short. It's only 500m long. The whole trip took a few seconds. There isn't enough track length to accelerate anywhere near 430 kph.
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I'm thoroughly divided on whether, with this reply, you are supporting my point or attempting to contradict it :-)
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It means nothing, the project is doomed because they didn't build a fully working system complete with hundreds of miles of track, stations and the general public before testing it for the first time.
Virgin Hyperloop vs Chad Maglev (Score:2)
It's doomed because it's not feasible from engineering and economic point of view.
In Virgin Hyperloop vs Chad Maglev fight, the maglev wins because it works the way it's supposed to, right now.
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One of those... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hyperloop is one of those "really cool as long as everything works absolutely perfectly" systems.
There are a lot of "rapid failure with no recovery" options in Hyperloop.
Capsule fails and passengers exposed to hard vacuum while in transit? No way to fix that.
Tube fails completely and air rushes into tube at several hundred miles per hour, killing every passenger in every car through impact (or slamming into the cars behind when the cars get pushed by the air)? No way to fix that.
Tube collapses partially and cars slam into the obstruction at a few hundred MPH? No way to fix that.
Power fails completely and cars all slide to a stop, trapped in vacuum for several hours? No way to fix that.
Basically, Hyperloop is "making a ground-based alternative to aircraft, without the schedule flexibility of aircraft."
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Re:One of those... (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of stuff happens on the Chunnel all the time
Not a fair comparison because the hyperloop is supposed to be very different from the Chunnel. Chunnel is not under vacuum, the hyperloop is supposed to be under vacuum. A door seal failure on a chunnel train car will not cause a vacuum in the passenger compartment. If the hyperloop cars are stopped for a significant amount of time, say 6 hours, how long will the air in the car last as it is a sealed environment? How will passengers be evacuated between stations? If they break the vacuum then every inch of the tunnel will need to be inspected and the vacuum restored before service resumes. How will that effect service throughout the line?
Chunnel train travels at 160 km/h, the hyperloop is supposed to travel at 1,223 km/h. That is 7.5 times faster than the chunnel train. If car fails and stops, the next car is coming at 1/3 a kilometer per second. How far apart are the cars? How fast will they be stopping? What if the car has a failure at 1,000 Km/h and hits the side the tunnel? How much damage do you think will be caused? How survivable is that?
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Why do you complain about stuff that is physical impossible?
If the hyperloop cars are stopped for a significant amount of time, say 6 hours, ...
What circumstances could even cause such a thing? Sorry
What if the car has a failure at 1,000 Km/h and hits the side the tunnel?
How would that be possible?
If car fails and stops, the next car is coming at 1/3 a kilometer per second. How far apart are the cars?
The next car will stop, too, just like rail road trains. The tunnel will be segmented and make sure only on
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If a car fails and rescuers have to go to it in the tunnel and remove the people, it could take hours depending on where they are. The tunnel will presumably have to be unsealed, how long does that take and what are the effects on other cars in the same tunnel that are traveling? Do they wait for them to all travel to the nearest station or do they all stop too? Maybe they can operate under normal air pressure but at a much slower rate? How about tunnel access points, it could take time to get rescuers a
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You have ever been in Switzerland, Austria, Italy, France and drove your car through a 50km long tunnel?
Guessed so ...
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Why do you complain about stuff that is physical impossible?
If the hyperloop cars are stopped for a significant amount of time, say 6 hours, What circumstances could even cause such a thing? Sorry ...
The same thing that caused it to happen to the chunnel train [bbc.co.uk]
.
What if the car has a failure at 1,000 Km/h and hits the side the tunnel? How would that be possible?
The same way other trains fail. Do you think the hyperloop train will be magic and can't possibly fail?
If car fails and stops, the next car is coming at 1/3 a kilometer per second. How far apart are the cars? The next car will stop, too, just like rail road trains. The tunnel will be segmented and make sure only one train per segment. Sorry, that are all no brainers.
How big will be the segments? How far apart will be the trains? Will the segments be isolatable? When a segment has to be shut down, all other segments have to be shut down, yes? So, if it takes hours to fix whatever has shutdown that one segment, won't the people in the other segments be stuck for hours? Or, will the fill the tunnel to get the people out and then spend hours pumping it out again after th
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The same thing that caused it to happen to the chunnel train [bbc.co.uk]
Seriously? The trains in the channel run on ordinary rails and wheel. (*facepalm*).
The hyperloop does not.
Do you think the hyperloop train will be magic^H^H^H^H^H and can't possibly fail?
No it can't fail by crashing into a wall. Has nothing to do with magic, idiot.
The rest you can decide. In Germany segments are 8 times the braking time, or 3 minutes, what ever is bigger.
You have can complete idiotic idea about vacuum. Such a tube is no
Re:One of those... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can apply that to an awful lot of things.
Submarine - hull suddenly ruptures filling with water.
Airplane - hull suddenly ruptures with loss of pressure and oxygen.
Pedestrian - a car suddenly swerves off the road and hits you.
House - the walls and ceiling suddenly collapse on you.
The question is "does that happen a lot?" and for the hyperloop we don't have the answer yet but if we never tried we wouldn't have anything.
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Even if it's reliable it won't make any money. Capacity is too low, maglev is cheaper and easier and already exists.
A more practical option would be to just build maglev with very long tunnels and work on reducing air pressure in them. No need for the tubes, still goes ridiculously fast and most of the problems have already been solved. The Japanese maglev is going to be mostly tunnel anyway, unlike the Boring Company they have actually figured out novel ways to build tunnels, so go talk to them.
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For the millionth time, though it never sinks in to anyone: the Hyperloop Alpha proposal was not maglev .
Japan dig tunnels at massive expense. The entire point of the Boring Company is to dig tunnels that aren't massively expensive.
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I know it's not maglev. I'm saying they should build maglev instead.
The tunnels in Japan are not cheap but the terrain is pretty difficult. So far the Boring Company hasn't done anything novel or got the cost down but good luck to them.
I'd be surprised if building an over-ground pressurised tube, which means buying or leasing the ground under it, would be much cheaper in the US. And tunnels mean you can go into the centre of town without it looking like one of those fun park water slides. Again the Japanese
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cumulative chance of failure = 1 - (cumulative chance of success)
cumulative chance of success = [ 1 - (chance of failure) ] ^ (number of failure modes)
(I'm simplifying a bit here, it's not really an exponent, it's a multiple product denoted
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Manned submarines are dangerous. They are used almost exclusively for mission-critical military purposes.
Airplanes are able to lose pressure with minimal risk to those onboard.
The way proper engineering is done is you solve these problems on paper. And then do scale tests to ver
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I wonder if people said the same thing about trains and cars and airplanes and boats and submarines and guns and power plants and space ships.
Tube collapses partially and cars slam into the obstruction at a few hundred MPH? No way to fix that.
"Train track breaks and cars slam into each other? No way to fix that." Instead, we mitigated it.
Power fails completely and cars all slide to a stop, trapped in vacuum for several hours? No way to fix that.
"Aircraft pressure system fails completely and all airline passengers suffocate, trapped in a vacuum for several hours? No way to fix that." Instead, we mitigated that.
There definitely are new risks, but do not simply declare them as insurmountable and give up before w
Early rail transport was a bloodbath (Score:2)
Even maintenance (an enormous, labor-intensive industry) in the early steam era killed THOUSANDS of workers. I'm interested in early railway shop practice and machine tools and was surprised to read that from contemporary literature from the Internet Archive. That was worth the tradeoff along with the rest of the Industrial Revolution and forgotten today
Today transportation casualty rates in the first world are trivial and easily sustainable (though exotic death freaks out the 100-IQ crowd) so we take drivi
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Even maintenance (an enormous, labor-intensive industry) in the early steam era killed THOUSANDS of workers
wow, interesting! Do you think that culture has changed enough that we are no longer willing to take those same risks again?
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Technology is not valuable for it's own sake. True innovation is about the ability to provide new options that people did not have before, and those options need to give people a better choice than they had before to be successful and sustainable. New technology often provides that, but not every new technology provides that, and the benefits suggested by Hyperloop are insufficient to provide something reasonable.
Despite the
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Hyperloop is one of those "really cool as long as everything works absolutely perfectly" systems.
There are a lot of "rapid failure with no recovery" options in Hyperloop.
Capsule fails and passengers exposed to hard vacuum while in transit? No way to fix that.
Tube fails completely and air rushes into tube at several hundred miles per hour, killing every passenger in every car through impact (or slamming into the cars behind when the cars get pushed by the air)? No way to fix that.
Tube collapses partially and cars slam into the obstruction at a few hundred MPH? No way to fix that.
Power fails completely and cars all slide to a stop, trapped in vacuum for several hours? No way to fix that.
Basically, Hyperloop is "making a ground-based alternative to aircraft, without the schedule flexibility of aircraft."
If I were your boss:
Interesting problems. It is 12:28 EST now. I want solutions to all of those by tomorrow at 9AM.
I will be at lunch and at meetings for the rest of the day; so do not bother me.
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All your claims are wrong.
Capsule/Cabin failure: like in air plane, masks drop down (and how exactly should something like this happen in a vacuum tube?)
Tubes fails completely: sorry you overexagerate the problem. No difference to plane again, which also has air resistance. Depending how big/long the tube is, it will fill in seconds.
Tube collapses partially: that will cause loss of vacuum, easy to detect, see above, and cars stop automatically: just like any train does.
Power fails completely: if that is the
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Let's start off with your #1 stupid thought:
"Masks drop down." In a capsule that's at a REAL vacuum, not just low pressure. In an airplane, the immediate response by the crew is to reduce altitude (dive rapidly) until they get down an altitude where people can breathe normally. That means a 4,000 feet per minute descent, because the oxygen systems on passenger planes can only hold so much oxygen. Note that if an airplane springs a big leak, the plane can keep pumping air into the cabin to help offset that,
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the plane can keep pumping air into the cabin to help offset that, because there's still enough outside for the engines to pump into the cabin.
That is why we have masks in airplanes.
#MARK If a Hyperloop capsule loses pressurization and goes to vacuum, the occupants have less than ten seconds to get their masks on.
That is nonsense, it is easily 2 minutes, depending on condition of the person.
The "Tubes fail completely" scenario means that the capsule will be hitting a near-Mach 1 pressure wave, which will r
Re:One of those... (Score:4, Insightful)
For example let's say there there were a hyperloop running from LA to San Francisco (400 miles) then there might be 50-100 pods going in one direction at any given time. So if there was a pod that set on fire, or the pipe ruptured, or a piece of debris struck a pod, or there was a power failure then the system needs to detect it instantly. Maybe a pod or two becomes an instant casualty. But you still have all the pods behind and they have to slam the brakes on and stop before colliding with the pod in front - every single pod must successfully apply its brakes or you have secondary disasters. And even if that all succeeded then you still have thousands of people stranded possibly the entire 400 mile length. How do emergency services reach them? Can they evacuate themselves, or wait? What happens with the pressure in the system? Are there going to be evacuation points? Or side tunnels? How do you rescue people who are possibly 15 yards off the ground suspended above a highway on some pylon anyway?
And that's just the immediate aftermath. After that the entire system is basically inoperable until they clear the tunnel and repair the damage. So I could see it potentially being safer overall but not necessarily without the potential for unique catastrophic failures and disruption points.
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Kind of reminds me of Lets Game It Out's Satisfactory I Built a 600 Meter Human Cannon That Ends All Existence [youtu.be] video where he has fun with Hyper Tubes. :-)
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Regular trains: they can crash into other vehicles in level crossings. People can put things on the rails that cause accidents or even derail train cars. Train windows can be smashed by large rocks hurled by assholes near the tracks. People can jump in front of trains, jump or fall out while moving, or be pushed by lunatic murderers. Trains can have brake failures and fail to stop at terminals. People can be electrocuted by stepping on or touching the wrong things or cables.
Airplanes: they can actually fall
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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That does sound a bit scary but there are bound to be a few teething problems and I guess that turning Josh Giegel and Sara Luchian into Elon Musk is one of them.
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All part of Musk's cunning plan to create 7 billion clones of himself.
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If, as this last year has me suspecting, we are all in a giant episode of the Twilight Zone, then Musk riding on the Hyperloop wouldn't count. And the twist ending would go like this:
[Scene: Surface of Mars. Elon Musk and a hapless, corrupt investor survey the desolation]
Hapless corrupt investor: But you said Mars would be a nice place to live!
Musk: It is!
[A giant, alien gas exchange erupts from Musk's thorax]
Musk: Just taste that oxygen difluoride!
Good Idea, Wrong Application (Score:2)
Why wouldn't this be used to move cargo? You could automate the load/unload and shoot goods and services long distances. Might be alot more useful.
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oh I don't know, maybe it's fucking stupid to be digging tunnels when trains above ground already move cargo? Even for tunnels this was a solved problem 200 years ago, fucking train in a tunnel was done for mining.
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There isn't enough demand for super high speed cargo to make it economically viable. People hate sitting on a 6 hour transcontinental flight. Packages don't care, and package recipients don't care about a 6 hour delay of almost any product.
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People hate sitting on a 6 hour transcontinental flight.
Most people hate it because everyone is crammed like a sardine in economy. You can only really make planes so big. This isn't nearly as applicable for trains. You can add a lot more space onto a train than you can a plane. Every bullet train I rode in Japan trumped the comfort and space of an airliner. If the US had 300MPH trains that could cross the US in 8-10 hours and they had sleeper cars, tons of people would consider it if it was cheaper than planes.
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Regular maglev trains already get to 300mph - Musk's vaporware isn't needed for that.
And even regular high speed trains routinely get to 200mph, which is enough for an 8-10 hour trip between NYC-Dallas or Minneapolis-Miami. Keep in mind that no earth-based vehicle is going to be going over the Rocky Mountains at high speed, because the necessary tunnels and bridges would be unaffordably expensive.
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Wow, that would be such a zing if Musk/SpaceX had actually proposed a maglev train. Instead of something that was neither maglev nor a train.
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What's your point? It doesn't matter what he proposed if it has no advantage over existing technology.
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Apart from incredibly short travel times and incredibly low costs, none at all.
(And before you reply, please read the Hyperloop Alpha document section which answers whatever it is you're about to write / claim)
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Anyone can claim low travel times and costs... there is no evidence that Hyperloop will ever achieve either of those.
Did you hear about my new transportation project? It's twice as fast as Hyperloop and costs half as much! Sure it hasn't been built yet, but neither has Hyperloop. According to this article there is a 100mph prototype of something vaguely related to Hyperloop, but I also have a 100mph prototype, I took it on the freeway last week.
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This is what I was thinking too. It doesn't make sense to move people from an Airport to a building in the center of the city. You still need a massive volume (think personal space) of "human" to be transported around the city. And I don't think this will work for anything less than 25 miles. All you will do is push the volume of road traffic between the airport & city into the end points. You could say that frees up road realestate but that just puts more density on the end points as more people f
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Why wouldn't this be used to move cargo? You could automate the load/unload and shoot goods and services long distances. Might be alot more useful.
The cargo capacity is as bad as the passenger capacity.
An important milestone?? (Score:5, Insightful)
This was a PR stunt. Presumably they're trying to raise funds so they stuck a couple of people in and sent them a few hundred yards down a track. They will need a hell of a lot of money to turn this into a viable mode of transportation.
Where's my robo-car? (Score:1)
In science fiction, there's a thing where an undergrount tunnel, evacuated of air, can shoot a passenger bullet at ballistic speeds and "fall" along its path.
Less than that, a supertrain can speed with much less air pressure.
This is none of that. It is a fancy trolly underground.
Nope. (Score:2)
The entire point of the Hyperloop Alpha proposal [tesla.com] was to avoid maglev, as maglev is quite expensive. It relied on air-bearing levitation using ram air.
Virgin Hyperloop is just using the name "Hyperloop" and has no connection to Musk and the SpaceX team that developed the original concept.
Everything about this idea is absurd (Score:2)
In a world that is rapidly transforming into what we expected *decades* ago - that there was little need to travel that far save for reasons of enjoyment and pleasure - this mode of transport is nuts.
It is attempting to solve, I guess, two problems - congestion and thus, speed of getting from A to B.
The thing is, for the vast majority of us, the daily commute on a scheduled basis is rapidly fading - massively accelerated by the pandemic.
When 50 to 60 percent of the work force no longer need to be at a desti
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Should one bother pointing out for the millionth time that the Hyperloop Alpha proposal wasn't maglev?
Hyper bole hyper loop (Score:1)
A feedback loop of hyper bole hype, overland trains in the progressive world (every where except the US) travel significantly faster than hyper bole loop.