Robert Goddard designed a vacuum train in the 1910s, why did Elon think it was going to work a century later?
The point wasn’t to work. The point was to kill/delay CAHSR.
Can't think of why a car company owner/CEO would want to do that...
The simplest reason seems to be that he expected it not to work, at least with current technology.
He successfully made investors waste hundreds of millions into these hyperloop startups, which are like real life parody of high-tech scam startups.
On the other hand, one must be quite illiterate scientifically to buy into Musks grand sci-fi projects. Should only work on 5 years old. But you don’t have to believe, you just have to pretend and take these easy millions from rich but dumb VCs.
You mean like the world's first reusable rocket, the only private company to sent astronauts to the ISS, the world's biggest rocket, or mass producing EVs?
Yeah, you're right, it's good he stuck to the easy stuff!
He also talks about a supersonic electrical passenger jet from time to time, but he says he don't have the time to do that either.
No, the tech is not fine. There are really serious, showstopper issues with it. Issues that were known way back in the early 1900s and there is still no feasible way to overcome them.
Look there are mag lev trains in Japan that run on superconductors. By all means you can put that tech in a tube and call it a hyperloop. Absolutely feasible.
That is why all of the companies doing it switched to maglev. And we know the issues with maglev.
A partial vacuum would be trivial to achieve and you could by all means use mag lev + partial vacuum in a tube.
Yeah works great.
I hear they are gone install on in Hoboken soon.
The tech already works even without a partial vacuum. But a partial vacuum would be all the better.
Mag lev works: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCMaglev
Nothing in the idea of a hyperloop precludes the use of a maglev propulsion system. The partial vacuum wouldn't even be necessary but might help with efficiency. Partial vacuums are just air pumps.
Maglevs are great. Why not build one of those instead?
If you don't have an atmosphere, the near vacuum conditions are free
You need robots to dig tunnels if you want sizeable bases. Figuring that out on earth just gives you a headstart.
What should transit look like on the moon? On Mars? Can you use those tunnels? What will be different with lower gravity?
This is the most charitable interpretation I can make, fwiw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Early_development...
A bomb would be a serious threat, the shockwave from both the explosion and rapid decompression, but I believe it can be mitagated. Bombs are bad for pretty much everything anyways.
The other problem is if the walls don't break but the pipe crumples. But this is more likely to have a self-sealing effect, and with enough overbuilding, it shouldn't cause a chain reaction.
I don't believe in hyperloop, but I think catastrophic implosions are rather low in the list of reasons why it won't happen. It doesn't even make it at the top of safety related reasons.
I have yet to see a convincing simulation of how a would be hyperloop would behave of one were to poke a hole in it. And by convincing situations, I mean one with an appropriate model, that is a very long tube engineered to hold a vacuum.
An then you can downvote this post too, a good explanation is well worth a few karma points :)
of course cost is something we can also make good estimates of.
I think the idea was wrong and wouldn't actually work. But the assertion that its simply exactly the same isn't the case.
That said, even if an idea is old, that doesn't mean a new take isn't warranted. They considered rocket re-usability in the 1960 and tried in the 1970. EV are 100+ years old.
Apparently not, I suppose is your point.
Of course, reversed stupidity is not intelligence, this isn't evidence that hyperloop is good, just a suggestion to choose a better source for your arguments.
In other words, the misconception is yours.
The other misconception here is the assumption that the entire length needs to be maintained at 100 Pa. This is not necessary. Having a pressure gradient is fine because it isn't going fast near the terminals anyway.
One example of many is the weird conversations he was having about sonic velocity robots and "lights out dreadnaught" sort of auto factories, which just about every other automaker has been trying on and off since the 80s, and has worked out that it doesn't work. So Tesla's modern lines, after quite a bit of fooling around with that sort of rubbish, look just like everyone else's lines, because as soon as you have humans in the loop for the things robots can't do well, you may as well run the line at human speeds.
SpaceX disrupted the space launch industry, which had not advanced at all since the 1970s. SpaceX really just picked up and ran with the idea of vertical landing reusable rockets, which was not new. Werner von Braun was exploring it for Saturn V back in the 60s, and Lockheed finally did it at prototype scale with the DC-X in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o (You can see at the end that the DC-X even does the same "hover slam" maneuver as Falcon 9 to land with maximum propellant efficiency.)
Tesla was similar. Auto manufacture itself isn't moribund, but old school auto makers always hated EVs and resisted doing anything serious with them. Tesla's rise was a classic exploitation of the innovators' dilemma by calling them on this and forcing their hand. Now that some are embracing EVs, Tesla is facing increasingly stiff competition but has at least carved out a brand.
Musk has not been particularly successful competing in less moribund industries. The Boring Company is kind of a flop. Neuralink seems questionable so far, to say the least. The Hyperloop, even if it worked, wouldn't be competitive at all with high speed rail on cost. It'd be faster and in theory more energy efficient but nowhere near enough to compensate for the added capital cost or complexity.
Now if Musk had created, say, a rail transport division of Tesla he could have absolutely disrupted rail transport which is another fairly sluggish moribund industry. Imagine modern unmanned trains (FSD on rails is WAY easier than on roads) with batteries to allow them to span un-powered sections of track and recharge on sections with third rail or overhead catenary wires. But that would have been a threat to the car market. Innovators' dilemma anyone?
My point is that Musk isn't superman... he just picked industries that were ripe for disruption and built teams that executed well enough to succeed.
Of his companies SpaceX is by far the most impressive in its own right. What Tesla did could have been done much much better by a "legacy" car maker if they'd been willing to disrupt their ICE business. Nissan actually beat Tesla to market with an affordable mass market electric (the Leaf) but didn't put as much heart into it. The result was okay but not nearly as cool as what Tesla did, especially in Tesla's glory days. (I own a Leaf and have no complaints, but it's not sexy.)
like with Tesla they're ahead of other companies in multiple ways, but still behind in some aspects as well.
And it's fine to not trust prevailing wisdom, but when you don't even bother trying to learn from them because "they're dumb dinosaur companies that don't even know code" (which has utterly nothing to do with reality), re-learning the same lessons yourself isn't some amazing foresight. It's simply a stupid waste of resources.
Any one of these would have cemented him as a premier industrialist.
In the end, there's legions of Internet commenters who complain about Elon Musk in between complaining about their bosses or complain about Google and Facebook or what have you. And then there's this guy doing things successfully.
The Silicon Valley attitude that I love is that when someone tells you "that's not going to work", you just go ahead and do it if you have conviction. After all, you're only sacrificing your own self.
Yes, we've ruined astronomy with a ton of LEO satellites, but we've got some internet in exchange (I'm rural, I have it, I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay, and how inconsistent it is - on some days, it's quite good, on other days it's more or less dialup grade).
And we'll see how that lift capacity works. Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted!
I've done computer security a bit too long, I think.
This is exactly why the stated goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of electric cars - in other words, make it happen a lot sooner than it otherwise would have.
I personally think making internet available to people who don't have it is far more important than people who do have home internet complaining about their view of the stars during their camping trip.
China and others have done far, far more to contribute to space junk than SpaceX has.
Who? And how did they mainstream EVs more than Tesla? Fisker was in the market early, but didn’t mainstream EVs. GM was in way early, but probably held the market back.
Making EV mainstream is about more then a big company throwing a few batteries into an existing car platform. It was about shifting perceptions, starting a public conversation and making people actual demand EVs. And making EV profitable.
> and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time.
Ah that's why Tesla is such a small an insignificant company now, because everybody else knew everything. Brilliant logic.
> It would have happened one way or another.
That is literally what Musk has said for 20 years. Its gone happen anyway, Tesla is about making it happen faster. And his building of the Roaster, Model S were clearly huge steps. Building the Gigafactory Nevada was a huge signal, and lead to a huge amount of investment all threw the supply chains, and lots of companies thinking bigger. The biggest European battery maker is people who helped build Giga Nevada and then went and started a new battery company in Europe.
The Model 3 reaching profitability was a absolutely huge signal in the automotive industry. Tesla building it with 20%+ margin was a literal bomb in the industry. Until that point it was almost universally believed that high volume EV were just not gone be possible. After that pretty much all car companies accelerated their EV strategies.
> Yes, we've ruined astronomy
How this nonsense claim gets repeated over and over again is just beyond me. Anybody who still argues this is just willfully ignorant at this point.
> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers
And more then 2 million people disagree with you and that number is growing.
> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome
The inherent permission in your worldview is just sad and depressing. Everything bad must happen even when most experts agree it wont happen.
Tesla absolutely was and still is. They dominate the market.
> on other days it's more or less dialup grade
You’ve either got bad hardware or you’ve never used dialup. Even in congestion on the RV product (lower priority than residential) I’ve only seen down to 20mbps. That’s 400x dialup.
> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay
Please cancel! I could use the capacity when I’m out in the boondocks.
> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted!
LEO natural decay means a royal fuckup locks out <10 years.
If you have any actual meaningful analysis to add on why these constellations are Kessler risks, please notify the space force! Everyone involved seems to think it’s not a problem so you should probably correct them.
It's 2023. I'd like to buy a car, TV, phone, or computer that isn't, by default, "slurping as much behavioral data as it thinks it can possibly get away with, routed out whatever connection it can find, to be sold to others who want to influence my thinking." It's hard to find.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#Pendulum_rocket_falla...
He didn’t intend to build it.
*paraphrasing from memory from the last time I had this argument and found an interview from the time