Elon Musk Will Build a Hyperloop Track for Ultra-High Speed Transport Tests
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Is it a good idea? will it work? will it be as cheap as his team estimated? will it be safe? Will people want to ride it? Will terrorists blow it up? Will earthquakes tear it apart? Will it make enough solar power to be self-sustaining?
Nobody knows for certain the answers to those and ten million other questions.
Elon is forging ahead to find out - rather that sitting around nay-saying.
Bravo. I wish there were more people in the world like this.
Talk is cheap. Implementation is hard (and more interesting); JFDI.
Naysayers will naysay, but a thing that's done is more powerful than "Oh, well, you can't do that because"; JFDI.
It also extends to telling people they don't need permission. If it won't be costly (in time or money) for other people to undo, you don't need to ask -- JFDI.
Hyperloop seems really weird, but arguing with Elon Musk forging ahead is weirder.
I'm going to add more JFDI to my life.
It's really easy to tell other people that they're doing something wrong, or that they should do something you want. If you expect them to say JFDI back, you'll start out with the opinion that their time is worth quite a bit.
I suppose you could combine them to Just Fucking Get Shit Done JFGSD
Pumping Station One [+]
Variations on a theme.
http://www.startupvitamins.com/products/startup-poster-fuck-...
More importantly, (never say never, but...) this will not actually be a high-value target for terrorism; the individual pods don't hold enough people to make for a significant death toll, the tube itself being of a uniform construction would be relatively easy to repair, and the system itself doesn't really hold any political or cultural significance of note.
Keep in mind that it would have to compete with far more valuable targets as well - the ever-popular White House, Pentagon, various national airlines as well as soft but high profile targets like shopping malls, stadiums, movie theaters.
The risk of terrorism for this mode of transportation is actually less than many others.
From what I understand of Musk's hyperloop approach, the pods will each carry relatively small numbers of passengers. In theory it should be much, much more difficult for a terrorist to kill a lot of passengers this way.
It's not like building skyscrapers and apartment complexes has ceased because of 9/11.
Also, because the termini proposed are not particularly close to the urban centers it is supposed to connect, avoiding the expense of connecting from where people actually are to where people are actually likely to want to go.
Of course, that also limits its utility for its intended purpose.
Looks like he's also planning on having an annual pod-racing competition: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555804403504918528
It will be pretty cool if he pulls it off, transportation hasn't really changed a whole lot in the last 100 years or so, the Hyperloop might be the next evolutionary step. Starting small for inner-city light rail type transport, then country to city type services and then eventually country-to-country. The test loop will determine the rough cost per metre for track, operational expenses, hazards and other factors a simulation cannot really accurately tell you.
Bring on the Hyperloop. I am tired of flying.
This is mainly because it really hasn't needed to. See most smaller European and Scandinavian countries where public transportation works well and riding bikes is far more common than it is here in the US. There's no need to go form one end of a country to another in 10 minutes.
I mean, in Germany, you can get a plan ticket to fly from Liechtenstein to Hamburg in about 60 minutes for around $300. Otherwise, it's about an 8 hour drive in your car. And that's one end of the country to the other.
I'm sure someone would pay to go from one end of the country to the other in a few minutes, but I can't think it's going to be cheap.
I imagine a hyperloop pod taking off down the tube will have a similar, but more awesome, sound.
I'd happily announce that I was about to fffoooooont across the country to visit someone.
Better predictive SCM similar to what Amazon has been doing negates this for the majority of online purchases.
https://twitter.com/boredelonmusk
and
Can someone please introduce Gerry Brown to Elon?
It's "Jerry" Brown, and they've met once or twice: http://imgur.com/MS9vVJT
Building things through the Central Valley is costly, but not nearly as much as in urban environments. The first draft of Hyperloop was presented as cheaper than HSR because it didn't account for land cost. Land cost is what accounts for the bulk of HSR cost. Yes, Hyperloop could be built as a viaduct, but so could HSR, and would still have to splurge mney into buying land/indemnize landowners. HSR doesn't have a technology problem as much as it has a land cost problem. And Hyperloop won't solve that.
edit:typos
I'm ready to be convinced that the Hyperloop system is cheaper than HSR, but the problem is building the right of way. Viaduct is not a magical answer, we could have a HSR viaduct with soundproof walls. Peninsula NIMBYs successfully killed building new tracks for HSR, where Caltrain already runs (with almost no additional nuisance). Somehow, I don't imagine them (or any californias suburban community) being OK with a viaduct going through their towns. A viaduct that couldn't be laid on top of existing roads to have the right profile for high speed.
There are very few existing roads that are compatible in profile with high speed. And they are located where the right of way is already cheap.
Solving the right of way problem sounds maybe less sexy than supersonic travel, but this is where we can gain the most efficiency. I think this is a harder problem than the hypersonic technology.
No, the actual termini for HSR are in the city centers.
Unlike Musk's hyperloop proposals, where one part of hitting the low cost number was terminating far from either population center (IIRC, substantially north of LA for the southern terminus, and way out in the East Bay on the northern terminus.)
> it will never meet the legal requirement of getting from LA proper to SF proper in 2:40.
Even if that was true, Musk's proposed hyperloop orientation would hardly be an improvement, as LA proper to SF proper would, in many cases, take that long or longer only considering the time between the city center and the proposed station locations, even if the hyperloop was an instant teleport.
FSAE teams can run out of a spare room in an engineering dept's basement with a 5- to low-6-figure budget. I'm not intimately familiar with the hyperloop proposal, but hazarding a guess here, I can't really imagine a team putting together a hyperloop pod on less than a million dollar budget, and the facilities needs would be greatly increased as well. Getting any competitors would be really impressive and would require pretty heavy corporate sponsorship.
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1) And/or creating and enabling organizations with their own inherent drives.
The practical problems with Hyperloop are right of way acquisition and emergency rescue. The technology seems workable. Acquiring right of way for large-radius curves is hard, but with political will and money, it can be done. Rescue is tougher. Underground sections may need something like Eurotunnel, where there are two running tunnels and an emergency service tunnel. This runs up the cost.
Another big problem with Hyperloop is that the capacity isn't that high. The original numbers described a system that carried about as many people as currently fly between SJC and LAX. That's much less than regular trains can carry.
Earthquakes can be designed for. The BART tunnel across the SF bay was barely affected in the 1989 earthquake, even though it crosses a fault. There are big rubber sections at joints. I did see one item of damage. At the SF end, the Transbay Tube terminates in a ventilating building near the ferry dock. There are some railings on both ferry dock and ventilating building connected by short chains, so relative motion won't break the railings. One of the chains broke in the quake.
The hyperloop is an unproven, untested, unverified concept. It has massive regulatory and safety issues to overcome and as currently designed is completely stupid. No one is going to use it for 35 minutes without the ability to either (a) stand or (b) use the toilet.
Ever fly in a light plane?
They are used by a tiny, tiny fraction of the population who given those are planes are used for business are far more likely to be middle aged, professional, healthier individuals than general consumers. They are also like normal flying more of an "event" than your everyday commute i.e. you plan ahead for them.
I am all for new ideas, but the Hyperloop has some safety concerns that need to be ironed out. Even the Channel Tunnel is substantially safer than the Hyperloop's initial design.
For example, if a "train" (pod?) breaks down or gets stuck between stations how do you rescue people? It is a low atmosphere tunnel, you cannot just walk down it, it might take hours to re-compress, plus you're well off the ground so cannot just cut a hole...
What if a fire breaks out on the train? Nowhere to run. So will you build it up to aircraft level-safety standards?
Also how will stations work? You have low atmosphere tunnels, but stations have to be normal breathable spaces, so are they going to have decompression chambers? And if they are then you have to design trains which can be decompressed and recompressed (see aircraft).
Plus these tunnels will have to be pretty large when you consider disabled people and luggage. The initial design showed a super low profile train, so much so that it was impractical for normal commuters, even relative to aircraft. The real thing would have to be much bigger (like road-tunnel sized).
Overall building this is possible. But essentially you're building a fully functional aircraft in a tube with all of the same issues and limitations that go along with air travel. If something "bad" happens then it will get very bad very quickly (like aircraft). So safety has to be aircraft grade too...
In particular I think many of the safety issues need to be considered before they build a scale prototype. Since presumably they wish to put people into the thing, it is a good idea to figure out how to get people out also.
This guy has managed to push the build of a well-reviewed and semi-revolutionary car, not to mention frickin' rockets. I think his staff can foresee the challenges, then design and test for them.
That is, after all, the point of a "test" - to figure out the fine details.
As far as size for wheel chairs it mentions having a pod that could fit a car(a Tesla of course) so fitting a wheel chair shouldn't be much of a challenge, or for the smaller pod it mentions being over 6 feet tall and over four feet wide I don't see why you couldn't fit a wheel chair in that amount of space.
What if a plane breaks down in flight or the flaps get stuck? There's low atmosphere at high altitudes, so you can't just open the door without risking structural damage to the aircraft. What happens if there's a fire on board? Where will these planes land? How big will the runways be?
My point is that the development of commercial flight took place over a long, long time to get where we are today. We're still in the whiteboard stages with the hyperloop. Lots of people had to break a lot of planes to get where we're at now.
Therefore, no one would have asked about problems with low atmosphere or opening doors.
The Wright craft used wing warping, and not flaps, so people didn't ask that question. What if the motor stopped - that's a much more critical question. The Benoist seaplane flight above had problem part-way through. The pilot landed on the water, fixed the engine, and took off again.
As for runways, the Wrights landed on the sand in front of them, the same as Chanute did earlier with his experiments with gliders on the dunes of Michigan. The first airplane flight in New England used a frozen lake surface. Early on people used large fields, like Penn Field or Roosevelt Field. The movies of Lindberg show there wasn't really even a marked route; I assume the better to align with the wind. Runways as we know it took a while to exist - they were airfields.
While I understand your intent, it would have been better to omit examples rather than make ones up. Otherwise your ahistorical comments affect my interpretation of your ability to judge an appropriate development cycle. People aren't talking about problems which might occur after 20-30 years of development, but rather problems that are well-known already.
This would be like telling Félix du Temple in 1870 that steam engines aren't powerful enough for a flying machine to carry humans.
Let us all aim for a better mean of comments than the ones posted on TC, as of this writing:
http://i.imgur.com/7BBvKQc.png
Thx.
I have no affiliation with Mr. Musk or his projects, private or commercial.
Does this need to be explicitly delineated ?
I am not of the Elon-Musk-Should-Always-Be-Lionized camp, but I surely do feel that the nay-sayers deserve a slow, ponder-simmering of sorts, in their chosen ways to oppose a man who is dead set on improving, resolutely, how we go about our lives.
For that, and for that alone, I'd gladly vaporize all the HN credibility I yet have.