Hyperloop

So Elon Musk released his plan for a high-speed transportation system between LA and San Francisco. Basically take some giant steel tubes, pump them down to 100 Pa, and shoot some 28-person capsules at 700 mph down the tubes. They use a giant compressor at the front to both eliminate the high pressure build up at the front of the capsules, and power air bearings that the capsules ride on.

Fascinating stuff, I'd love to see things like this get more prominent.

http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop

Edit: Not technically motorsports, but it's real fast and awesome. Mods, please move if this needs to be in OT.

Kinda like the mailroom used to be.

I think that Elon is loosing it a little on this one, but after the Tesla I wouldn't put anything past him.

I don't know, from reading that paper, everything seems very well thought out. It's not a quick little news release with some hand sketches, there's a 57 page technical paper that details how and why it would work and be so cheap.

Sometimes, my wife calls it The Hyperloop, but I just call it The Helicopter.

I would rather see my state tax money go to that rather than the "high speed" rail they are wasting billions on right now. None of which would actually be high speed...

Yeah, I like the direct shots he takes at that program.

Elon Musk said: When the California "high speed" rail was approved, I was quite disappointed, as I know many others were too. How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL – doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world? Note, I am hedging my statement slightly by saying “one of”. The head of the California high speed rail project called me to complain that it wasn’t the very slowest bullet train nor the very most expensive per mile.

I want to ride in a vacuum tube bullet maglev shot like a railgun! Man, I really hope this happens. Musk is making all of my sci-fi book details come true!

Musk is one of those guys that normally has ideas that everybody is behind, and he can make them a reality. With all of his money now, he can make most stuff seem easy.

He realizes that the Hyperloop is both considerably more expensive that his previous endeavors, and more importantly, it involves public and private land he does not have access to.

He's doing the one thing he does best, marketing the idea. If he can get the Hyperloop on a first name basis with California voters, when the next election roles around you'll hear candidates talking about it, then it'll happen.

Can anyone summarize his idea of having multiple stations on the same line? Or would each tube be restricted to one destination?

From what I read, there's airlocks at undetermined intervals where cars can pull off of the main line to load/unload. Although the capsules are going 700mph, there's something like 23 miles between each car at peak usage, so it should be doable.

The way some papers have been reporting it, they make it sound like Musk is going to build the thing. He's not. It's very well thought out idea that some full-time engineering hours have been devoted to so that the feasibility is pretty well known.

Musk did recently say that he might build a small prototype, and then hand it off to someone else to build the real thing. I read some quote yesterday of him saying he wished he hadn't even mentioned the Hyperloop, because it caused so much incorrect speculation, but it sounds like he's still changing his interest in it based on how people are reacting to it now.

I really like that he's specifically targeting the California high speed rail project. That project is a disaster already and its hardly gotten off the ground. I wish we could just stop it and put the funds into development of Musk's idea...

Yeah, I heard he's going to build a small-scale prototype just to prove it works, then let someone else sink time and money into the big one.

It's unknown territory, so I don't see it getting off the ground. Elon is a smart guy, but this is little far fetched IMO.

I am an advocate for high speed rail, but the problem is that in order to do HSR correctly is entirely removing the current infrastructure which no state/rail company is going to do. HSR could work well in this country, but without a major overhaul to the rail network, it's never going to be what it should.

Why target 700mph? Most of the internet "debunkings" I've seen seem to detail how impracticle it is due to mostly the difficulty of running the tube at .1% pressure at sea level, the tolerances required for the air bearings to work consistently at 700mph, and the straightness of track required due to G loading caused by minor changes in direction at 700mph. Special call out to the logistical issues of Right of way for the project and the fact that its in earthquake country but these are true for any mass transit project in California.

My question is really if you could get from LA to San Fran in 1 hour it would beat all non-private plane modes of transport now, only have to run at a more modest 350mph (Not crazy out of line with what has been achieve on various forms of High speed rail), Half all energy requirements and decrease the Gloading by half due to direction changes.
Realistically even going 180-200mph with something with 1/10th the cost of high speed rail would be a HUGE GIGANTIC achievement. It would have a roughly 2.5 hour trip time which would place it on par with Airtravel but be-able to move 2-4x the people the Musktube proposes.

In reply to nocones:

It works more like maglev/railgun than by the air pressure thingy, and it takes less energy to go faster than to go slower (supposedly, I'm no fungineer).

I don't care if HyperLoop works or not, I'd just like it to derail (no pun intended) the current high speed rail debacle. $60B is the current budget on that. That's enough money for the state to buy Southwest Airlines and give every resident of California 13 free round-trip tickets between SFO and LAX.

In reply to codrus:

Holy carp man, that's even worse then our I-5 bridge crossing debacle we had going on up here. I read the CHSR blog and nearly bought a 1-way ticket to Mars to get away from the same atmosphere as the shiny happy people in charge.

I think Elon's smoking crack if he thinks the system can actually be built for $6 billion.

In reply to Will:

Agreed. That's about what I'd expect to pay for just liability insurance on having people sucked through a giant tube.

I am looking at this whole thing like a Popular Mechanics article from 1962. I don't think the point is to start building, I think the point is to introduce theory and technology in the form of a preliminary design with the goal of research-driven outcome.

All you have to imagine is what would happen to a human at 700 mph on a mag-lev train during an earthquake, or a depressurization, or a tiny failure of one pole of the mag-lev track.

I think the results of a depressurization are being overblown. the hype for this has swollen well out of proportion and it really had no chance to survive under such pressure. People are shaking at the opportunity to point out the risk of earthquake damage.

I like that someone is doing some big thinking. When I was a kid the world was full of space races and threats of nuclear oblivion from previous big thinking. It was exciting in a "cool to ride on top of a truck full of hay going 80 down the freeway while dad smokes thru a pack of Camels" sort of way.

I need some relief from the last 30 years of fearing for our own safety. Some motherberkeleyers need to get in some rocket planes or 700mph vacuum tubes and give my kids some hope that we are not all a giant pile of E36 M3 that is afraid of hot coffee and lawn darts. Plus, this place is over-crowded. We need some fun ways to off some early adopters.

Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: I like that someone is doing some big thinking. When I was a kid the world was full of space races and threats of nuclear oblivion from previous big thinking.

I do agree with this point completely. My initial reaction to pretty much all new technology is to e36 m3 all over it and theorize as to why it won't work. Sometimes I'm even right.

But there does need to be someone out there thinking outlandish thoughts in an attempt to make the world a better place. As the old Apple commercial said, the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who usually do.

So yeah, I still think this is a pipe dream (no pun intended). But at least someone is still dreaming, and I hope people like me don't fling so much poo that it stops them from coming up with crazy dreams in the first place.

Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: I like that someone is doing some big thinking. When I was a kid the world was full of space races and threats of nuclear oblivion from previous big thinking. It was exciting in a "cool to ride on top of a truck full of hay going 80 down the freeway while dad smokes thru a pack of Camels" sort of way. I need some relief from the last 30 years of fearing for our own safety. Some motherberkeleyers need to get in some rocket planes or 700mph vacuum tubes and give my kids some hope that we are not all a giant pile of E36 M3 that is afraid of hot coffee and lawn darts. Plus, this place is over-crowded. We need some fun ways to off some early adopters.

^^QFT

My dad worked on the Apollo project and I was practically born on a boat in the Banana River while the family was out to watch a S-V launch. He doesn't say it in so many words, but he does despair a bit that we've become a country full of folks that are scared of their own shadow and lacking giant, hairy, audacious goals.

Many may consider Musk a crazy man, but my hat is off to him. He represents the dreaming, aspiring and won't-take-no-for-an-answer attitude I remember from when I was a kid.