Hyperloop - 5th mode of transportation?

[Brykovian]

Any of you take a look at the idea of the "Hyperloop" as an ultra-fast method of transport between paired cities (~35 minutes from LA to San Fran, in this example)?

I found it intriguing.

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop

-Bryk

[American Patriot]

Been watching the news on this.

Don't see it happening in America any time soon. Not unless it is funded by a non-government entity.

I certainly will protest it.

[Brykovian]

I certainly will protest it.

Protest it in general ... or just if it's government-funded?

-Bryk

[American Patriot]

Government funded.


I think it is a great idea. The guy came up with something new, unusual and it will probably work. You should be able to create some hub in the middle of the US and connect major cities to get you across country faster than an aircraft can fly.

One from the US to Europe, one from the US to Australia and one to Asia.

However, if this were a government project (and YOU KNOW the government will try to put its multiple hands into the project) that it will never 1) get off the ground, 2) will be overfunded, 3) will over run the budget, 4) will continue to cost taxpayers well into the even unforeseeable future, and 5) you will have to sign away your first, second and third born to even get on the thing - and pay extra for baggage.

[MinutemanCO]

I like the idea of moving away from standard infrastructure. Our system is very dated, especially when you consider the size of the continental US. We haven't progressed in this area nearly as fast as we should given technologcial advancements in other realms.

My only issue at this time (somewhat tongue-in-cheek)... if you have to take a leak, you're screwed.

[American Patriot]

By the why Bryk I should point out a couple other things here that "bug" me a little bit.


Tesla... the company that Elon Musk is CEO over, also has other issues.

http://money.msn.com/now/post--tesla...-push-to-obama

Their "profit" was from OUR tax money:

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-...turns-a-profit


I just think this is another smoke and mirrors project created by this guy to make Obama look good. Think about it, if he can get a "grant" to do some preliminary work on proving it's viability (regardless of whether it is or isn't) then Obama wins because he has "money in Tesla" (we all are pretty certain it's an investment hidden from the law for Obama, his wife, his daughters or even Valerie Jarrett).

There is NO WAY I want to see this thing come to fruition to give more of OUR hard earned "taxes" directly to Obama.

Remember the battery company, car company, and all the other "green energy" companies that got money from the government that Obama was pushing? They went UNDER, but that money went SOMEWHERE.

[American Patriot]

Why Elon Musk's 'hyperloop' transport won't work

If it were up to Tesla and Space-X founder Elon Musk, California would be ditching its pricey high-speed rail for a system that resembles the tubes at a bank's drive-through.
Chris Woodyard, USA TODAY 9:10 a.m. EDT August 13, 2013

Heat and stress on the system are just two big factors

(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Story Highlights

• Elon Musk's idea for a system to whiz passengers between cities through tubes gets mixed reviews
• The Tesla founder's plan sounds feasible, but...
• But there are huge issues that must be overcome

The world has had a day to digest Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's proposal of a "hyperloop," a high-speed train that would shoot pods through a tube with air pressure at speeds that would take people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes.


And he is mostly being hailed as a visionary, an example of the kind of can-do spirit that America needs.


But not all think the idea he is supporting is feasible -- pointing out that traveling faster than a jet aircraft in a tube would be really, really difficult.


Sam Jaffe, writing on the Navigant Research blog, says that after reading Musk's 57-page proposal that he sees some very big hurdles.


"The biggest concern with this plan has to do with temperature. The pod will be compressing air and expelling it downwards and backwards. All that air compression creates an enormous amount of heat, which can damage the pod and its machinery," Jaffe writes.


He notes that Musk proposes that every passenger pod carry a water tank, which would provide a coolant. The water would turn to steam that would be released at stations. But he questions whether a pod would be able to carry enough water to do the job.


Likewise, the pods would be under a lot of stress. And if the tube structure is elevated, it could be subject to buffeting by winds.


Musk's idea isn't new. Ever since pneumatic tubes using negative air pressure to shoot capsules through tubes showed up decades ago -- department stores used them for transactions and newspapers used them to carry stories from the newsroom to operators that would produce metal type for the printing presses -- people have dreamed of traveling through cylinders at high speed.


Jay Yarow, writing for Business Insider, says a similar idea for transporting passengers was hatched 41 years ago by a Rand Corp. researcher, R.M. Salter. He called his hyperloop a "Very High Speed Transit System," or VHST. It, too, depended on trains suspended in air running through tubes. He says it faced technical challenges, but there were no apparent insurmountable barriers. His system would have been airtight, unlike Musk's.

The idea went nowhere.


And Musk is not proposing to take on this futuristic train idea himself, having enough on his plate now with his Tesla car company and SpaceX space technology company.

While he put his own fortune on the line for those, Musk will be sitting back to see if his support helps get this idea advanced in the hands of others.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/...ace-x/2646969/

[American Patriot]

And Musk is not proposing to take on this futuristic train idea himself, having enough on his plate now with his Tesla car company and SpaceX space technology company.

This is part of the key here.... he is NOT going to take on this thing HIMSELF. Apparently, the idea will come out later to form another company, get a federal grant and go from there.

Mark my words, this isn't something that just occurred to this guy. This is a planned method for grabbing at green government funding.

[American Patriot]

Elon Musk's Futuristical Napkin Drawing of a Mass Transit System

The Hyperloop is awesome. But...
Alexis C. Madrigal Aug 12 2013, 6:17 PM ET







He already has spaceship and electric vehicle companies, and he'd like to fly to Mars, but Elon Musk has another idea to bring us closer to the comic-book future. The Hyperloop is a pod-based transport system that Musk's been toying with, and he revealed more details today.


He gave the most information to BusinessWeek's Ashlee Vance, sketching out the design and answering questions about the physics of the Hyperloop.

He describes the design as looking like a shotgun with the tubes running side by side for most of the journey and closing the loop at either end. These tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, and the pods inside would travel up to 800 miles per hour.

Musk also posted a 57-page PDF proposal called "Hyperloop Alpha," calling it an "open source transportation project."


Among the details contained therein, we find the route that he proposes, which would be more accurately described as Los Angeles to Hayward (not San Francisco). Heyward is a heck of a long way from the Mission (but not too far from Musk's Tesla factory). At the speed Musk is proposing, that would take 38 minutes.






So, two thoughts on the Hyperloop, which I find to be in tension. First, like anyone who has ever read a sci-fi novel or made the sound "pew-pew" with a raygun made from thumb and forefinger, I think is fantastically cool and wonderful. A pod system that shoots you to LA! Amazing! Even the drawings evoke that '50s can-do futurism. There's none of that dark '60s/'70s technoanxiety in this proposal. None.


Which brings me to thought two: I worry that more fully baked transportation projects might be put on hold in hopes that Musk's still-fictional idea works out. Musk's proposal, because of who Musk is, could serve as a poison dart for California's high-speed rail, and then nothing comes of it, leaving the state with an outdated passenger rail network and no Hyperloop to make up for it.


Musk says he could build a Hyperloop system to transport people for $6 billion or one capable of transporting people and cars for $10 billion.
California's long-suffering high-speed rail project has been projected to cost $68 billion. In part because they have to acquire 1,100 different pieces of land. Just Fresno to Bakersfield, a little over 100 miles, is supposed to cost $7 billion for high-speed rail.






It's not that there couldn't be cheaper ways of doing things. I'm sure there are. But in comparing Musk's plan with the California HSR proposal, we're looking at two very different levels of detail. Musk's is a sketch. The HSR proposal has been worked over by so many parties for years, and many more costs have been discovered lurking in the details of putting in a major transportation system in the second decade of the 21st century.


California's high-speed rail system may be a boondoggle. But Musk's estimate would be an unfair way to make that point.






Take the $1 billion allotted for "land and permits" in Musk's plan. Assume that along the 700-miles of the Hyperloop, they can manage to buy just a skinny strip of land 500 feet wide. That'd still be 42,424 acres of land the Hyperloop would need to acquire right down the heart of California. Is that going to be possible? Is it reasonable? Sounds like a lot of lawyer's fees and contract work. But who knows?



UPDATE 8/13: Some people have said to me, "Musk's plan is to get a hold of land in the I-5 median, or alongside it, so they won't need to buy nearly that much land." Here's how Musk put it in his proposal: "By building it on pylons, you can almost entirely avoid the need to buy land by following alongside the mostly very straight California Interstate 5 highway, with only minor deviations when the highway makes a sharp turn." It's a nice idea, but that doesn't mean such an approach is going to be possible. How many people are going to want a newfangled, super high-speed transport system towering over California's biggest north-south artery? Imagine the insurance costs. And why would Caltrans turn over this right of way to the hyperloop? Here's the pro-California High-Speed Rail blog pointing out some other problems, too:

you'd still need to get Caltrans to sell its own right of way alongside or in the middle of Interstate 5, which is not going to be easy or free. And Musk is downplaying the challenge here when he points to I-5. Building in the Central Valley is the easy and (relatively) cheap part, including land acquisition, whether it's a bullet train or a Hyperloop. How exactly is Musk going to get these tubes from the Valley to downtown SF and downtown LA without causing disruption?

That's the thing with Musk's plan, and its cost projections: there is a lot we don't know, and a lot of assumptions baked into that low, low price. Until a lot more due diligence has been done, it doesn't make sense to just take Musk's plan at face value.

[American Patriot]

What I find most humorous is the fact that all the Left Leaning in-the-tank-for-Obama Media outlets are coming out and pooh-poohing this thing.

4 Reasons Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Could Tank

Don't expect to be riding one by 2020.
By Matt Peckham @mattpeckhamAug. 13, 2013

Elon MuskRendering of a Hyperloop tube stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Billionaires — so much pressure to deliver the ineffable, so many people to potentially disappoint. Last night was a little like the buildup to Dean Kamen’s “Ginger,” the press tripping over itself to hand entrepreneur Elon Musk a megaphone, as if waiting for a robed figure to descend from the rumor-clouded mountaintop carrying a phablet with the words “Thou shalt build a pneumatic tube that flings people between distant cities like bank deposit slips” scrolling across the screen.


Elon Musk’s so-called Hyperloop — a slender tube filled with pods that would zip along at hundreds of miles an hour spaced just moments apart — isn’t so far-fetched, steeped as it is in existing technology; indeed, some are saying Musk has invented nothing at all, that he’s merely taken existing tech and shuffled it around. Regardless, it’s hard not to be impressed with some of that shuffling: Fans that suck air from in front of the train to compressors that fire it from the tube bottom to keep the air pressure low? Using the air “cushion” generated by such a system to “levitate” the train a bit like a puck floating on an air hockey table? Solar panels along the tube’s top — including battery packs that store energy to offset cloudy days — that provide “far in excess of the energy needed to operate”?


The idea is that you’d be able to walk (or drive — Musk is proposing being able to transport vehicles, too) into one of these pods every so many minutes, like queuing for the world’s fastest ride at the world’s longest amusement park. As Doug put it last night, “The concept seems like how a roller coaster works: line up, file into an open seat, buckle up and hold on.”


So the question isn’t whether it’s possible — all kinds of crazy-cool-sounding things are possible – it’s whether it’s a good enough idea, or the best in an ocean of grand ones (maybe it is, maybe it isn’t — just putting the question out there). The difference between a guy like Elon Musk and all the other big thinkers pitching society-changing inventions, is that he has the wherewithal to make an idea like the Hyperloop happen.


Or does he? Consider some of the more obvious (and a few less so) obstacles.


Musk claims the Hyperloop would be safer than flying, but has he thought it through?


Nothing’s perfectly safe, of course, so the question’s really whether something like this would be safe enough. Musk has already attempted to deflect worries about natural events like earthquakes, noting that the tube could be built to at least the specifications earthquake-resistant buildings are; that it would be “immune to wind, ice, fog, and rain”; that since the propulsion system is part of the tube itself, it’s inherently speed-limited by the design of each section (you’re essentially removing weather and human control error, he says); and since the pods are completely contained within the tube — to say nothing of the lack of physical rails — train-style derailment is impossible.


But while the Hyperloop would include safety systems, from oxygen masks (in the event of depressurization) to emergency brakes and retractable wheels in each pod, systems like these aren’t impervious to glitches, power outages, battery backup failures, etc., and the margin for error here sounds relatively slim: In a plane, you have the entire sky at your disposal (even then, air-based collisions can and do occur); in the Hyperloop, you’d have up to 28-passenger cars departing every two minutes on average or every 30 seconds during peak-use periods, putting up to 70 or so pods in a tube connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco and more than twice that number in a 1,000-mile version. Given their speeds and departure intervals, they’d be separated by appreciable distances, but what happens if there’s a problem that forces the pods to slow or come to a stop and the brakes fail in even one?


The most serious concern, however, which Musk glosses over in his alpha paper (see section 4.5.6, “Human Related Incidents”), would be terrorism, say someone managed to smuggle a bomb onboard, or fired a rocket at the tube (or one of its bracing pylons) from a distance. Remember, we’re talking about tubes that could cover up to 1,000 mile stretches. Think about our southern border security issues, then imagine if that border also included hundreds or even thousands of potential human targets — locked inside tubing that might vector through huge swathes of remote areas — at any given moment.


Elon Musk now says he might build a prototype, but he’s got a lot going on.


Musk’s initial position was that he didn’t have time to build the Hyperloop, but as All Things D reports, he’s backpedaled a bit by saying, “I think it might help if I created a prototype.”


Elon Musk is CEO and chief designer at SpaceX, a private aerospace company he founded in 2002 with around 3,000 employees and dead serious plans to establish human colonies on Mars. Musk is also CEO, chairman and product architect of Tesla Motors, the electric car company in the news recently for its unexpectedly strong earnings and again earlier this year for Musk’s very public dustup with New York Times‘ critic John Broder. Last but not least, Musk is the chairman of a public energy company called SolarCity. In Musk’s own words, talking to Businessweek about the Hyperloop: “I wish I had not mentioned it. I still have to run SpaceX and Tesla, and it’s fucking hard.”
The point being the guy’s already overcommitted — what are the odds he’ll have the time, energy and resources to bring a project this audacious to fruition?
The Hyperloop may have heat dissipation and wind concerns.


Noticed by USA Today, energy analyst Sam Jaffe, writing on the Navigant Research blog, says Musk’s Hyperloop has at least two potential show-stopping issues the innovator doesn’t address in his paper. According to Jaffe, who specializes in energy storage technologies and applications:

The biggest concern with this plan has to do with temperature. The pod will be compressing air and expelling it downwards and backwards. All that air compression creates an enormous amount of heat, which can damage the pod and its machinery. Musk’s solution is to add to each pod a water tank that will capture that heat and turn it into steam to be collected at the next station. Although the thermodynamic calculations are correct, a small pod with only a few cubic feet of room for a heat exchanger leaves little space for an efficient exchange of heat. That means that the flow of water must be increased, requiring a lot more water on board. There may be an elegant solution for this challenge, but it’s not in Musk’s current paper.


Wind stress is another challenge. Any structure elevated 100 feet off the ground is going to be under a lot of wind pressure, which will act on it in weird and sometimes multiple directions. If that structure is a heavy tube stretching hundreds of miles in either direction, you effectively have a big sail. Will the concrete pylons be powerful enough to resist that pressure?

The annals of invention history are cluttered with bold ideas that went nowhere.


Think Edison’s Diamond Disc or Tesla’s coils. Think Betamax, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, New Coke, Microsoft’s Clippy, and Segway. Think Ludwig Dürr’s hydrogen blimp and Da Vinci’s gyrocopter. While Musk deserves accolades for putting his idea out to the public, open source-style, the chances of the Hyperloop happening when the actual costs are tallied, timeframes double-checked and potential political red tape measured…well, despite Musk’s claims that you could turn the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco version of this system around inside seven years, I wouldn’t make plans to ring 2020 in riding this thing.

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2013/08/13/...#ixzz2bsKDpifc

[MinutemanCO]

These ideas, no matter their viability have major obstacles to overcome: fiscal, political and physical. Remember, we're dealing with an established infrastructure designed and constructed to accomodate cars, trains and airplanes. These vehicles are predicated on internal combustion for the most part with fuels derived from petroleum products. Trillions of dollars have been expended on the very roadways, tracks, airfields and fuel production to make these conveyances go. Now along comes this fancy new system of high speed travel. Again, no matter its viability, it crashes headlong into the old farts propping up the old system. I'm a designer. I've encountered these negative forces throughout my career. Visionaries are not frequently looked highly upon.

[American Patriot]

It's not only the old "farts" propping up the system, lol, it's the very fact they have to completely change peoples' thinking on this.

Seriously, it sounds like a cool idea. But who is gonna pay for it? And when they decide who is gonna pay for it, do you think the taxpayers will go along? (Because that's who they will decide).

Besides - it's really not a very good mass transit design. It will be EXPENSIVE to go from point A to Point B and there isn't a Point C.

[MinutemanCO]

Besides - it's really not a very good mass transit design. It will be EXPENSIVE to go from point A to Point B and there isn't a Point C.

Agreed. It's an exclusive system for exclusive individuals costing an incredible amount of money. I just like the visionary nature of the concept. It stands apart from the current dessicated ideas that so proliferate our society with mediocrity.

[American Patriot]

Agreed. It's an exclusive system for exclusive individuals costing an incredible amount of money. I just like the visionary nature of the concept. It stands apart from the current dessicated ideas that so proliferate our society with mediocrity.

I didn't consider the "exclusive" part exactly but you're right. I know I said it would be expensive, but I wasn't considering the fact that likely only rich folks would use it.

[MinutemanCO]

If it ever comes into development, I see the Hyperloop as similar to the hypersonic jets - very expensive, available only to relative few
with significant amounts of cash

[American Patriot]

Rumor has it there will be commercial space travel in another year.

Who knows?