I'm excited that Elon is taking steps to make this happen.
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.
There's a phrase at one of Chicago's hackerspaces (and probably at many others): Just Fucking Do It.
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.
Extend it to how you interact with other people and it'll do weird (good) things.
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.
It is cheap because it doesn't account for the hard part of building HSR: buying land, clearing legal hurdles, and indemnizing landowners. I would be happy to see Elon Musk come with a solution for that. We could use some creativity here.
> It is cheap because it doesn't account for the hard part of building HSR: buying land, clearing legal hurdles, and indemnizing landowners.
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.
Right now it's politically, legally, and technologically uncertain. The first two are affected greatly by the last one, so I think this is the correct order of operations.
I don't see how terrorists are any more of a threat than they are to any other rail line. Air flowing into the hyperloop due to a tunnel breach can be detected and signal all cars to stop automatically.
I am almost universally opposed to the position that you would do something great, but are too afraid of terrorists, so I agree with your sentiment. That said, the faster you are going the harder it is to stop. I would much rather be in a conventional train heading towards a break in the tracks than in a hyperloop heading towards a break.
I'm sure that emergency friction braking could be implemented along with other aerodynamic measures to brake the pods at a rate probably only limited by the human occupants.
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.
Isn't Hyperloop a fail-safe design? If you blow a hole in it, the whole thing will start pressurizing and the air friction would slow things down fast (AFAIR pods ain't that aerodynamic, so as long as you shut down that powered air intake in front, it they'll be as aerodynamic as bricks).
The pods weigh something like 0.0X% as much as a train, so stopping them may in fact be far easier due to their tiny mass, regardless of their crazy velocity.
Perhaps the opposite in fact. Modern high-speed rail is a concentrated, semi-fragile target. 200-300mph with 150-200 passengers - a particularly bad combination if you're talking about a terrorist target.
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.
If you read the article, it points out he has barely said a word about the Hyperloop since 2013. The pod-racing competition aspect was also covered in the article.
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.
I think you're a little off on the 100 years bit.
30 years maybe.
The first jet was the German Heinkel He 178 built in 1939. First jet airliner wasn't until 1952. First high speed train was 1962.
If you bought a car 100 years ago, the wheels would come with wooden spokes, it had 2 speeds and a reverse. There was a transmission brake but no brakes on the wheels. No clutch. You had to crank the engine by hand to start it.
>> transportation hasn't really changed a whole lot in the last 100 years or so
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 see the hyperloop's best use case in those countries as high speed package delivery. While you may not have a reason to go across the country in 10 minutes, you might want to have your online purchase shipped across the country in 10 minutes.
I don't know, I'd love to go across the country in 10 minutes. I live in Seattle and have a lot of friends and former co-workers that live in NYC/DC/Boston/Philly. Flying is expensive and miserable. Looping (Can we figure out a gerund for this? Looping sounds wrong) over to Brooklyn for drinks and then heading home sounds awesome. I think it would open up rapid transit in a way that just isn't possible for flight.
In my younger days I had a PVC potato gun which everyone referred to as a "fffoooooont cannon", due to the sound it made when you ignited the hairspray.
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.
100 years ago there were no commercial fixed wing aircraft, just a few zeppelins. Transportation hasn't really changed a whole lot in the last 50 years or so.
What's not mentioned here is California just broke ground on a similar project from "LA to SF" but is more like Burbank to San Jose. It is not only estimated to cost 10x as much, but because it will use existing Amtrak rails not designed for high-speed trains, it will never meet the legal requirement of getting from LA proper to SF proper in 2:40.
The hard part about infrastructure is getting it through cluttered urban environments, like the Peninsula or LA County. The advantage of HSR is that it can use existing tracks to serve San Francisco and Los Angeles before new, more rapid tracks get build. The trains WILL go from LA to SF, even though they won't be high speed all the way at first. Hyperloop can't use existing tracks and in the first draft Hyperloop service was actually linking the outskirts of LA with the outskirts of SF, NOT LA to SF.
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.
The original hyperloop proposal called for the tube to be in the median between the northgoing and southgoing sections of I-5. That's how the 6B$ estimate conveniently avoided land cost.
Yes, that works in the Central Valley, where it is already relatively easy to build HSR. It doesn't in urba areas. The constraint on the profile of the infrastructure, both horizontal and vertical, in a function of the speed. In the end what you need in an infrastructure with the right profile, and that is where the bulk of the cost is, not in the system that runs on it.
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.
> What's not mentioned here is California just broke ground on a similar project from "LA to SF" but is more like Burbank to San Jose.
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.
I'm most surprised by "Also thinking of having an annual student Hyperloop pod racer competition, like Formula SAE".
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.
It's my understanding that the hyperloop test track that's planned for Texas is going to be a small-scale version. This surely means it'll be a short distance but it also likely means that it will be a smaller diameter tube. I think most schools could come up with a 1:3 scale concept with a budget in the realm of 5-figures.
I sort of agree, however most teams also build on the previous year's team. So the first team has a much larger task, but it does get incrementally cheaper and easier. And if there are some initial specs that people can follow, then it's even easier/cheaper.
Many universities participated in the Solar Decathlon housing project, which took up a lot of space (ours was just outside the engineering building): http://www.solardecathlon.gov/
(Edit: This is a reply to a now-deleted comment about a CA ballot question to kill the CA high speed rail project and instead fund a Hyperloop pilot.)
Hyperloop was originally intended to elicit exactly this response—replace a project based on current technology with a pie-in-the-sky research project based on an unproven tech.
There have been many pilot projects in transit tech that were never successful enough to merit subsequent wide deployment. Is anyone connected to airline finances at all concerned about Hyperloop? If Hyperloop was real then airlines would be panicking.
An analysis reported earlier here was that it will either be half as fast as proposed, or will cost more due to requiring larger diameter tubes. [1]
If you read old discussions here on HN you'll find serious questions about the design's ability to cope with both seams and thermal expansion in the tube. [2][3][4] One proposal previously discussed here replaces Musk's design with a knitted carbon fiber tube. [5] Anyone who discounts the seriousness of the thermal expansion issue would do well to read the Heat Orders FAQ from Virginia Railway Express. [6]
Hyperloop is back in the news because the pilot project is Musk's carrot dangled to the state of Texas to allow him to build showrooms, see "Tesla's Musk woos Texas lawmakers with talk of track, car plant". [7] The Hyperloop test track is about benefiting Tesla, not building out Hyperloop. It's a political bargaining chip.
Actually seems like it'd be a decent use of what became of the ill-fated super collider project south of Dallas. A quarter of it has already been bored.
I've been expecting Google to put in one between Mountain View and Google's airport (formerly Moffett Field) for their own employees.
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.
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 very surprised this is being built. Who is paying for it?
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...
I'm sure everyone asked the same questions when people started proposing flight as a legitimate transportation means.
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.
I can actually answer some of that. The first flights were unpressurized and there was no door to break down. The first commercial flight was a Benoist seaplane which flew that trip under 50 feet altitude, though it could fly up to 1,000 feet. The first KLM flight (the oldest airline company still in service) used an Airco de Havilland 16 in 1920, a year before the first pressurized cockpit.
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.
Thanks for the comment. I'm a stats guy who wishes he studied engineering. I'll be more careful in my word choice next time. Learn something new everyday, right?
Most of your scenarios and objections are addressed in the Hyperloop whitepaper. Will these proposed solutions work? Nobody knows. Sounds like a prototype is in order.
I have only seen the one. All of your safety concerns except fire were covered. They really don't mention to much about station design, but does mention the pod withstanding pressurization and depressurization.
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.
That isn't really true. Most engineering projects of the last one hundred years had no prototype and the engineers were able to foresee and eliminate many of the problems.
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.
The prototype isn't just a physical thing. It's an entire process of planning, building and testing that thing. e.g., it includes consideration of the various things you've listed. It goes without saying.
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.
Please - for all that you hold holy and pious, God or singularity - don't admonish this attempt, just for the sake of your momentary instance of peak bliss.
Let us all aim for a better mean of comments than the ones posted on TC, as of this writing:
Then they should self-reprimand for such a poor inflectional decision.
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.
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.