
Elon Musk Will Build a Hyperloop Track for Ultra-High Speed Transport Tests - phreeza
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/15/elon-musk-will-build-a-hyperloop-track-for-ultra-high-speed-transport-tests/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
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grecy
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.

~~~
NegativeK
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.

~~~
grecy
JFDI - I like that a lot. Thanks.

I'm going to add more JFDI to my life.

~~~
FlailFast
Can we call the conscious cultivation of this attitude the JFDI Mind Trick? :)

~~~
julsonl
Just Effin Do It?

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saturdayplace
As far as I can tell, this tweet:
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555803747792609280](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555803747792609280)
is the only thing he's said about it at the moment.

Looks like he's also planning on having an annual pod-racing competition:
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555804403504918528](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555804403504918528)

~~~
DigitalSea
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.

Bring on the Hyperloop. I am tired of flying.

~~~
at-fates-hands
>> 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.

~~~
0x5f3759df-i
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.

~~~
remarkEon
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.

~~~
Fuzzwah
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.

~~~
thewelder
hairspray? we always used ether (starting fluid).

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firlefans
I'm finding it hard to tell the difference between:

[https://twitter.com/boredelonmusk](https://twitter.com/boredelonmusk)

and

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk](https://twitter.com/elonmusk)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah. @boredelonmusk is my favourite Twitter profile and I often can't see
where the serious part ends and the joke starts.

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BlakePetersen
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.

Can someone please introduce Gerry Brown to Elon?

~~~
erispoe
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.

edit:typos

~~~
es09
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.

~~~
erispoe
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.

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grmarcil
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.

~~~
mikeyouse
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.

~~~
butwhy
What does the length of the track have to do with anything? They're making the
pod that sits in the track (independent of length).

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pasbesoin
I doubt Musk will ever be "poor". And now he is assembling, running, and
driving organizations (1) that appear to be "just fucking doing it". Bravo.

\----

1) And/or creating and enabling organizations with their own inherent drives.

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oxtopus
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.

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trhway
my hope is that Hyperloop is just a starting point for Musk in high-speed
transport systems and Hyperloop 2.0 will be a ground launch system :)

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Animats
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.

~~~
threeseed
You're joking right ?

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.

~~~
Animats
_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?

~~~
threeseed
Light planes aren't used for mass transit.

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.

------
Someone1234
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...

~~~
remarkEon
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.

~~~
dalke
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.

~~~
remarkEon
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?

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wozniacki
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:

[http://i.imgur.com/7BBvKQc.png](http://i.imgur.com/7BBvKQc.png)

Thx.

~~~
wozniacki
Why was I downvoted?

I have no affiliation with Mr. Musk or his projects, private or commercial.

Does this need to be explicitly delineated ?

~~~
phreeza
Probably because people thought your comment didn't add anything constructive
to the discussion

~~~
wozniacki
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.

