We Think We Know What Elon Musk's Hyperloop Is

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-elon-musks-hyperloop-2013-5

by wtracy • 13 years ago

228 159 13 years ago

andymoe2• 13 years ago

He has already said it is not an evacuated tube though he chooses his words very carefully in all the talks I've seen. It comes up in just about every long interview he has done over the past year.

anologwintermut• 13 years ago

Lets assume it is some kind of maglev in a buried tunnel. How does this effect right-of-way? My understanding is the problem for building even a simple high speed train from LA to SF is principally NIMBYism and the resulting lawsuits . This causes costs to sky rocket as you get delays.

Does digging a tunnel underground solve that ?

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

It will depend on the jurisdiction. In Australia, for example, what's under the ground generally belongs to the Crown in right of the particular State or Territory.

In general, however, almost any amount of haggling, land resumption / compulsory purchase and rezoning is cheaper than building tunnels.

We talk about disruptive startups. Bringing the cost of tunnels down by an order of magnitude would be fairly ... seismic.

(Unfortunately, the Earth is restless and heartless).

venomsnake2• 13 years ago

I suppose the authorities will just use air travel as precedent - nobody needs your permission to build air corridor above your house.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

I think it's even simpler than that; when you own property, don't you typically only own a certain distance down into the ground?

lmm• 13 years ago

There were lawsuits over this when air travel was getting started.

tsotha• 13 years ago

It does, but when they dug a tunnel for the LA subway it cost a billion dollars per mile, so I'm hoping that's not his grand idea.

snogglethorpe3• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that America is famously horrible at doing public projects of this sort cost-effectively (e.g. the NYC 2nd ave subway is roughly four times more expensive per mile than similar projects in other countries, including very expensive countries like Japan). There are various reasons for this, but a lot of it seems to be dysfunctional bidding rules etc. that result in few bids and poor methods for choosing the winner.

Other countries manage to do similar projects for vastly lower costs, and it seems pretty likely that an intelligently run private project in the U.S. could also manage to do a good job of keeping costs down. [It's not just labor costs, etc either—total cost per mile is remarkably similar all over the world, both in cheap countries and expensive ones, except in the U.S.]

rdl5• 13 years ago

I'd rather see something essentially a ramjet-in-a-tube, similar to UW's RAMAC space cannon launcher. Essentially, a long tube filled with correct mixtures of natural gas and oxygen, where a double-cone shaped projectile is accelerated through external (railgun?) means into the breech, and then the compression of gas detonates it right behind the projectile, accelerating it like a ramjet at constant acceleration. For a shuttle, you deaccel by running in reverse from midpoint. It'd be like $100 in natural gas to send 100 people from SF to LA at mach. You'd have to build a low-pressure 1-4m diameter pipeline, totally something we know how to do already for water pipes and natural gas pipelines.

If I had $50mm (or access to that level of capital), I'd probably build one as a LEO satellite launcher. Put 20kg satellites into LEO, full of Ka-band gear, for $100k each, several times a day, 365 days a year. On the side of a mountain in Kenya/Ethiopia/Somalia.

venomsnake2• 13 years ago

How do you brake this thing in normal operation? How do you break this thing during emergency?

Edit: Fixed typo

sounds3• 13 years ago

I think his proposed business model (a satellite launch service) would not concern itself with braking.

If you needed to abort, your only chance would be after launch. So this would probably not be useful for human cargo.

Groxx6• 13 years ago

Wouldn't you have to re-fuel the tube each time? Presumably this would cost more than $100... and how would this work in reverse to slow down?

I would think (probably incorrectly, since I know next to nothing about it) that a ram-based system would inherently have combustion primarily behind whatever tightest-seal exists that's bringing the gasses up to combustion temperature, since doing so would also mean the expansion pushes forward against that seal. Or does simply sealing a bit better cause combustion in front of the seal?

rdl5• 13 years ago

Actually I didn't think as much about how to do deacceleration correctly; you wouldn't be able to just flip it around and do ramjet-style, you'd have to use a progressively more sense fluid to fill the tube, which would create a lot of heat. You could still do braking over a hundred miles, progressively, though.

The main goal (vs. a regular cannon) would be to spread the impulse over a long acceleration area, not all at once like with an explosive-powered gun. People would probably be happiest with <1G.

abcd_f2• 13 years ago

Do you realize how impossibly loud this is going to be?

rdl5• 13 years ago

That's why, for satellite launch, it would go in the Horn of Africa. Maximum volume is at the muzzle, and would pretty much require an exclusion zone of maybe 10 miles out, and would be deafeningly loud for another 50 miles. Mountains would be ideal for this.

ricardobeat3• 13 years ago

This was the most thrown around idea right around when the Hyperloop story came up. Nothing new here.

He also publicy said “It is not an evacuated tunnel”.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4815665, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4806059 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4813416

FD3SA4• 13 years ago

Indeed, putting the old clues together with his new hints narrows it done quite precisely.

It will be a Ground Effect lifting body on an electromagnetic rail. The lift is provided by aerodynamic effects, and thrust is provided by electromagnetic force.

Based on the details of the design, it would be capable of supersonic speeds like the Concord, while employing Ground Effect like an air hockey table, and propelled like a Rail Gun.

The biggest challenges will be keeping the vehicle stable and at a constant distance from the power rail at high speeds, as aerodynamic disturbances can destabilize the vehicle. Given Elon's expertise with rockets, this should not be too difficult.

EDIT:

An prototype of a ground effect train:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaOnrIRf_Mg

Elon's will use electromagnetic propulsion instead of electric fans.

EDIT 2: I just realized this may be Elon's electric jet idea. He may use a ram-air electric jet at high speeds, and only use the power rail to get the vehicle to supersonic speeds where the ram-air engines are most efficient. This would make it MUCH cheaper than maglev by eliminating the power rail on the majority of the track.

EDIT 3: Rail gun diagram.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/rail-gun1.htm

The walls of the guideway will likely house the propulsion system.

InclinedPlane2• 13 years ago

Musk has said that his idea of the hyperloop involves a system that "can never crash". Assuming that he's not just talking about really robust safety protocols and instead is referring to some inherent property of the system I think there's probably some missing detail here.

Although I think overall this is probably pretty close.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

If the track is not evacuated, what happens to the supersonic shock wave off the nose of the train? Seems to me it would reflect off the ground and enclosing walls, causing all sorts of turbulence.

curiousDog• 13 years ago

The soviet Ekranoplan is another cool vehicle that makes use of ground effect: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun_class_ekranoplan

dmiladinov• 13 years ago

Half serious, half tongue-in-cheek, but he's apparently had this idea since at least Iron Man 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuG2AVFB-g0

cpeterso2• 13 years ago

But where could he actually build such a long, and presumably straight, railway? He said the system has no "right of way" issues.

Groxx6• 13 years ago

>The VHST would have to be underground.

Anyone have any idea why? It seems to me like seismic shifting underground would be many times worse than above-ground, if only because you have to dig to make room (either before or after such shifts).

sounds3• 13 years ago

NORAD and the LHC are examples of successful underground projects that have addressed the seismic issues.

I agree with you that to reach the level of safety consumers will demand, more thought needs to go into it. But it's not impossible, which was kind of in line with what the article was saying.

Groxx6• 13 years ago

Are there earthquakes around NORAD (it has long underground tubes?) and the LHC? I really have no idea, and Google is failing me (and it's slow going, very bad internet connection at the moment). And I feel I should point out that the LHC doesn't cross major fault-lines like any trans-USA transportation system would have to do (or even SF to LA, which is explicitly used as an example, and presumably that's much easier than LA to NY (which also crosses the San Andreas fault line)).

Anyway, I'm questioning underground tubes in places where the earth moves at "about 33 to 37 millimeters (1.3 to 1.5 in) a year across California."[1]. While that's not much per year, it adds up, and presumably such a large project would be built to last more than a couple decades (or plan for fairly routine major construction work to keep things straight).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andreas_Fault#Plate_moveme...

snogglethorpe3• 13 years ago

Note that Japan's Chuo Shinkansen is to be approximately 60% underground (much of that "deep underground").

... and it's real-world, actually-being-built, long-distance (about 300km for the first phase), safety-critical (transports passengers at high-speed), market-financed project in a highly seismically active area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen

cookingrobot• 13 years ago

As long as we're guessing, here's my idea. An electrically propelled train in a tube. Instead of evacuating the tunnel you have ducts in the walls that vent the high-pressure air from in front of the train to the low-pressure sides/bottom/rear of the train. This should reduce the energy wasted trying to push a shockwave through the tunnel, and would use the air pressure to keep the train off the walls. This would fit with his "air-hockey" comment, and wouldn't be an evacuated tunnel - which he said it isn't.

edit: And the "loop" part of the name is because the air ducts are loops the same length as the train. They move the air directly from in front where it's high pressure to the rear where it's low pressure.

nitrogen2• 13 years ago

My guess: Musk is throwing random keywords at the Internet, then feeding all the speculative ideas generated by smart geeks to his engineering team until they come up with the real product ;-).

nickik• 13 years ago

The Hivemind is read.

nitrogen2• 13 years ago

After I posted this, I noticed a top level comment with the same idea from an account that's been dead for nearly two years, apparently for posting an Office Space joke:

stiller 3 hours ago | link [dead]

At this rate, Elon can simply wait until somebody comes up with a viable plan and say, "yes, that's what Hyperloop was all along."

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stiller

saraid2162• 13 years ago

Robert Jordan actually joked he did this with his novels. He'd just read fansites to see what was the most plausible explanation for an event and go with it.

mbenjaminsmith• 13 years ago

I would go one step further and say that the mechanism you describe would also keep the train off the floor (and would possibly be handled by the train, not the tunnel). It seems to me that using electromagnets for propulsion only and not for levitation would drastically reduce costs.

I could only guess at the aerodynamics but I have a feeling you could just give the train a flat bottom and make the end of the train pointed like the intake of a jet engine. At speed it would compress the air and force it between the train and the floor of the tube in a way similar to how an air bearing functions. (Actually all sides, assuming it was rectangular, would work in the same way.)

btilly3• 13 years ago

I had the same guess. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2012/11/speculating-about-hyper... for proof.

In thinking afterwards about the many good comments that dpark made in the resulting HN discussion, I convinced myself that while my idea was neat, it was unlikely to be correct. (I did not say so anywhere in the discussion because by the time I had worked this out for myself, the discussion was long over.)

Vivtek• 13 years ago

Yeah, there are real problems with an evacuated tunnel - such as the fact that any air leak in its hundreds of miles makes it a non-evacuated tunnel. Do something like this and you've got the best of both worlds.

Elon Musk is making America something I'm proud of again. Or at least trying.

aidenn0• 13 years ago

I seem to recall Musk specifically said it's not an evacuated tunnel. However, air leaks aren't a huge problem. You just need them to be slower than the pumps that run to maintain low-pressure; since the flow into the tunnel from leaks will increase as the pressure drops in the tunnel, you will reach an equilibrium at some point. For a really leaky tunnel that might be near 1atm; for a well-sealed tunnel it will be near 0atm; a practical transportation tunnel will balance construction and maintenance costs against the diminishing returns of lower pressures.

joezydeco• 13 years ago

I personally believe Musk is smart enough to avoid thinking about digging tunnels in earthquake zones.

alwaysinshade• 13 years ago

> Hyperloop is a “cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table.”

I'm thinking Wing in Ground Effect [1], where small vehicles are launched to supersonic speeds using electromagnetic slings (and perhaps then use their own power to super-cruise to the destination and eventually decelerate). You wouldn't need much infrastructure - the cost would be in the vehicles and launching mechanisms.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_In_Ground_Effect

schiffern3• 13 years ago

That doesn't sound very "immune to weather" to me.

omegant2• 13 years ago

It must be inmune to weather and take into account that it will be supersonic at least, so it must be covered. Also Elon is very good at going to the basics of the problem like: -Cost of installing the system -pass rights -cost of raw material -current state of technology (lots of legacy tech on transportation) and "easy" improvements of Efficiency with improved implementation.

Given that thanks to his actual business he has great knowledge of high speed aerodinamics, electromagnetism electrical propulsion and energy storage..

My bet is towards an elevated light tube (not vacuum) that works as a induction propulsor for the vehicle and condensor battery(you may use solar panels on top to recharge it). Also it insulates the "train-plane" from the weather and the exterior from the sonic shock. The vehicle will be like a electromagnetic train but just for impulsion and braking, it will use the shock waves and ground effect to hold the weight and stabilization. That way the electromagnetic fields don't need to be generated with expensive systems. The tube could use high voltage lines right of way and some simple metal towers to hold the actual system. I don't know if it makes sense but if something like this really can work it will be way cheaper that current high speed trains, vacuum capable tube or spinning megatons of steel at high speed through highly populated areas(a mechanical failure has the capability of wiping entire neighborhoods like a wire lawn mower).

SuperChihuahua• 13 years ago

While that article says it will take 21 minutes to travel from LA to NY, Elon explained that the Hyperloop will make you travel from LA to SF in less than 30 minutes. It's a matter of definition, but I believe the Hyperloop is slower.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

You have to love a guy you looks at massive, capital-intensive projects and thinks "I should do that" instead of "shit let's do something easier."

abcd_f2• 13 years ago

Let's do a beautiful ToDo app :)

vidarh3• 13 years ago

I sometimes think the perfect todo app is harder than colonising Mars.

jwr3• 13 years ago

Elon Musk looks increasingly like someone straight out of Ayn Rand's work. He's the present day Ellis Wyatt or Henry Rearden, tackling grand projects that others shy away from.

He deserves respect just for that — looking beyond the next quarter's bottom line. Just look at the contrast this creates with all the managers whose plans for the next quarter are "let's spend slightly more on marketing".

seehafer• 13 years ago

I want to archive your comment and bring it up again next time there's a discussion of Rand on HN. Musk is her idea of a businessman-hero (yes, government loans notwithstanding... he doesn't have the luxury of playing in a free market to begin with, energy is already highly regulated and subsidized), not the current crop of Wall Street bankers.

alphydan• 13 years ago

well, Ayn Rand modulo all the public money he uses in his ventures (state environmental credits for Tesla, contracts with NASA ... ie. taxpayers money, research grants, etc, etc). Then again Ayn Rand did suck state bottle with medicaire and social security. I'm not saying the projects are not ambitious and amazing. But they would not grow so quickly without the State.

nikster• 13 years ago

Elon Musk is the last big industrialist alive, after Jobs passing. If his endeavors succeed he'll be remembered alongside Edison, Franklin, Ford, Jobs etc. It's admirable.

I just don't think it has anything to do with Ayn Rand and her philosophy.

Strangely I just had a discussion about rational thinking and I kind of failed to make a point. Rational thinking is better than irrationality and crazy Bible-thumpers, but you really need to get over that. You need to see past this, you need to pass it by and leave it behind as a neat idea born out of the greatest misconception there ever has been: "I think therefore I am". The reality is - I am, therefore I can think.

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

Shall we keep the economic kooks & Elon Musk in separate bins?

deftnerd3• 13 years ago

A previous HN discussion brought up the possibility of a Launch Loop and several descriptions of that proposal seem to fit very well.

A Launch Loop is an iron cable just 2 inches thick that runs inside of a sheath at tens of thousands of miles an hour. The sheath has electromagnets inside of it to accelerates the cable. The motion of the cable would cause the loop to curve and raise into the sky.

To outside observers, it would look like a giant version of the St. Louis arch with the peak nearly in low earth orbit, but only a few inches thick. The magic comes with the fact that the iron cable can be used for travel by using electromagnetic attraction to the iron cable through the sheath.

What's interesting is that while there are several engineering challenges, unlike a space elevator, this wouldn't require any materials technologies that don't already exist today. The iron cable could be made by existing forges that make the cabling for bridges, and the electromagnetic sheath could borrow a lot of existing technologies from the hard drive manufacturing industry.

It would also fit with his previous work on Space X and Solar Cities to some extent.

A launch loop can be used to transport cargo or passengers high enough that the energy required to get them into orbit is very inexpensive, which ties into his Space X work.

The external sheath of the Launch Loop could have solar panels on it to power the electromagnets that help keep the loop in motion, and even when the sun goes down, millions of tons of iron spinning like a flywheel has enough kinetic energy to keep going until the sun rises again.

I wouldn't be surprised if he ran across the concept when he was researching ways to get into space before he founded Space X, and it's his "Step 2".

Lastly, if you had a giant cable stretched across the sky that worked kind of like a bicycle brake cable in its sheath, but the cable was running through the system at 30k mph in a giant loop, what better name than Hyperloop? It also explains why a trip that he describes as being twice as fast as an airplane would take 30 minutes. It takes more time to go to LEO and back down

Keep an eye out for Musk buying any patents on electromagnetics or him buying a oceanic cable-laying ship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

btilly3• 13 years ago

That suggestion fits amazingly well.

I have no idea how I missed that previous HN discussion, but I must have. Because I'd remember if I'd seen that suggestion.

schiffern3• 13 years ago

I put forward my argument here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4806458

Of course, Elon Musk had to throw a wrench in it. From SXSW:

>[The Hyperloop is] not exactly a train. It's a new mode of transportation that doesn't exist. It could be underground or above-ground.

An underground Lofstrom loop seems unlikely.

The most revealing hints are the speed and the cost. Musk says it'll be cheaper than the LA-SF high-speed rail, which is so expensive because the allowable turn radius is enormous. Their right-of-way acquisition is constrained by ruthless physics. Since the allowable radius scales as square of velocity, anything doing LA-SF in 30 minutes will move more or less in a straight line (except near the endpoints).

So it has to be a straight line, but also avoid right-of-way issues. In my mind the Lofstrom loop is still the only option that fits.

deftnerd3• 13 years ago

Also of interest, the worlds most authoritative subject on Launch Loops is Keith Lofstrom [1]. He maintains a wiki on the subject with amazing information on the concept. [2]

He also maintains a wiki on one of his other projects, Server Sky, a push to get a cloud of micro-satellites in orbit for public access. A literal cloud of servers. [3]

What caught my eye is that Keith Lofstrom spoke at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) this year and he has a ton of patents under his belt. He's not a kook and seems to really have done his homework on the subject. That makes me think that it's a plausible technology.

[1] http://www.keithl.com/ [2] http://launchloop.com/ [3] http://server-sky.com/

vijucat• 13 years ago

Here is a video of the Lofstrom Loop that I found on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCwVjUZV92Q

hansy• 13 years ago

Musk explicitly mentions, "If you put solar panels on it, you generate more power than you would consume in the system. There's a way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries." [1]

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/29/4378468/elon-musk-teases-j...

tripzilch2• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm reading over it, but the article you link doesn't actually seem to contain that quote?

uvdiv• 13 years ago

I think that might be true of launch loops? The cable has incredible kinetic energy, but it is magnetically suspended in a vacuum tube, so its power loss could be low.

phreeza• 13 years ago

What happens to the sonic boom in this scenario? I understand that is the main obstacle to conventional supersonic flights above or close to land, how would this be different?

Someone• 13 years ago

The tubed is pumped vacuum. See http://launchloop.com/VelocityShear. That also argumentatie that having a heavy fast-moving Core close to a heavy stationery ouder tube is less of a problem than having a hard disk platter close to a stationry 1 gram (possibly less) disk head. I do not quite get that. The damage, once something goes wrong, is way higher, so we should make a much larger effort to decrease the probability that something goes wrong.

joshuahedlund• 13 years ago

That sounds interesting for, say, a sci-fi novel, but in the real world I wouldn't want to be responsible for dealing with infrastructure maintenance, earthquakes, tornadoes... Can you imagine if even part of something like that collapsed?

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

Over the ocean? Would be relatively minor impact even for a catastrophic failure.

The thing is the speeds - anything that can do NYC-LA in minutes is going to have a catastrophic failure mode that kills everyone in a big radius. I am just trying to imagine the London Underground at 14,000 mph.

madaxe• 13 years ago

It could of course also just be a good old-fashioned mass driver, based on his descriptions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver

tocomment2• 13 years ago

It's starting to sound like this is the right idea.

For you I have questions 3...

1. How do you avoid friction between the cable and the sheath?

2. Isn't the process of using eddy currents to generate motion very ineffient?

3. Would it be possible to build a small scale low speed version as a proof of concept?

tocomment2• 13 years ago

I guess the only problem with his is your have to put it 5+ miles out into the ocean and there's really no way you can sail out that far, take the trip and sail back in under 30 minutes.

richtr• 13 years ago

Since we are generally speculating here, is there any possibility the Hyperloop could be a suborbital craft to escape the atmosphere and thus reduce journey times dramatically.

That doesn't really work for "San Francisco to LA" but Richard Branson has mentioned this as an objective for Virgin Galactic "within the next 20 years". I'd be surprised if SpaceX, and hence Elon Musk, were not also looking in to this considering the technology they are creating.

john_w_t_b• 13 years ago

I hope this is it. Suborbital hops between cities would be a spectacular ride. Minimal ground infrastructure needed also.

oelmekki• 13 years ago

> History has shown that some obvious projects, such as tunneling under the English Channel proposed in the time of Napoleon, can be delayed for centuries because of political pressures

I really don't see why, french empire and united kingdom were such good friends :)

On a side note, I feel very sad to consider we could have a mean to travel the world at cheap cost for four decades, and it still cost a salary and sometime about 24h to go to the other side of the world. With all other things Musk has talked about, it really makes think humanity seriously lags.

JackpotDen2• 13 years ago

If you want a good head screw, think about the Baghdad battery and the Antikythera mechanism.

Now imagine if the Turing church hypothesis was figured out back then.

ck2• 13 years ago

This is like something you'd read in popular science a decade ago where they are theorizing the 22nd century.

But people are very messy, annoying creatures.

Imagine all the social problems of a typical jet or subway ride today, now put them in a closed tube across the country.

The ride may take 30 minutes but the TSA line will be an hour to grope you.

At best this would work for cargo. But we'll have automated, self-driving semitrailers decades before this ever happens.

BuddhaSource• 13 years ago

Elon Musk knows how to keep Tesla and himself in the news.

Tesla is successful so far only because of his strategic marketing. People have build great stuff in the past but not really appreciated because they did not market well.

There is huge learning from this. I personally like his execution.

pbreit• 13 years ago

Don't forget that the car itself got the highest rating ever from one of the most independent reviewing organizations in existence. But, yes, the marketing is pretty terrific, too.

presspot• 13 years ago

Standing on the downtown BART platforms you can't help but think about (and literally feel) the massive amounts of air being pushed around by the trains.

An evacuated tunnel would do wonders for both efficiency and hair styles.

AliAdams• 13 years ago

Successfully isolating from earth movements would be my biggest worry about a project like that. The system is going to need a good bit of flexibility built in.

ubernostrum• 13 years ago

So he's going into the burrito business?

bigiain• 13 years ago

Exactly what I thought.

(For those not "in" on the joke: http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_t... )

IvyMike• 13 years ago

Supposedly, sections of the East Side Access subway project in New York cost upwards of one million dollars per foot. I can't imagine how much a vacuum-sealed tunnel would cost.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

The costs of East Side Access is almost entirely due to tunneling deep under one of the most heavily built-up areas on the planet, without disruption to either above-ground or underground activities.

Musk's system, if it works, will cost a bundle on this fact alone. Any corridor that would justify such a high speed system would also be stupidly expensive to build through, both to acquire the rights to, and to construct without completely destroying everything along its path.

tachyonbeam• 13 years ago

The article makes it seem like politics are the only problem. Another problem is that this would be very very expensive. Magnetic levitation train tracks are already expensive. How much is it going to cost to build a vacuum tunnel with some sort of magnetic propulsion system built into the walls of it, not to mention the supporting infrastructure (vacuum pumps, power distribution, safety exits, maintenance tunnels)? Probably not achievable with the current cost of labor and parts (and all the overbilling happening everywhere).

Then there's the danger. What if an earthquake happens? What if the tunnels leak and air or water seeps in? What if your magnetic stabilization system fails for a fraction of a second and your train floating at 14000MPH grazes against the sides of the tunnel? If an accident happened in one of those tunnels, it could easily kill everyone onboard, and disable the tunnel for months.

It's a really nice and futuristic idea, the kind that would once again make the world a smaller place (commuting from SF to NY for work, anyone?), but it probably won't happen until we can really prove such a thing is safe, and we change from capitalism to an economical model where we build things like this because, you know, they're good for humanity as a whole.

Personally I think a project like this would be good for the American economy, but then so would massive investment in solar power plants. Instead you guys gave fat checks to the banks.

danielmendoza• 13 years ago

Odd that this article popped up on Yahoo today:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-now/futuristic-high-spe...

"A company called ET3 has plans in the works for the Evacuated Tube Transport, a high-speed transportation tube that uses magnetic levitation."

Dnguyen• 13 years ago

Can I build a generator on top of this? Since it's a metal object, I just need to build some magnetic rings along the way, et voila!

We Think We Know What Elon Musk's Hyperloop Is

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