Hyperloop

http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop

by spikels • 13 years ago

2666 941 13 years ago

spacex.com

Andrenid• 13 years ago

Announcement any minute now according to Elon Musk's twitter: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/366964441159438337

Edit: First article - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-12/revealed-elo...

Edit2: Site OP linked to is up, but may be cached for you. Try http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop?1

untog3• 13 years ago

A "coming soon" page is at the top of HN?

frankblizzard• 13 years ago

for the second time now, yes. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6201160 which was closed

treeform• 13 years ago

I think a lot of people (including me) are excited by what he has to say. By all indication it should have showed up 7min ago.

kevin_rubyhouse2• 13 years ago

It should have been already published (at 1:30 pacific time.) https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/366964441159438337

btilly3• 13 years ago

SpaceX has a history of failed launches before settling into a routine of spectacular success.

Hopefully their inability to publish this page on time will prove to be another example of the same. ;-)

lem72• 13 years ago

I have never been more excited for a coming soon page.

sethbannon• 13 years ago

It's very interesting that this is a SpaceX project. Why not Tesla, or another company entirely?

fourstar• 13 years ago

Probably because SpaceX has more autonomy since it doesn't need to meet the expectations of shareholders -- the same reason Musk isn't planning on an IPO with SpaceX for a really really long time.

cryptoz• 13 years ago

I think the SpaceX IPO is planned for about 5-10 years from now - that's not too long. The only indication we have is that MCT will be making regular trips to Mars before SpaceX IPOs, and they seem pretty set on that happening in the next decade.

deletes• 13 years ago

They just quickly needed a webpage to display the data.

kevin_rubyhouse2• 13 years ago

Elon said that he isn't going to work on his Hyperloop idea. http://www.businessinsider.com/musk-too-busy-for-hyperloop-2...

tephra• 13 years ago

He has said that he will not do it himself, just publish the idea and let someone else do it.

gkoberger• 13 years ago

EDIT: It was posted both places, so I wouldn't read into it at all (http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop)

-----------

I wouldn't read into that. Musk has said he has no intention of developing it; he probably just needed a place to put it. SpaceX makes as much sense as anything else.

That being said -- hopefully he lied when he said he had no interest, in order to quell speculation until the announcement. Kind of like how Apple says they'll never ever launch certain things... right up until they do it.

marvin• 13 years ago

This is not going to happen. It is a very rich, successful engineer musing at what might be possible if we thought radically different about transportation. I'm as big a fan of Elon Musk's projects as anyone, but the weight assigned to these napkin calculations is ridiculous.

[Edit: If anything, this might lead people to take this type of eccentric and radical design more seriously. But given the criticism Musk's engineering ventures have had before, I wouldn't count on it.]

kenshiro_o• 13 years ago

I hope this happens. I've only started reading the .pdf and cannot claim I will understand everything but it seems like a very promising read. If Musk can partner with Richard Branson and other billionaires (along with contributions from people on the web) it could happen!

argumentum• 13 years ago

Feedback is welcomed on these or any useful aspects of the Hyperloop design. E-mail feedback to hyperloop@spacex.com or hyperloop@teslamotors.com.

- from the pdf

faramarz• 13 years ago

It is also cross-posted on Tesla

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

Recoil42• 13 years ago

It's on the Tesla site as well. http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop

rthomas64• 13 years ago

From the PDF:

"Feedback would be most welcome – please send to hyper loop@spacex.com or hyperloop@teslamotors.com . I would like to thank my excellent compadres at both companies for their help in putting this together."

polarix• 13 years ago

HYPE*rloop

bobzimuta• 13 years ago

Cache needs busting http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop?a=b

nm, they fixed it

dwaltrip• 13 years ago

Hot damn it's there

jcfrei• 13 years ago

thanks! here's the actual pdf: http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-201...

pedelman• 13 years ago

http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-201...

rbhatia• 13 years ago

its up now

mwein• 13 years ago

It's now up on http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop

MarcScott• 13 years ago

It's there now. No longer a holding page

aresant• 13 years ago

"In the case of the Hyperloop, Musk started focusing on public transportation after he grew disenchanted with the plans for California’s high-speed rail system."

And who says that big government stifles entrepreneurial innovation?

If ALL Musk does with the Hyperloop announcement is shed more light on the potential debacle that is to be our $70b+ high-speed rail in California, we owe him a debt of gratitude.

PS - Direct link to the Hyperloop plans .PDF http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-201...

zeckalpha• 13 years ago

Comments on the whitepaper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6201728

melling• 13 years ago

So, we have "light shed" on the current "debacle" and neither system gets built. That's a win? HSR was first commerically available in 1964. Yes, it got really expensive waiting 50 years. I imagine it'll be even more expensive in another 20-30. California is going to get even more crowded.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Not building the HSR that is envisioned is the win.

tptacek3• 13 years ago

That's an argument in favor of a useful HSR system. But politics have resulted California's HSR system being deliberately pessimized; it may do more harm than good to the HSR cause, right?

mhartl• 13 years ago

So, we have "light shed" on the current "debacle" and neither system gets built. That's a win?

Yes, preventing a debacle is a win.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

California will get more crowded, but it will continue to be a disaster of urban planning, limiting the utility of HSR.

It's mind boggling to me that the California HSR isn't being built from DC to Boston instead.

lmg643• 13 years ago

Interesting point that big government provoked the advancement of the hyperloop idea - counterintuitive idea, and clearly yes. but any idea like this will need government cooperation. The real test of big government will be how they respond to the hyperloop.

magic response: "of course we may be wrong, we'll look into this immediately." and then they decide to build it.

likely answer: praise, perhaps even an evaluation, then disregard as unrealistic a year from now.

why would "big government" ignore this idea? fairly simple: risky and unproven, for a politician, in a career where risk is not related to upside; and probably more important is the ability to control $70bn in spending to private citizens and contractors - far more valuable to their careers (leading to donations and influence) than spending a smaller amount (a mere $7bn) on fewer contractors. For the most part, the hyperloop contractors would not be the same guys who have been donating to politicians for the past decade in support of the train.

so yes, big government and the natural corruption of a large budget (donations->spending with favored constituents) will likely lead to the status quo - a ludicrously overpriced train.

as far as political repercussions, california is not a two party state any more, so there's no one to capitalize on the idiocy of the folks in power. i guess, we reap what we sow.

adventureartist2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't be so fast to make that declaration. Elon Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX are pretty influential players right now, and I don't think anyone reading this white paper are anything less than wide eyed at the possibility that the future of travel is written right here and we could build it, for cheaper than the current slow expensive system.

Influential people and money people and politicians are all going to read this and say Sounds great. Elon Musk? I'm listening. 7 Billion? Go on. And scientists are going to chime in, and universities, and people always forget the global reactions. Momentum.

I'm going to keep my faith that this idea has legs.

bsbechtel• 13 years ago

Um, pressure your representative to support this idea instead of a high-speed rail system?

ewoodrich3• 13 years ago

It was approved by a ballot measure, so in this case it may be the "idiocy" (or will) of the voter.

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...

abruzzi2• 13 years ago

The problem is that, at least with the CA high speed rail system, the design is all theoretical at the moment. It may be a brilliant idea, but but moving from the core ideas in the document to actual working, build-able products, can be a slow process. And given the state of where CA is on their project, that may not put them on the same window.

9999• 13 years ago

Jerry Brown's political career is coming to an end, so there are no long term political consequences for him. He's also traditionally been an opponent of government waste. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that he would choose an unproven but promising technology over our existing useless high speed rail project. The assembly is another matter. If you think hyperloop is interesting, write and call your state assembly member and encourage them to consider this plan, that's what I'll do.

dllthomas6• 13 years ago

How about spend the full amount, but on more links? That way, you're employing probably more people, both short term and long term.

smadge2• 13 years ago

Are you seriously saying that government wont consider Hyperloop because they are averse to innovation? On the contrary, "big government" has been the largest engine of innovation the past century. NASA has put people into orbit, and on to the Moon, has launched the first space stations, and made several robotic probes to other planets and the depths of space. Musk founded SpaceX which has managed to do a fraction of the things NASA has decades after them. In 1972, the Rand corporation, financed by the United States, thoroughly researched a "Very High Speed Transit System" that is similar to Musk's proposal. Sure there will be political difficulties implementing something like The Very High Speed Transit System or Hyperloop, but realistically the government is the only entity that has the foresight, money, and motivation to undertake such a project.

meddlepal• 13 years ago

The reason this will never be built is because it's incredibly unproven. At least with HSR the unknowns are sort of understood and the costs can be calculated. Nobody knows what the unknown costs are with Hyperloop.

Not to mention safety. Nobody is going to just trust Musk to say it's safe. There will be a decade of trials to test it before it even gets green light approval for a small practically useable section.

dragonwriter23• 13 years ago

as far as political repercussions, california is not a two party state any more

The Republicans haven't yet adapted to the people of the State taking away their ability to roadblock budgets from the minority, which is a crutch they'd come to rely on to avoid dealing with the difficulty of trying to build a minimum winning coalition in CA while at the same time toeing the line of the national party.

I'd be surprised though if they haven't started returning to being an effective opposition by the 2014 elections.

mncolinlee• 13 years ago

Having run for state office three times in Minnesota, I can respond to some of this.

Politicians aren't all afraid to take risks, especially when they believe a particular policy they like will live on and be remembered.

Our former governor Jesse Ventura overcame incredible resistance and media scorn to get our first light rail line built. Almost all casual observers thought major health care reform was impossible in Washington. These things actually happened.

The key to passing a good policy is to reduce the risk. Politicians love projects where someone else was the guinea pig for them and/or someone else pays for studies and prototypes. Usually, they look for other units of government that have done something very similar with great success.

If I wanted to get Hyperloop to pass, I would first aim to table discussions on high speed rail for the proposed route. You would find allies among politicians who don't want to spend any money on transit, usually to appease highway contractors.

Secondly, I would immediately aim to seek R&D money for a high-profile demonstration project with plenty of funding for a study to project potential costs and impacts. This effort should even begin before the high speed rail bidding is tabled. I would leverage the demonstration results in the media and build a grassroots and lobbying organization around support for a Hyperloop.

Finally, I would seek advice from experts to craft a model bill with appropriate requirements for the bidding process.

threeseed• 13 years ago

Can you please clarify why the high speed rail is likely to be a debacle ?

It seems pretty clear that California needs it and generally HSR is a pretty sensible infrastructure investment.

spikels4• 13 years ago

As currently envisioned CA HSR is likely to be more expensive and slower than current air travel. This is before the virtually certain cost overruns. To be competitively priced it would require large subsidies but still would be no faster than alternatives.

That said like you I would love to see a superior alternative to the current situation but CA HSR is probably not it.

Edit: added some references

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_15746975

http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/08/01/3419259/high-speed-rail-...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-califor...

DannyBee6• 13 years ago

The same reason san francisco has built like 100 or 200 new housing units in the past year, and the same reason the california coastal commission was being sued (and found unconstitutional, etc):

California has a very large amount of regulatory burden compared to almost anywhere else in the US. High speed rail there is likely to cost overrun by a massive factor, and under deliver by a massive factor, and both, for no actually good reason, instead, only theoretically good ones.

flomo2• 13 years ago

Can you please clarify why the high speed rail is likely to be a debacle ?

I don't believe that high speed rail will necessarily be a debacle.

But the route was largely chosen for political considerations. It was decided downtown San Jose, Fresno, and Bakersfield must have stations. (This requires an additional long tunnel, and urban construction is much more expensive.) The route takes a detour through Palmdale[1], an underdeveloped part of Los Angeles County.

The 'straight shot' route down I-5 that Musk proposes was also considered for HSR, and rejected even though it would have been much cheaper and simpler to construct.

[1] http://www.cahsrblog.com/2013/06/the-truth-about-tejon/

javert5• 13 years ago

Among other things, rail is worthless in CA, because you need a car to get anywhere anyway.

If you can afford to rent a car at the end of your train ride, you can afford a plane ticket.

In my opinion, most likely, the CA rail proposal is just a political folly being undertaken by corruptocrats who have ideas to profit from it.

Yes, the rail would be useful for poor people who want to visit family, but that is not a business case, and does not justify harvesting tens of billions from the innocent citizens of CA. (Even if a tyranny of the majority voted to do it.)

LekkoscPiwa4• 13 years ago

but why to ask California State for subsidy? Why not to build it using private funds? I'd imagine that if this is economically sound idea there must be potential investors lining up to have their share in the Project? The estimated cost is $7B. Now, Musk just needs to make a few calls to his friends at Google, Amazon, etc. Can't these guys just form a company together just to build it?

Maybe I'm naive... or maybe Musk for all his genius is focused on the Government grants too much instead of being focused on the investors in the business world.

If this brings profit, everybody want to own piece of the pie, no?

simonw• 13 years ago

You need government backing to acquire the land.

milesskorpen• 13 years ago

The proposal calls for the line to built alongside I-5, which requires government involvement.

dragonwriter23• 13 years ago

but why to ask California State for subsidy? Why not to build it using private funds?

Because you can't, in practice, acquire the rights of way necessary to build a substantial railroad/hyperloop/freeway or other major infrastructure project of that type without government (specifically, without use of eminent domain).

geoffschmidt• 13 years ago

(1) CA is much better positioned to straighten out the land use issues. It needs to use the existing I-5 right of way, it needs to tunnel through some mountains, and it probably needs to eminent domain some additional bits of land for pylon bases where I-5 curves too sharply. No matter what, this is a project that has to pass the legislature in order to get built.

(2) A CA-sponsored bond issue must be by far the lowest cost way to finance a $7B infrastructure project that's amortized over 30 years.

thrownaway24248• 13 years ago

For the same reason that Musk needed a huge, free government loan to get Tesla off the ground: without the government, he'd be less rich.

ibudiallo2• 13 years ago

Bill gates can reach for his wallet and fund this. He won't even notice it.

Someone get me his phone number right this moment.

mehwoot• 13 years ago

Well the issue, apart from getting the land to build, is probably that the public benefits a great deal more than a company can profit off. There are always going to be intangible benefits from huge infrastructure projects like this that a company can't monetize. Hence what is economically a good idea for the nation or state as a whole, is not necessarily a good idea for a private investor.

riggins• 13 years ago

the investors in the business world.

few investors would touch this. It doesn't fit into any investment category that's approved.

There are infrastructure funds but they're looking for sleepy assets. Stuff like toll roads and ports that have an established operating history and are supposed to be low risk.

This is a whole different animal. It's almost infrastructure VC. I don't see how this fits in any part of the institutional world. That leaves wealthy individuals and I don't think there'd be a lot of interest there. They're looking at Berkshire and steady growth vs. an investment in speculative infrastructure. I could see $10M investments but I think it'd be hard to get people to put a big chuck of their net worth into it, which is what you need (i.e. you need a couple people putting in $1-2B). Furthermore, historically public transportation hasn't been very profitable. Realistically you probably need the state to build it.

Aloisius4• 13 years ago

If ALL Musk does with the Hyperloop announcement is shed more light on the potential debacle that is to be our $70b+ high-speed rail in California, we owe him a debt of gratitude.

Really? Because it looks like this is an attempt to derail CA HSR using a proposal for an experimental technology that offers a fraction of what CA HSR does, but is potentially faster.

CA HSR replaces/upgrades two metropolitan rail systems (Caltrain/Metrolink) in addition to connecting SF (as opposed to Oakland!) and LA, requires no R&D, is supposed to handle significantly greater ridership, has detailed cost estimates which include things like take into account electrification costs (because it does get cloudy), support facilities (because there is maintenance of these cars), administrative buildings (because someone has to run the system), bypassing/rebuilding overpasses (which are all over I-5) that are in the way and grading land.

MikeCapone• 13 years ago

take into account electrification costs (because it does get cloudy)

Did Musk say his Hyperloop wouldn't be tied to the grid?

jarek26• 13 years ago

CA HSR replaces/upgrades two metropolitan rail systems (Caltrain/Metrolink) in addition to connecting SF (as opposed to Oakland!) and LA, requires no R&D, is supposed to handle significantly greater ridership, has detailed cost estimates which include things like take into account electrification costs (because it does get cloudy), support facilities (because there is maintenance of these cars), administrative buildings (because someone has to run the system), bypassing/rebuilding overpasses (which are all over I-5) that are in the way and grading land.

Not to mention their estimates actually include going into downtown SF and LA, unlike Musk's $6B figure.

j2d33• 13 years ago

It is presented to provoke and I think you're right, it does look like an attempt to derail CA HSR.

Instead, I think of it this way... if it's so cheaply do-able, then - do it! Sounds like an easy money making idea if you can build it for the figures proposed. While you may only need to charge $20 each way to break even, why not charge double what it costs to go the next most fast, convenient way, and you would make bank! I mean, who wouldn't do this if it works as envisioned? It's a genius business plan, right!?

So do it! Some rich bold genius! Build us a hyperloop - so cheap and obvious and do-able! And whenever we get to HSR, we'll build it so it connects to the awesome LA-SF express hyperloop.

kemiller2• 13 years ago

West Oakland is 10 minutes from downtown SF (Embarcadero station, nearest to the HSR terminal) by BART, and you can take any eastbound train, so you rarely have to wait more than 2-3 minutes during the day to catch one. The area is already set up for rail, and land is relatively cheap. It's a fantastic location for it. The only reasons to go to SF proper are politics and pride.

HoratioWarlock2• 13 years ago

"If ALL Musk does with the Hyperloop announcement is shed more light on the potential debacle that is to be our $70b+ high-speed rail in California, we owe him a debt of gratitude."

We would owe a debt of gratitude to a hypothetical public transport project for helping to obstruct or kill a real public transport project?

antitrust• 13 years ago

And who says that big government stifles entrepreneurial innovation?

"A brilliant exploration of new ideas in business argues that government is behind the boldest risks and biggest breakthroughs"

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/32ba9b92-efd4-11e2-a237-00144...

I don't have much of an opinion on this topic, since it seems to me that any large concentration of money and smart people produces innovation (so do lone geniuses). But I thought this article was interesting.

mgaphysics• 13 years ago

This may very well be at the heart of his submission, especially since he is the first to point out that most of the real kinks have not been worked out.

What do most of us in the general public really know about how projects like the high speed rail get on the ballot. A lot of people have their suspicions, but we have to ask ourselves if there was a competitive bid process to determine the best solution.

I, for one, would have voted to throw money into future technologies over current rail solutions. Mostly because I shudder to think how much current tech will be old news in ten years when the high speed rail is completed (if at all).

If we pursue the hyperloop or similar tech, and whether it can be completed or not, at least it would be a first of it's kind and on the cutting edge.

Lewton• 13 years ago

Holy hell

A 57 page document

I expected mostly fluff.

andrewfelix• 13 years ago

Don't speak too soon. There is quite a bit of fluff amongst that 57 pages. This is mostly conceptual.

hnha2• 13 years ago

To me those sentences don't really fit together. 57 pages is a lot so let's hope it actually is not mostly fluff. I won't read that so I would be much happier with a 100 word tldr.

kilroy123• 13 years ago

Personally, I'd prefer a video explaining this to the layman.

Florin_Andrei5• 13 years ago

"Mostly fluff" is not exactly this guy's style.

_random_• 13 years ago

I think his vision is based on Futurama: electric cars -> spaceships -> elevated transportation tubes -> hover cars -> robots. I bet if the government still goes with the traditional rail plan, then Elon will build "his own hyperloop", adding "blackjack..." and other stuff.

thatoneguy• 13 years ago

From my skimming of the PDF, it sounds like a pneumatic tube transportation system with a compressor fan on the front of the vehicle that moves high-pressure air from the front to the back maintaining a low-pressure state around the vehicle. Kind of like an Earth-bound Alcubierre drive.

qiemem• 13 years ago

The pumped air is also used to create an air cushion around the pod to keep it suspended at high speeds. Also, solar panels line the top of the tube so that it is self powering.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

If this is going to be running above ground, how do they purpose to find space to even build this?

http://mappery.com/maps/Los-Angeles-California-Transportatio...

My only guess would be to build it vertically. . which is were everything is going anyways, right?

tootie• 13 years ago

Does it support multiple pods in the tube at once?

bostonvaulter22• 13 years ago

Yes but they need to be 5 miles apart so they would board approximately every 30 seconds and carry 28 people each.

jswhitten2• 13 years ago

Yes, a pod would depart every 2 minutes or less, which puts about 23 miles between them.

Tloewald2• 13 years ago

Yes, but no discussion of how you'd bring the system down if one broke down mid-trip or how you'd bring it back up. The individual cars only carry power to maintain speed, no to accelerate, so if they have to stop because something goes wrong, a whole bunch of people are stuck in the middle of nowhere without a toilet (or air?)

jared314• 13 years ago

Hyperloop is considered an open source transportation concept.

I'm glad they didn't just let the idea die on a drawing board somewhere because of a lack of time/money. Now, someone has to just develop it faster than someone else can legislate against it.

toyg2• 13 years ago

Given the sort of heavy infrastructure required and their related permits, I'd assume that whoever actually starts an effort to build a HL-like system, will have local politicians on board.

r00fus2• 13 years ago

These days, politicians have to stay bought. And any competitor or detractor can derail your effort by buying off one of the local politicos.

This is one of the biggest reasons northern CA doesn't already have a bunch of such systems already in place.

digikata3• 13 years ago

It would be more interesting to see a company with the technical (and probably political) chops to pick it up. GE comes to mind because they have the industrial and scale out know how in multiple system areas needed for hyperloop. But maybe it would interfere to much with their air and train businesses. Then again, if you established yourself as being able to build all components of a hyperloop system, I imagine that could be a long lucrative business market...

The question for GE and other similar industry companies which have build-in capability to construct this is if they can lift themselves out of the comfort their existing markets.

venomsnake2• 13 years ago

(Figure 1). The only system that comes close to matching the low energy requirements of Hyperloop is the fully electric Tesla Model S.

Shameless plug of the day :) So far it does not break too much of the laws of physics and is indeed workable.

MBCook2• 13 years ago

I also enjoyed that the vehicle carrying option could hold larger vehicles "like the Tesla Model X".

escoz4• 13 years ago

Not only that, but they would also use a lot of technology that Tesla/SpaceX now has a lot of experience in: battery, eletric engines and turbines, the metal for the ski pads, etc. There's a reason why he is making the plan completely free: he has a lot to benefit if this ever really happens.

I would love to see this happen though, and to see Elon become a trillionaire.

swalsh• 13 years ago

From a telecommunications stand point, we were just starting to get handovers to work on high speed rail, now we have to get it to work on super sonic transport? come on now :D

revelation2• 13 years ago

The aerodynamic power requirements at 700 mph (1,130 kph) is around only 134 hp (100 kW) with a drag force of only 72 lbf (320 N)

Mind blown.

acadien2• 13 years ago

But that's at a pressure of 100Pa (1/1000 atm). How much power does it take to maintain a vacuum of 1/1000atm in a tube hundreds of miles long? It seems this point is skipped over in the whitepaper, so perhaps its negligible.

Edit: yes I was referring to the power to sustain a vacuum in a leaky system, of course no power is required to maintain a vacuum in a perfectly sealed system :)

btgeekboy• 13 years ago

I think that's handled by the rooftop solar cells.

ansible2• 13 years ago

How much power does it take to maintain a vacuum of 1/1000atm in a tube hundreds of miles long?

It doesn't require any power, if there are no leaks. The power required will be determined by the amount of leakage that is considered tolerable to the system.

HCIdivision174• 13 years ago

To me, a 1/1000 atmosphere vacuum system IS a really leaky machine :) Anecdotally, the machine I used to work on would gleefully chew on that for hours idling while we scrambled to find the hiss on the system.

It made an awesome sound when it ground into the atmospheric pressure on initial pumpdown, but at about 1/100 atmo it got bored (mere minutes), and without additional high speed stages the mechanical pumps would backwash at 1/10000 atmo (though it would take a while to get from 1 hPa to 0.1 hPa, many multiples of the time it to to get from 100 hPa to 1 hPa).

Edit: fixed units (0.001hPa is still leaky for base pressures but a completely different thing from 0.001atm).

vidarh3• 13 years ago

Sections 4.2 and 4.5. It estimates the cost of vacuum pumps for the tube and stations at $260 million. I haven't seen if they've broken out costs to maintain the pumps, but it specifically also mentions compensating for minor leaks with higher pump capacity to be able to continue operating and fixing smaller leaks as part of routine maintenance.

jessaustin• 13 years ago

I think it's interesting to devote so much space in the introduction to hypothetical supersonic air travel. Might this be what Musk actually intends to do next?

VandyILL• 13 years ago

In an interview last we he stated that his next company would be vertical take off supersonic electric jet, if he decided to start another company. He said he's not likely to start another company any time soon.

pjungwir• 13 years ago

    The key advantages of a tube vs. a railway track are that it can be built above
    the ground on pylons and it can be built in prefabricated sections that are
    dropped in place and joined with an orbital seam welder.

Did anyone else read this and imagine laser beams fired by satellites?

druiid• 13 years ago

Not really. It's a valid welding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_welding), but I imagine it might be quite a task to scale it up to pipes as large as would be needed for this project.

hyperbovine3• 13 years ago

For some reason Elon Musk is extremely enamored of welding technology. I remember seeing a page on an old version of the SpaceX site containing a high-level overview of the Falcon 9, where they went out of the way to mention how great circumferential friction stir welding is compared to whatever NASA used to do. And here he is bragging about it being the large stir welded thing ever created: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2009/01/musk-ambition-spacex-.... It's a revolutionary vehicle in many regards, but Elon seems to have a particular soft spot for welds.

spikels4• 13 years ago

Orbital welders can be used in pipes on any size (smaller sizes often need special welders). Not sure what the record is but they are commonly used on water pipes that are several meters in diameter. Should work fine for the Hyperloop tube. Seems like all the required technology is proven but I'm sure we will hear more from all the experts in the various fields.

babas• 13 years ago

Orbital welding on this scale and much larger is already done in the offshore oil industry.

knes• 13 years ago

I did. It would be so cool :)

mmanfrin• 13 years ago

Well how else would you propose welding them together?

gaoshan• 13 years ago

But in China vast expanses of high speed track are built on pylons. Here is an example of one such track (and some unfortunately placed apartment blocks): http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/pb-1...

hristov3• 13 years ago

I do not get this part. These are not advantages of tube v railway track, because a railway track can also be built above ground and can also be build from prefabbed sections. In fact I would think that building a railway track would be much cheaper than building an airtight tube.

DannyBee6• 13 years ago

Railway track built above ground has to support weight of the cars, which seems significantly higher ....

jere• 13 years ago

I immediately imagined drones in FTL. Some shoot lasers, others shoot beams, and a few can repair your own ship while orbiting around it.

chrismealy3• 13 years ago

So, it's a two-lane highway where the cars are 5 miles apart? How many people will be able to use this thing?

aaronmarks• 13 years ago

From the report: "...with capsules departing as often as every 30 seconds from each terminal and carrying 28 people each. This gives a total of 7.4 million people each way that can be transported each year on Hyperloop."

acadien2• 13 years ago

That seems like a pretty optimistic estimate, but I suppose its a guessing game for such a hypothetical system anyways. Also, for comparison BART ridership tops up at over 100 million a year[1], and 6 million fly between LA and SanFran annually[2].

[1] http://www.bart.gov/docs/barttimes/BTimes0707.pdf

[2] http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/10/la-sf-nations-second-busie...

cma3• 13 years ago

Eventually hits up against this problem:

http://books.google.com/books?id=DenWKRgqzWMC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA...

ciex2• 13 years ago

"The Hyperloop is sized to allow expansion as the network becomes increasingly popular. The capacity would be 840 passengers per hour which more than sufficient to transport all of the 6 million passengers traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco are as per year. In addition, this accounts for 70% of those travelers to use the Hyperloop during rush hour. The lower cost of traveling on Hyperloop is likely to result in increased demand, in which case the time between capsule departures could be significa ntly shortened."

p.11

chrismealy3• 13 years ago

Thanks. By comparison HSR in Europe carries 300-500 people with three minute headways (according to wikipedia).

bttf• 13 years ago

One of the few times I've read the word 'pylon' without being concerned with some video game.

rthomas64• 13 years ago

I am skeptical of the proposed cost were someone to actually build this. Sure, the cost of materials, labor, engineering, etc. is probably accurate, but something like this has never been built before. What about the cost of research and testing? Not to mention there doesn't currently exist an industry of contractors to build most of the parts of this system, which is not true in the case of traditional high speed rails. Citing the cost to build something like the Hyperloop as the entire cost of developing it seems a bit disingenuous.

Not that it still wouldn't be comparable to the cost of a high speed rail system.

marze• 13 years ago

$6B buys a lot. If your day job is getting people to Mars, a system like this is a relaxing side project.

munificent2• 13 years ago

something like this has never been built before

That was true of everything, once.

jarek26• 13 years ago

Doesn't mean building the first one should be expected to be easy.

skore2• 13 years ago

That may be true, but the only thing you really need is to find a company that is willing to build this while chipping in some of the R&D cost.

I don't think such a company would be hard to find because if they get this done, they are now the only vendor of a highly desirable technology. Pretty sure they'll be able to get back that early investment... and then some.

(And remember - Musk contrasts $6b to what he estimates could possibly grow to $100b for the current proposal, so even if they end up needing to double their budget, they'd still be off by an order of magnitude.)

rthomas64• 13 years ago

Very good point. Another possibility is some forward-thinking government paying for the initial R&D effort to have one of these built in their state/country.

dragonwriter23• 13 years ago

And remember - Musk contrasts $6b to what he estimates could possibly grow to $100b for the current proposal, so even if they end up needing to double their budget, they'd still be off by an order of magnitude.)

Why should we think that Musk's estimates for a technology which still isn't well defined (read the "Future Work" section at the end of the document) are reliable even to within an order of magnitude, and why should we accept Musk's assumption that the actual cost of the HSRA will be 50% higher than its official estimate?

ajiang2• 13 years ago

So who wants to start a company? I'll uh...come up with the business plan.

Seriously though, this would be an incredible project to work on. I wonder, outside of Elon Musk, who would take on the challenge?

prawn4• 13 years ago

Might Tony Hsieh champion a group pushing for LA to Vegas? I imagine SF-Vegas might have a roundabout route.

ajiang2• 13 years ago

That could definitely make sense. Vegas might even put up some capital to make it easier for people to visit and put their hard earned dollars to good use.

I can also imagine that from an infrastructure standpoint building across desert you'd run into fewer obstacles, although that might be wishful / oversimplified thinking.

dkulchenko• 13 years ago

That capsule (http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2013-08-12/0812_Hyperloop_605.jpg) looks like a claustrophobic's nightmare.

Otherwise very, very cool.

popopje• 13 years ago

what happens when you develop unexpected gastric issues mid-30 minute journey?

venomsnake2• 13 years ago

Well the pod has compressor - so it literally can hit the fan :)

The only thing I really dislike so far is the battery pack in the pod. I would have wanted to see something more elegant instead. And this way we halve the weight of the pod.

r00fus2• 13 years ago

What happens currently on a high-speed rail system? I suppose there's a lavatory in the HSR (e.g.: France's TGV).

fatjokes3• 13 years ago

Each chair is actually a toilet. Problem solved.

snorkel• 13 years ago

diapers

marssaxman• 13 years ago

Same thing that happens if you develop unexpected gastric issues during a 30 minute plane flight, I'd imagine, since you'd spend the whole time strapped in for take-off and then landing.

kalid2• 13 years ago

The same thing that happens when you develop gastric issues on a 30-minute helicopter tour, as the minister in a wedding ceremony, or in a dentist's chair.

VikingCoder2• 13 years ago

sbashyal pointed out in another thread that you can't use the restroom on a commercial airline during take-off or landing either, which I thought was a great point.

toddmorey• 13 years ago

How is that any worse than standard commercial air travel? Plus, really, you are talking about a thirty-minute journey.

nonchalance• 13 years ago

The journeys currently envisioned by the hyperloop are more appropriate for trains, and Acela (for example) is actually pretty roomy

toble3• 13 years ago

You can get up and walk around on a plane.

raldi2• 13 years ago

Doesn't look any more cramped than the back seat of a car.

untog3• 13 years ago

...which is pretty cramped.

mortenjorck2• 13 years ago

Look at the illustration on the next page of the PDF. That's not even a two-door car back seat; that's an F1 cockpit.

ciex2• 13 years ago

How do you get out of there in case of fire? If the doors open like that I don't think it would work while inside the tube wouldn't it?

marshray8• 13 years ago

Well, there's a low grade vacuum outside so you probably don't want to.

It's a failure of the onboard steam tanks that scares me. ("The steam is stored onboard until reaching the station. Water and steam tanks are changed automatically at each stop")

I don't want to think about what the result of that would look like for the cleanup crew. Eeeewww.

mortenjorck2• 13 years ago

I'm not claustrophobic, but this image ever so slightly terrified me: http://i.imgur.com/lGD9bUP.png

I have to wonder, would making the capsule the size of a small subway car completely destroy the economics of it?

axus• 13 years ago

It's also scary that the passengers would suffocate if the life support system failed.

orofino• 13 years ago

They're talking about pods that can hold cars, so it doesn't seem that way. The cost does increase, but doesn't look to be a deal breaker.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

How well will it fit the obese & large American, something that is around ~%40 of the population now?

ash4• 13 years ago

It's no so different from lying in a bunk bed. Isn't it great to have a half hour nap during morning commute?

donpdonp• 13 years ago

I get the feeling the space in the passenger car (which is limited) was designed by people who build space capsules.

Sami_Lehtinen• 13 years ago

Have you ever been in submarine?

pradocchia• 13 years ago

There is in fact a proposed passenger plus vehicle capsule:

The passenger plus vehicle version of the Hyperloop will depart as often as the passenger only version, but will accommodate 3 vehicles in addition to the passengers. [p12]

The passenger plus vehicle version of the Hyperloop capsule has an increased frontal area of 43 ft2 (4.0 m2 ), not including any propulsion or suspension components. This accounts for enough width to fit a vehicle as large as the Tesla Model X. [p15]

Tubes would be bigger, and the system would cost more.

mesozoic• 13 years ago

I like how the head of the project called him to make sure he knows it's not the absolute slowest or most expensive per mile only nearly so.

delsarto3• 13 years ago

No toilet, and no way to get off, or even really stand up? I know some personal jets lack such facilities, but they're not exactly open to the public. At least on BART you can move away from the crazy...

mandeepj• 13 years ago

it's a 35 min commute so those things are not necessarily required. Amenities can be built outside the boarding station

SuperChihuahua2• 13 years ago

LA -> SF in 30 minutes. Why would you need a toilet?

thenomad• 13 years ago

Unless it breaks down. In which case the "toilet" question might become quite pressing, quite quickly.

clarkmoody4• 13 years ago

The paper mentions two tube diameters, supporting "more versatile" Hyperloop capsules in the larger version.

Also, with a 35-minute trip time, these concerns are well within the realm of "hold it" till the next stop.

dvmmh• 13 years ago

No toilets on commuter buses either and people ride them 45minutes to 1+ hours everyday with no issues.

You're stuck in the "long trip" "it's like a train" framework.

It is neither.

tptacek3• 13 years ago

Commuter buses stop regularly.

delsarto3• 13 years ago

The distance is just about what I commuted on a bus for many, many years, also with no facilities.

In peak hour it would probably be fine, when everyone is fairly sensible and not drunk. But after hours, I've had quite a few uncomfortable bus rides due to the various anti-social behaviours of fellow passengers. That was with the hand-brake of a driver who obviously isn't getting involved, but can avoid escalating behaviour by stopping the bus or calling authorities.

I have great faith in the technology! I just wish I had as much faith in the people riding inside it :)

dntrkv3• 13 years ago

You can't get out of your seat during take off or landing on commercial plane either, and that easily takes 30+ minutes.

mightybyte4• 13 years ago

No toilet, and no way to get off, or even really stand up?

Seriously? It's like laying in a not quite horizontal bed for 30 minutes. If you can't plan your bathroom usage 30 minutes ahead of time, then don't use this transportation system (or wear a diaper). I can almost always hold it for 30 minutes after I am really feeling the urge to go. With 12-14 million trips per year, will there be accidents? Certainly. So that capsule gets diverted to be cleaned. Big deal.

At least on BART you can move away from the crazy

It looks like those spaces are small enough that only 1 person could easily interact with you. If that's a problem, they could probably build in plastic dividers. Or you could just buy two tickets. If you can't tolerate that level of risk, then again, don't ride this thing.

I can assure you that there are plenty of people who are not bothered by these issues.

wavesounds3• 13 years ago

Jerry Brown: Build this tube!

Matti• 13 years ago

"Hyperloop Passenger Capsule The maximum width is 4.43 ft (1.35 m) and maximum height is 6.11 ft (1.10 m). With rounded corners, this is equivalent to a 15 ft2 (1.4 m2) frontal area, not including any propulsion or suspension components."

At a first look I didn't get that the proposed passenger capsule would be so small. That's pretty cramped.

Edit: Isn't the the ft to m conversion for the height wrong?

toyg2• 13 years ago

Or pretty exclusive.

mladenkovacevic• 13 years ago

Yeah that should definitely be 2.10 meters

Gravityloss3• 13 years ago

Or then the m to ft conversion is wrong.

dragonwriter23• 13 years ago

From the pictures, 1.10m heigth with 1.35m width looks more right; in any case, there's no simple typo:

If the feet are correct, (6.11 ft), then it should be 1.86m, not 1.10m (or 2.10m as you suggest.)

If the meters are correct (1.10m), it should be 3.61 ft (not 6.11 ft).

bostonvaulter22• 13 years ago

How long would it take to get from San Fran to LA?

Edit: nevermind, it is about 30 minutes

amitdugar• 13 years ago

This is such a cool concept. I was so hoping he would build this.

featherless• 13 years ago

Thought this was amazing: $20 for a one-way, 35 minute trip from SF to LA.

nazgulnarsil2• 13 years ago

Well it has to beat a standard commuter car (~$45 one way@34mpg) by a significant margin to be useful for consumers.

What about freight?

greedo4• 13 years ago

Time is money too. The drive from SF to LA is about 5.5 hours (per Google Maps). 5.5 hours of stress and frustration, compared to 30-40 minutes of hyperloop...

rdl3• 13 years ago

It's kind of cool that Elon Musk is competing with himself here -- Hyperloop vs. a 3rd generation Tesla (which should be even cheaper than $45 one-way per car, including depreciation and electricity.)

The real problem, even once you add self-driving cars, is I-5's limited capacity.

HNaTTY• 13 years ago

$20 is the unsubsidized 20-year-amortized cost of building the thing, there would be additional costs to run it, not the least of which being insurance.

jdeibele• 13 years ago

That's the estimated cost to build it. I'd guess double it for operating expenses - maintenance, security personnel, etc.

dragonwriter23• 13 years ago

$20 plus operating costs. That is, the $20 is just the additional cost to pay off the capital cost over $20 years, and doesn't include any of the amount necessary to pay the operating costs.

Airline tickets would be pretty cheap if all they were paying was the 20-year amortized capital cost of the airplanes + airports, too.

MaysonL• 13 years ago

Ah – a turboprop tubular-ground-effect vehicle.

clebio• 13 years ago

4.5.6. Human Related Incidents Hyperloop would feature the same high level of security used at airports. However, the regular departure of Hyperloop capsules would result in a steadier and faster flow of passengers through security screening compared to airports.

Ugh. That only seems feasible if back-scatter scanners are the only option (but would you still have to take your belt off and put all metal in a little bowl?).

untog3• 13 years ago

Wow, yeah, that basically ruins a significant part of the appeal to me.

macinjosh2• 13 years ago

I can't wait to get frisked by one of Musk's minions!

ngoldbaum2• 13 years ago

The TSA phased out all the X-ray backscatter machines due to radiation concerns. All the scanners at airports use millimeter wave radar now. Still the same privacy concerns, but no ionizing radiation and thus no possible health concerns.

newman314• 13 years ago

WRONG.

Such machines are still in use and besides, neither machine machine has provably been better than plain old metal detectors.

http://tsastatus.net/

Turing_Machine11• 13 years ago

You'd really only have to scan for explosives.

Knives or even guns would only pose a problem to the few passengers in the capsule with you (yeah, you might be able to shoot a hole through the tube, but it would take a LONG TIME for a bullet hole to let in enough air to affect the pressure in a LA-SF-sized tube).

It's not like you can hijack the thing. :-)

ehsanu1• 13 years ago

Some interesting tidbits:

    The total trip time is approximately half an hour, with capsules 
    departing as often as every 30 seconds from each terminal and carrying 28
    people each. This gives a total of 7.4 million people each way that can be 
    transported each year on Hyperloop. The total cost of Hyperloop in this 
    analysis is under $6 billion USD. Amortizing this capital cost over 20 years and 
    adding daily operational costs gives a total of about $20 USD (in current year 
    dollars) plus operating costs per one-way ticket on the passenger Hyperloop.

    For aerodynamic efficiency, the velocity of a capsule in the Hyperloop is 
    - typically: 300 mph (480 kph) where local geography necessitates a tube bend radii 
      < 1.0 mile (1.6 km)
    - 760 mph (1,220 kph) where local geography allows a tube bend > 3.0
    miles (4.8 km) or where local geography permits a straight tube.

danvoell• 13 years ago

I think he should start a ticket pre-sale on kickstarter and see if he can be the first person to reach $6 billion for a project.

javajosh• 13 years ago

30 million people donating 200 each...totally doable.

epicureanideal2• 13 years ago

Or 3 million people donating $2000 each for huge discounts on long term access. I would donate $10,000 if the discount was steep enough on long term use and included use of future expansions of the system.

Simple1234• 13 years ago

That's more than the population of the cities it would connect. Maybe if it was NY to LA.

dictum2• 13 years ago

I'm impressed, but I'm afraid Hyperloop's operation is modeled after airplanes, while the actual use of the system would be closer to a city bus.

All capsules would have direct radio contact with station operators in case of emergencies, allowing passengers to report any incident, to request help and to receive assistance. In addition, all capsules would be fitted with first aid equipment
Typical times between an emergency and access to a physician should be shorter than if an incident happened during airplane takeoff. In the case of the airplane, the route would need to be adjusted, other planes rerouted, runways cleared, airplane landed, taxi to a gate, and doors opened. An emergency in a Hyperloop capsule simply requires the system to complete the planned journey and meet emergency personnel at the destination.

What happens if a brawl erupts inside a capsule? What happens if a suicide bomber boards the Hyperloop?

rthomas64• 13 years ago

Probably the same thing that would happen if these things happened inside a high speed rail.

RyanZAG2• 13 years ago

What happens if a brawl erupts inside a moving bus or taxi?

What happens if a suicide bomber boards a train or bus?

What happens if a suicide bomber rents a car and crashes it into you as you walk along the sidewalk?

Rather than living in perpetual fear, you could try making the world a place where people who can't get food or work aren't trying to blow you up as a last resort?

Americans seem to be the most worried about suicide bombings out of anybody else, yet America has probably seen the least suicide bombings per capita of any country in the world. (yes, exaggeration)

dictum2• 13 years ago

I'm an advocate for not living in perpetual fear too, but I couldn't find specifics of how unexpected passenger behavior would be handled. Assuming it's as cheap and easy to operate as it seems, I really want the Hyperloop to succeed and be installed in as many metro areas as possible, but for the Hyperloop to succeed, it has to be resilient and not overly optimistic, and not assume everyone onboard will sit and stay still for the whole trip.

Humans don't always behave as they're expected to by the engineers of a system. That happens in software, happens in hardware, and in public transportation too.

[EDIT] I think these paragraphs give an idea of how an incident would be handled:

If a capsule were somehow to become stranded, capsules ahead would continue their journeys to the destination unaffected. Capsules behind the stranded one would be automatically instructed to deploy their emergency mechanical braking systems. Once all capsules behind the stranded capsule had been safely brought to rest, capsules would drive themselves to safety using small onboard electric motors to power deployed wheels.
All capsules would be equipped with a reserve air supply great enough to ensure the safety of all passengers for a worst case scenario event.
In the event of a large scale leak, pressure sensors located along the tube would automatically communicate with all capsules to deploy their emergency mechanical braking systems.
Hyperloop would feature the same high level of security used at airports. However, the regular departure of Hyperloop capsules would result in a steadier and faster flow of passengers through security screening compared to airports. Tubes located on pylons would limit access to the critical elements of the system. Multiple redundant power sources and vacuum pumps would limit the impact of any single element.

numbsafari2• 13 years ago

Americans seem to be the most worried about suicide bombings out of anybody else, yet America has probably seen the least suicide bombings per capita of any country in the world.

Not that I approve of many of the things we do to "prevent" them, but...

Perhaps worrying about preventing certain things sometimes actually helps reduce them?

evan_3• 13 years ago

Regarding a brawl, there's not really much space for much of a fight.

jcromartie3• 13 years ago

What happens if a suicide bomber boards the Hyperloop?

What's the point? Bombing this system would be unspectacular, and thus probably unlikely. Terrorists are in it for the spectacle.

mightybyte4• 13 years ago

Exactly. Best case, you'll kill 28 people. The other capsules will stop, and the hyperloop will be out of commission for awhile. Definitely not spectacular. They'd be better off attacking a more densely populated area. Much more hysteria...

pjscott2• 13 years ago

Regarding suicide bombers: all pods are equipped with emergency brakes, and wheels as a (slow) backup transportation method. Life support on each pod is powered by redundant batteries. Capsule depressurization can be dealt with airplane-style, with oxygen masks, or by doing an emergency repressurization of the whole tube.

mightybyte4• 13 years ago

What happens if a brawl erupts inside a capsule?

Put plastic dividers between all the seats like they have in police cars. Problem solved.

niels_olson• 13 years ago

My dad has worked on at least one proposal for linear rail in California in the past. Emailed him the whitepaper for comments. Delivery not guaranteed :)

yid• 13 years ago

Risk of derailment is also not to be taken lightly, as demonstrated by several recent fatal train accidents.

Interesting. No comment on the potential outcome of a passenger-filled capsule being ejected from a burst tube on high pylons at 350mph.

tfgg• 13 years ago

Also, I wonder what HSR incidents he's referring to. The Spanish relatively low-speed human error crash? Systems like Japan's Shinkansen have never had a fatal accident, despite operating at the edge of technology for 50 years. I don't think a derailing accident is at all likely on a modern system like California's plan or the UK's HS2.

hussong• 13 years ago

Check out Eschede.

marshray8• 13 years ago

If the tube bursts so wide that the capsule could be ejected from it, the inrush of air would likely be so great that capsules probably wouldn't even make it out. The bigger concern would be that they could decelerate too quickly.

smithian3• 13 years ago

And if the tube breaks behind you, you'd just arrive sooner.

mrbill• 13 years ago

Made me think of a scifi book I read recently where terrorists attacked the hyper-speed rail system by leaving a bowling ball on the "tracks"...

gnu_fan2• 13 years ago

i would say that it is marketing if the guy did not own SpaceX. Still I am skeptical. Every child can draw neat pictures and speak about vacuum.

matthewcford2• 13 years ago

I would read the pdf before commenting, this is a little more than some pictures.

HoratioWarlock2• 13 years ago

Yes, it's a whole PDF!

joyeuse6701• 13 years ago

and it isn't a vacuum

wehadfun2• 13 years ago

Appreciate Elon Musk for this idea. But do you really want a bus sized hunk of w(ever)tf this is made out of zipping by you at 700mph?

pjscott2• 13 years ago

It's in a big, steel tube. You won't see bus-sized things going at nearly the speed of sound; you'll see a big, steel tube.

Turing_Machine11• 13 years ago

Bus-sized chunks of metal are flying over your head every day. They're called "airliners".

wehadfun2• 13 years ago

That's true.

jlgreco4• 13 years ago

Lets be honest, the difference between 700mph and 80mph head across the median on is negligible. Either way you are almost certainly dead or crippled. Past a certain speed the only real difference is how large of an area your body is spread out over; dead is dead.

ithkuil• 13 years ago

of course, once it hits you it doesn't make much difference. However, the faster and/or more massive an object is, the bigger is the radius of damage that it can do, hence the more likely is for you to be affected by it.

For example, a sufficiently fast and massive object can derail and hit a large building killing many, while a 80Mph SUV hitting a building wall will still, most likely, not be able to bring down the whole building.

platz3• 13 years ago

"Btw, this is not the very latest version. Will post an updated version with several late arriving corrections in a few hours." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/367028946426019840

richcollins• 13 years ago

Feedback is welcomed on these or any useful aspects of the Hyperloop design. E-mail feedback to hyperloop@spacex.com or hyperloop@teslamotors.com

Better:

https://github.com/hyperloop/hyperloop

pixelmonkey• 13 years ago

"Open source" plans in PDF format. "But we published it on github, that makes it open source, right?"

RMS is rolling over in his -- oh wait, he's still alive.

How about a ReST or LaTeX document that generates this PDF?

lutorm• 13 years ago

It's not the paper that's open source, it's the information...

evan_3• 13 years ago

I thought Musk said it wasn't an evacuated tube. Does it not count because it's very low air pressure and not a completely hard vacuum?

lnanek22• 13 years ago

I think it's fair that he said that. A vacuum tube has as little air as possible to help things move. His paper explicitly says it is more cost effective to have some air and his capsule design depends on air as a levitation cushion. If he had said it was a vacuum tube, no one could have guessed the levitation method.

varworld• 13 years ago

"Btw, this is not the very latest version. Will post an updated version with several late arriving corrections in a few hours." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/367028946426019840

SriniK• 13 years ago

My travel nirvana: Supersonic air + Hyperloop + Self Driving Car.

macinjosh2• 13 years ago

For all of you whose panties get wet at the sound of Elon Musk's name Hyperloop is essentially just Aérotrain in a tube:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%A9rotrain

This guy isn't really a genius, he's just rich.

outworlder• 13 years ago

Not really. There are similarities in the car's design, just as there are similarities among airplanes.

Aérotrain is a magnetic levitation train, Hyperloop does not use magnetic levitation. Read the PDF.

clarus• 13 years ago

Aérotrain is not magnetic, it uses air resistance too. Read the link, ahem.

weeber• 13 years ago

Aérotrain uses air, like the hyperloop.

krasin5• 13 years ago

430 km/h (Aerotrain) vs 1200 km/h (Hyperloop) is a big deal. That is possible with the tube design. Aerotrain operated on the "free air" and that was the reason to lose the competition with TGV.

VladRussian210• 13 years ago

man, the air cushion behavior at 1200 km/h (speed of sound at normal pressure, and 1.2 Mach at the proposed decreased pressure in the tube) would be a subject of a lot of PhD works. Or in other words - it will be hell of an engineering (stability of the cushion and parasitic oscillations come to mind - that is with respect to compressor created cushion, and in addition to the compressor created air cushion the cushion's airfoil will be riding its own shock wave between tube surface and the airfoil in front of the cushion's high pressure volume) to make supersonic ground effect from concept into product.

onebaddude• 13 years ago

This guy isn't really a genius, he's just rich.

And a self-promoter. This is how you maintain you image of a super-hero.

The Hyperloop is a cool idea, and I hope its the future. But anyone who believes this can be built, today, for $6BB is out of their mind.

DonPedro14• 13 years ago

Just the simple fact that the Aerotrain was on a track and not in a tube makes all the difference in the world. And I don't get this "look someone proposed something similar before" thing (everything from vacuum tubes to maglev to this thing). These previous inventors failed to get their ideas realised. Now a visionary has his own tweak on things and should have a good shot. Rejoice!

27182818284• 13 years ago

I honestly expected better work. I feel like this is something everyday users on Reddit or HN could have put together in a report. I only gave it a look because Elon Musk's name is on it. That says something sad about me when it comes to the Big Imagination projects :-/

mason552• 13 years ago

Part of what has made Musk so special is that he gets things done. As they say, ideas are a dime a dozen - what matters is execution and Musk has proven time and again that he can nail execution.

It's the same reason that pg & YC say that they really care about the founding team and frequently encourage the founders to pivot far away from their original ideas.

dragonwriter23• 13 years ago

Part of what has made Musk so special is that he gets things done.

Not applicable to Hyperloop, which he has pretty clearly said he is not going to get done.

nmeofthestate2• 13 years ago

I feel like this is something everyday users on Reddit or HN could have put together in a report.

I'm not so sure. When Hyperloop was unknown, HN spent far too much time enthusing about obviously nonsense guesses about what Hyperloop might turn out to be. Let's not get too conceited about HN's abilities.

mercurial• 13 years ago

I was thinking that a well-timed explosive charge on a support pylon would make for a nice mess, but I suppose it's not any easier to secure a conventional railway.

jcromartie3• 13 years ago

The distance between the pylons is small enough that adjacent pylons may be redundant. It's also a massive steel tube which would be pretty strong in itself compared to rails (or roads).

zevyoura• 13 years ago

The tube itself also isn't bearing nearly the same load as a train track.

clarkmoody4• 13 years ago

I love this concept!

My main concern is the air-bearing suspension system. Barring very high flow rates, the fly-height of an air-bearing system is very small. Some systems[1] fly at 5 microns, for instance. That being the case, any sort of particulate or imperfections in the tube will cause the air-bearing to 'land' with a large amount of friction. Perhaps this is alright if you're already going 700mph, but it would reduce the overall coasting efficiency of the system.

The engineer in me sees this as the most important design consideration of the project.

As an aside, I would like to see trade studies done on filling the tube with other gasses whose speed of sound is much higher than air's, allowing the capsules to travel even faster before shocks begin to form.

[1] http://www.newwayairbearings.com/products/flat-rectangular-a...

ansible2• 13 years ago

I don't think this is a good idea for production use, because then you have to worry about air leaks to/from the passenger compartment.

As it is, you still have to guard against explosive decompression for the passengers.

clarkmoody4• 13 years ago

Well that's the point of a trade study: look at the cost/benefit of different gasses. Obviously one of the costs would be the increased engineering um...pressure put on the capsule design.

Your gut feeling is probably right, though, at least for this length of trip. The increased cost of a different tube gas probably won't outweigh the benefits of arriving 5-10 minutes earlier.

Now if there were a cross-continent Hyperloop system, then for segments of the trip it might be much better to have a different gas. But again, it might simply be better to invest in better vacuum pumps for certain legs of the journey to get lower drags and higher speeds.

malbs• 13 years ago

As someone who gets claustrophobic on planes - I have to fight the panic every time I fly, the dread that fills me at the thought of a service/system malfunction, while halfway between LA and SF, what happens then?

I'm reminded of this water slide at the Gold Coast's Wet and Wild - you end up going upside down - but in order to attain the velocity required to make the loop, you need to be dropped from a particular height, only some people don't make it - so they have a single access point into the tube where people who haven't made it, can get out, but I'm sure it wouldn't be a fun experience, so I opted for not going on that slide, even though my kids were pleading with me to do it. No thanks.

The hyperloop looks amazing, but my heart rate went up reading that document, and it wasn't out of excitement

redthrowaway2• 13 years ago

If you can't stand being in an enclosed space like that, there's still the interstate. Is not meant to be everyone's ideal solution, it's meant to be a good solution for most people.

jarek26• 13 years ago

Given ADA, would it be even legal for the California government to build this instead of a classic HSR? It's not even about claustrophobics, people in wheelchairs couldn't be serviced at all and obese people would be trouble too.

SuperChihuahua2• 13 years ago

From the conference call: "I'm tempted to at least make a demonstration prototype, but I think I would have to punt it for a little bit of time, it wouldn't be immediate."

Source: http://live.theverge.com/live-hyperloop-announcement-elon-mu...

wavesounds3• 13 years ago

Heres another live blogging source http://gizmodo.com/our-hyperloop-liveblog-starts-right-here-...

oakaz• 13 years ago

Does the government give it a fuck?

Symmetry• 13 years ago

After reading about the benefits of putting the track on pylons I was strongly reminded of monorails.

dllthomas6• 13 years ago

... could CHSRA just build this? I understand they're in the planning stages, and I don't think it'd be absurd to say "this is a train, just better and cheaper".

Edited to add: My question was primarily legal - if someone were to step up and demonstrate this was feasible could it possibly make a difference?

jarek26• 13 years ago

Could anyone just build this? We don't know because it's never been done before

dragonwriter23• 13 years ago

could CHSRA just build this?

No.

I understand they're in the planning stages, and I don't think it'd be absurd to say "this is a train, just better and cheaper".

This is a hypothetical concept, while HSR is a widely demonstrated, well-established technology, with real vendors with proven situations. There's a lot of civil engineering to go into building the infrastructure, but the technology is there (and isn't still looking forward to "[s]ub-scale testing based on a further optimized design to demonstrate the physics", as is the case with hyperloop.)

Hyperloop as an alternative to HSR is about in the same situation as nuclear fusion as an alternative to wind (or nuclear fission) power. .

djcapelis• 13 years ago

New laws would have to be enacted to amend some of the requirements of the funding sources. Both federal and state. Potentially another ballot measure as well.

But frankly if the project polled well enough, you might be able to make it a reality.

presty• 13 years ago

first thing that popped in my mind when I heard about the hyperloop was hank rearden

scott_karana• 13 years ago

Interesting that Charles Alexander's writeup was said by Musk to be the most similar, when the ideas were fairly dissimilar by the end.[1]

http://charlesalexander2013.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/hyperlo...

dllthomas6• 13 years ago

If Musk really wants to give this a push, how about a patent grant on Tesla battery patents used for this purpose?

goodcanadian2• 13 years ago

I am intrigued, but not overwhelmed. Many of his reasons why his hyperloop is superior to high speed rail are not specific to the hyperloop. For example, you can put railway tracks up on pylons, too, with very little impact on the ground. It is common to do this in urban areas, but it is rarely done in rural areas because it is flat out cheaper to put it on the ground. I don't believe that an experimental tube is going to be somehow magically cheaper and easier to route and build than train tracks.

Now, I am not trying to defend California's HSR, specifically. I agree with Musk that it appears to be very poorly done. However, the answer, to my mind, is to do it properly rather than propose a wild experiment with hand-wavy arguments as to why it would be politically easier to do. Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?

Now, in an attempt to end on a positive note, I do like his proposal as a possible next step beyond HSR. Rail can go up to 350km/h currently (perhaps more in the future--why wouldn't California design with this goal in mind?), but Musk's hyperloop is proposed up to ~1000km/hr. It is definitely an idea worth exploring, but I think it falls far short as a serious alternative to the current high speed rail plans.

enraged_camel4• 13 years ago

>However, the answer, to my mind, is to do it properly rather than propose a wild experiment with hand-wavy arguments as to why it would be politically easier to do. Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?

Even when done properly, HSR has most of the limitations stated by Musk. And while it is possible that special interest groups would make the construction of Hyperloop more difficult than it is, I don't think that's an argument against giving it a try.

Anechoic8• 13 years ago

I don't believe that an experimental tube is going to be somehow magically cheaper and easier to route and build than train tracks.

Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, "Oh, do whatever you like with your tube."?

These are extremely important issues that advocates seem to be glossing over. Putting the guideway on pylons doesn't magically eliminate land issues, you will still have to deal with visual impacts, along with any number of anticipated and unanticipated problems.

Musk should do what the Germans did with the TR0x series of maglev vehicles, build a 10-20 mile test section someplace and demonstrate that is analysis is sound.

(perhaps more in the future--why wouldn't California design with this goal [350 km/h] in mind?)

There are a variety of reasons, but one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour. When a train exceeds the shear wave speed, ground-borne vibration waves "build up" in a manner similar to the shock wave created in air when a plane exceeds the speed of sound, causing a ground-borne vibration equivalent of a "sonic boom" that can cause problems for wayside structures. I believe the French have started to experience this with some of their higher-speed TGV experiments and we don't have a good way to handle this yet.

digikata3• 13 years ago

When a train exceeds the shear wave speed, ground-borne vibration waves "build up" in a manner similar to the shock wave created in air when a plane exceeds the speed of sound...

Putting the railway or tubes on pylons would give you an opportunity to dampen or otherwise transform those vibrations wouldn't they?

javert5• 13 years ago

Musk should do what the Germans did with the TR0x series of maglev vehicles

Musk has already given more than enough for the world and done more than enough. Somebody should do it, but we should not expect him to do it.

yk3• 13 years ago

one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour.

Perhaps a stupid question, but the shock wave forms because the trains is moving continuously over the ground? So if you put the entire thing on stilts, there would be one wave formed at t0, x0 when the train reaches pylon 0 and the next wave would be at t1, x1 etc. So the interference pattern for the waves would look vastly different. ( This holds of course only for point like trains... )

6ren3• 13 years ago

The pod is basically flying. Although its weight of course is still ultimately borne by the pythons, perhaps it's mushed out and dampened in a way that reduces the ground-boom effect? But it sounds like one of the (many) bugs that must be worked out. spaceX wasn't all smooth sailing.

jeffasinger2• 13 years ago

The tube is not nearly as wide or heavy as a traditional train, so I don't know that it's fair to say that you can just as easily put a train up on pylons as you could this tube.

It's interesting to think about, but also there are probably much higher costs associated with a completely untested system like this than estimated. I wouldn't be surprised if this system, if it actually worked at all, ended up being more expensive than a HSR proposal through California that actually made sense.

jessriedel9• 13 years ago

But why make it a traditional train? Just build a lightweight train if it gets you all of the hyperloop's cost advantages without the additional costs and complexity of a tube?

jacoblyles2• 13 years ago

My bet is that Elon could build the Hyperloop closer to budget than the state of California could build a traditional train. Leadership matters.

cma3• 13 years ago

Can you elevate rail as easily? We're talking a lot more weight being carried by the pillars in that case. Plus you don't get the same natural banking off the walls he talks about, which is relevant at these speeds. While rail could bank, you better be going at the right speed when doing so, too slow and you just fall laterally off the tracks.

goodcanadian2• 13 years ago

Can you elevate rail as easily?

The short answer is, "yes." I've ridden on it. The slightly longer answer (as another commenter has pointed out) is that it depends on the weight of the train versus the weight of the hyperloop. I see no fundamental reason to assume that the hyperloop is lighter than the train. It could be so, but then, we could make smaller and lighter trains, too (light rail).

Plus you don't get the same natural banking off the walls he talks about, which is relevant at these speeds. While rail could bank, you better be going at the right speed when doing so, too slow and you just fall laterally off the tracks.

This is a problem even when you are at grade. The solution is known: tilt-trains. The track is banked such that the train will not fall over if it has to stop on the curve. The passenger cabin then tilts with respect to the wheels so that it always feels like the floor is "down" regardless of the speed that the train goes around the curve. The radius of curve sets the maximum speed the train can travel around it.

fizx• 13 years ago

Steel tube is inherently far more structurally stable than rail. This should make elevation easier/cheaper.

Edit: apparently, the weight of the train/car/etc matters more.

sjs382• 13 years ago

For example, you can put railway tracks up on pylons, too, with very little impact on the ground.

Out of curiosity (I'm not at all familiar with HSR)—does the Hyperloop plan increase the distance between columns or the cost to build the columns (due to materials or any other factors)?

DonPedro14• 13 years ago

The basic issue the hyperloop overcomes is the energy waste in train transportation, especially at high speeds. This is primarily about aerodynamics, and secondarily about carrying with you the propulsion system. Third, it overcomes the "chunkiness" of the rail system, where passangers needs to be assembled and grouped into train-sized lots for transportation, rather than being able to depart continuously. You get superior energy economics, speed and convenience. I cannot see how that would be disappointing.

StandardFuture• 13 years ago

God damn it, Elon! It looks amazing but the logistics are just not adding up! 2-minute departure time scales? Good luck getting the future Hyperloop TSA to do that.

But, the numbers don't quite crunch for this to be a legitimate business (unless we are talking no returns for 25 years charging customers an average of 1500-3000 dollars per ride .. but the demand is not there for those prices).

Idea is awesome .. yes! Viable ... yes, yes!! A business ... idk. :(

joseph_cooney• 13 years ago

From memory the departure time scales on the shinkansen are smaller than this...about 90 seconds IIRR.

crusso• 13 years ago

Planes take off from runways every minute or two.

Vehicle loading and unloading terminals can fan out from the automated system that loads them and unloads them from the actual Tube.

Osmium3• 13 years ago

Reading the entire PDF is highly recommended; it contains a surprising amount of answers already (including many to comments below).

I think, if anything, safety aspects haven't been sufficiently explored in the pdf. I'm quite happy to believe it's safer than other modes of transport, but I wouldn't be too quick to overstate it. Also, if anyone can explain what "Tubes located on pylons would limit access to the critical elements of the system." is meant to mean in §4.5.6 I'd be grateful...

skaevola• 13 years ago

I believe it means that the electrical components are not accessible from the ground where they might be vulnerable to vandals or animals.

MBCook2• 13 years ago

I'm really impressed to see the entire thing out in the public. They showed the designs, proposed routes, stress analysis, cost analysis... It's quire clear that this isn't just some "Hey I thought of an idea", they really put a lot of work into this.

I was worried this was going to be some pie-in-the-sky idea that was nebulous on a lot of basic details with quite a bit of "we can figure that out later".

dragonwriter23• 13 years ago

I was worried this was going to be some pie-in-the-sky idea

Sure, they put a lot of theoretical analysis into it, but its still pretty pie-in-the-sky. From the last page, note that

  The authors recognize the need for additional work,   
  including but not limited to:
    1. More expansion on the control mechanism for 
       Hyperloop capsules, including attitude thruster or 
       control moment gyros.
    2. Detailed station designs with loading and unloading 
       of both passenger and passenger plus vehicle 
       versions of the Hyperloop capsules.
    3. Trades comparing the costs and benefits of 
       Hyperloop with more conventional magnetic 
       levitation systems.
    4. Sub-scale testing based on a further optimized  
       design to demonstrate the physics of Hyperloop.

It's not a current competitor to high-speed rail, its more in the position that high-speed rail was in in the 1930s.

munificent2• 13 years ago

"Tubes located on pylons would limit access to the critical elements of the system." is meant to mean in §4.5.6 I'd be grateful...

You don't have to worry about cows wandering into oncoming vehicles like you do with cars and trains. It's also harder for non-determined people with malicious intent to interfere with operations.

A determined attacker can, of course, scale pylons. But you don't have to worry about stuff like kids lobbing bricks from overpasses, or people pushing others onto subway tracks.

Osmium3• 13 years ago

Thanks–I think it was the fact that the pylons could presumably be scaled that was making the sentence difficult to parse (I wasn't sure how they were meant to prevent access). That, and that the pylons themselves are also presumably "critical elements" of the system.

sfall• 13 years ago

the pylon could be the target to disrupt the operation

mpyne4• 13 years ago

Indeed, I started getting giddy when he was discussing how to get the best power factor from the stator of the linear induction motor. It's obvious there's been a lot of thought put into this.

On the other hand even with a recommendation to use something similar to TSA doing something similar to airport security, his response plan to a terrorist attac--, er, a "human related incident" is basically to say that the system will have redundant power and vacuum pumps.

I suppose this isn't his area of expertise and so it's better to say little, but this is the kind of thing people are going to worry about before they board a small tube hurtling at 700 mph while 100 feet above the ground.

For instance, does a HRI impact his plan for rapidly handling luggage pods at all? Just one thing to think about...

escoz4• 13 years ago

He does mention luggage would be 1) handled by hyperloop employees 2) removed from the pod all at once to be handled at a different time. Probably more like these pods, which are mostly "blast resistant" http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6918501.html

uptown2• 13 years ago

Really interesting proposal. How do you maintain the tube when something needs repair? You need to shut the whole system down, don't you?

krasin5• 13 years ago

Fair question. I would build 3 tubes instead of 2. That would help with repairs as well as with handling asymmetry in demand (for example, if more people want SFO->LA in mornings and LA->SFO in evenings)

uptown2• 13 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Eat the up-front build costs, but assure yourself a persistently-functional loop. Probably the type of thing best determined as part of the review-process, and not listed a requirement in the technical draft.

dkrich2• 13 years ago

The main reason why air travel continues to be the most practical, cost-effective means of high-speed transport is that the politics involved in connecting two points with a transit system are enough to make you lose faith in humanity.

Take for instance, the DC metro system. There is an expansion underway to extend the system west to Dulles Airport, about 30 miles or so from downtown DC. A huge project, no doubt, but it is about ten years behind schedule. What was a seemingly great idea (mass transit to a major airport and outlying regions of DC) was almost ruined by all the fighting.

This is for a project spanning 30 miles. Imagine the politics and fighting that occurs between politicians, contractors, lobbyists, and residents on a public works project that spans hundreds of miles between two of the most populous cities in the world.

A project this ambitious is only well-suited for a small, independent group of like-minded people, which unfortunately will never be possible with all the interests involved.

nickik2• 13 years ago

Plus Airtravle could be made 10x better without all that usless security shit. I fligh often from Switzerland to Germany and most of my time is spend standing in one line or another on the airport.

I see no reason that boarding a plane cant be as efficent or almost as efficent as getting on a train.

simias• 13 years ago

Because you can't crash a train into a skyscraper.

I don't know if that's a good reason, but that's the reason.

checker2• 13 years ago

I'm not saying that fighting won't bog a hyperloop down, but the Silver Line fighting was largely due to who was going to pay for it. You had Federal funds, VA state, each VA county, Dulles, and Metro all with their fingers in the pie. This hyperloop only has one state and a few stops, and it looks to be much cheaper than the HSR so it should be an easier pill to swallow.

They both have right-of-way issues, but what land-based project doesn't?

dkrich2• 13 years ago

They both have right-of-way issues, but what land-based project doesn't?

That's my main point- land-based projects are a nightmare to coordinate. I would actually think the DC metro would be one of the easier to get done because it receives federal funding.

dntrkv3• 13 years ago

I like to think (hope?) that when a world changing idea comes along (and if this does work as described, it definitely is world changing), everyone can work together and implement it in a reasonable time frame. I think one of the reasons many projects take so long to complete, like the California HSR, is because the cost to benefit isn't all that great. It has no advantage over flying and little to no advantage over driving.

Someone• 13 years ago

When a world changing idea comes along, there are always parties that stand to lose from it (1). If those parties are good capitalists, they will oppose the change. That is what stops many good ideas in their tracks.

(1) yes, a change could be an absolute net win for everybody, but it cannot be a relative win for everybody. In many cases, people will prefer to have less, as long as 'the others' have even less.

incision• 13 years ago

"There is an expansion underway to extend the system west to Dulles Airport, about 30 miles or so from downtown DC. A huge project, no doubt, but it is about ten years behind schedule."

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Construction was scheduled to begin in 2005 and actually got started in 2009 [0]. Also, Metro is something of a special case in general with the system spanning 2 states and the District while having no dedicated source of funding [1].

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Line_(Washington_Metro)#...

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metropolitan_Area_Tr...

dojomouse7• 13 years ago

It depends on where you are. China is expanding their high speed rail network like crazy. 10,000km of line between 2007 (when it was created) and end of 2012.

So the question is not whether projects like this can happen, but rather whether politicians in the USA can be beaten into allowing them to happen there.

matthewcford2• 13 years ago

I love the fact that Musk is publishing this publicly preemptively blocking future patent claims on the basis of prior art.

jessriedel9• 13 years ago

OK, so he says it's much cheaper than high-speed rail mostly because pylons require taking much less land through eminent domain. Can anyone explain to me then why high speed rail can't be built on pylons?

flyt• 13 years ago

Weight of the rolling stock.

jessriedel9• 13 years ago

"For those who don't know the lingo, "rolling stock" just means "all the vehicles on the train."

Does he say this explicitly? (Sorry if I missed it.) Why can't you make a train car just as light as these cars, and also skip the weight of the tube?

jcromartie3• 13 years ago

Does anybody else wonder how easily the rotor will slot into the stator at 700 MPH? It looks like pretty small tolerances. Maybe guide rails leading up to it?

theoh• 13 years ago

I'll believe anything now I've seen the videos documenting the Talgo variable-gauge system. Also, the tolerances in terms of distance from track of the Transrapid maglev are pretty good. I wouldn't be surprised if you can fly an air-cushioned vehicle with similar precision.

DonPedro14• 13 years ago

This, I thought.

"Maybe guide rails leading up to it"

Ricapar• 13 years ago

So one question that hasn't really been mentioned yet... What happens in the event of a fire?

Do you just keep going? Stop the Fire suppression systems?

Given any worst-case scenario.. how do you escape from the tunnel?

rwhitman2• 13 years ago

Or what if it breaks down and you're stuck in the middle of nowhere. How do emergency vehicles reach the pod if it is disabled in a sealed tube?

GigabyteCoin• 13 years ago

I thought it was just a few days ago that elon musk said that he "wished he had never mentioned the hyperloop as he doesn't have enough time to work on it" [sic].

When I heard the news about this announcement on the radio today, I thought that my local news station was just a week behind the times as usual. Apparently they were not?

delsarto3• 13 years ago

Just FYI, [sic] is used when you're quoting something with a mistake and you wish to indicate that mistake is in the source document, and not added unintentionally.

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

I'll just leave this here:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/elon-musk-and-the-hyperloop

Looks like I nailed most of it. So, who is going to build a proof-of-concept scale model of this thing a few kilometers long?

dojomouse7• 13 years ago

Really? I guess you got the tube part right.

nmeofthestate2• 13 years ago

Sorry - I'm afraid you were wrong on almost all, if not all, counts.

Tunnel is pressurised - wrong.

Use of the word "loop" means that something is 'recycled' - wrong.

Parallel tracks used for acceleration - wrong.

Carriages help push each other - wrong.

Internet analogy - wrong.

Summary: scaled up pneumatic tube - wrong.

greedo4• 13 years ago

Although Musk has said this idea stems from his frustrations in traveling through California, I wonder if he's contemplating something similar for transportation on Mars?

smithian3• 13 years ago

Well, you would no longer need to evacuate the tube...

huntleydavis2• 13 years ago

To put the the 7 billion cost in perspective...that's approximately the cost to build the new segment of the Bay Bridge.

karmicthreat• 13 years ago

I would dedicate 6-10 years getting something like this off the ground. Unfortunately I don't think anyone without the political and financial connections could pull this off. Musk could probably do it because of Musk Mania. But few others.

tomrod• 13 years ago

I hate to be a party pooper, but I see some economic issues.

My takeaway is that while the 7 billion fixed costs will be low, the operating costs are going to be huge.

Battery packs and solar cells will need replacement. Large maintenance teams will be needed with immediate response times to fix issues such as complete seal blowouts, etc.

I think the first few years will be great! But in my opinion maintaining this system over the long term will be very, very expensive compared to slower rail.

I'm still optimistic that most of these and other issues will be worked out in the long term.

EDIT: Did he post what this tube will be made out of? How will he prevent solar degradation?

randomknowledge• 13 years ago

The tube is steel, shouldn't be a problem. The electronics are only a small fraction of the cost. It is mostly just the cost of the tube, pylons, and land.

asmithmd14• 13 years ago

I see just a little bit of hand-waving with how to deal with the 300 psi and 1000 degree F air.

He says they will cool it with on-board water and storing the steam (I don't see a pressure here)in the vehicle. Given the tight space, will any kind of thermal insulation breakthrough be needed?

yk3• 13 years ago

Probably not, the pressure and thus the density of the air is really low and therefore it simply does not have the energy density needed to cause problems.

asmithmd14• 13 years ago

The almost vacuum at the front of the pod is compressed and piped out the back and to the air bearings. After it is compressed it is 1000 deg. F and 300 psi. That sounds pretty energetic to me

anigbrowl7• 13 years ago

The total cost of the Hyperloop passenger transportation system as outlined is less than $6 billion USD (Table 8). The passenger plus vehicle version of Hyperloop is including both passenger and cargo capsules and the total cost is outlined as $7.5 billion USD (Table 9).

Love the idea but the cost projections here seem extremely optimistic.

verbin2172• 13 years ago

Seems like this would be particularly vulnerable to terrorist attacks. There is a huge surface area that needs to be protected (tubes/pylons). If there are pods leaving every thirty seconds and traveling at supersonic speeds then taking out one pylon could kill several hundred people and leave the entire train inoperable. In a future where this design was used extensively to connect cities on the coasts it would quickly become a critical piece of transportation infrastructure. Attacking several arcs of the city graph simultaneously would be utterly debilitating. Especially if the system's relative efficiency leads to the displacement of other forms of transportation.

mightybyte4• 13 years ago

Nope. Read the document. Subsonic speeds with capsules 2 minutes apart. In the event of a catastrophic depressurization (i.e. bomb on a capsule or a pylon), all capsules stop. Worst case, 28 people in one capsule die. The rest are stuck for awhile until they can be evacuated. Not very spectacular.

verbin2172• 13 years ago

Wow excellent. I didn't read the whole document thanks for being thorough.

lowkey• 13 years ago

Adding a compressor fan to actively transfer air from the front to the rear of the pod while simultaneously serving as an air cushion to support the vehicle is simple, elegant and absolutely brilliant!

An ingenious solution appears so obvious in hindsight that it leads you to ask "why didn't I think of that?" While being subtle enough to confound all those who came before.

I have been following the developments of the ET3 Consortium for the past year. I have read virtually all the technical literature available online on the topic of alternative high-speed transportation systems going back as far as the RAND paper and even reading related patents from much earlier.

Looking at the genius of Elon Musk's insight is both inspiring ang greatly humbling - but mostly inspiring. Holy awesome! I would love to see this innovation take root. It could be the perfect elixer to our stagnant economic malaise.

Well done Mr. Musk!

ricardobeat4• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure that idea has been thrown around, maybe even here on previous HN discussions, can't remember. The hard part is having really deep knowledge of the tech involved, manufacturing and costs, and producing a 50-page technical document with input from dozens of top minds in their fields :)

huntleydavis2• 13 years ago

So who's starting the Kickstarter campaign?

capkutay• 13 years ago

I wonder if that $70 billion price tag is partly tied to the "I created x many jobs in my time as a politician" rhetoric. I'm just assuming high cost means a higher number of people being paid.

dudus2• 13 years ago

In Brazil the building of a new high speed train between São Paulo and Rio was just delayed for the third for for lack of interested companies to build the system. The estimated cost is at US$ 17B.

There are not earthquakes in Brazil and the length should be around 500km. It seems like a better candidate than SF-LA.

just saying,

dragonwriter23• 13 years ago

California is more able to attract interested private operators because the availability of potential passengers with money to spend on fares is substantially greater.

spikels4• 13 years ago

Not sure why you think there would be more passengers on LA-SF versus SaoPaolo-Rio: Greater populations, shorter distances and lower costs ($17 vs 68 billion). Brazilians may be poorer today but they are catching up fast.

Sure there will be private contractors but is there really any private interest in building and/or operating high speed rail in CA? Perhaps Hyperloop will change things but so far it has been government led and financed.

dudus2• 13 years ago

I thought high speed train was supposed to be cheaper than airplane. Or at least stay at the same price range.

São Paulo - Rio is actually the 3rd most busy airplane route in the world. With over 7.7M passengers in 2012. [1]

[1] http://www.amadeus.com/web/amadeus/en_US-US/Amadeus-Home/New...

escoz4• 13 years ago

lots and lots of hills and farms between SP/RJ , while in California most of the highway already in place is mostly a straight flat line.

tjmc• 13 years ago

Sydney-Melbourne is worth a look as well. It's the 3rd busiest air route in the world.

Gravityloss3• 13 years ago

The pressure difference is higher than in a passenger jet. The pressure vessel must be a tubular structure with small well sealed doors. None of this prism with whole fuselage gull wing door stuff.

ars4• 13 years ago

"by placing solar panels on top of the tube, the Hyperloop can generate far in excess of the energy needed to operate."

He seems to be planning to build this over farmland? Because farmers aren't going to be happy about someone blocking their light.

Light is the limiting factor in plant growth.

If he's going to block the light to farms he'll have to pay them for the lost crops, and then he might as well just buy the land.

pedalpete• 13 years ago

I've driven from LA to SF and back along I-5 a few times, I recall lots of cattle farms, I don't recall ass much agriculture (though their definitely was some).

At the same time, the aquaduct runs along I-5 for a considerable length. I think building along the aquaduct would make a lot of sense. I'm assuming that land is already owned by the gov't, and is already somewhat protected along it's length.

ars4• 13 years ago

I couldn't find the aquaduct on google maps, but I do see lots of "brown" land, so I guess it's not as heavily farmed as I thought. Not enough water presumably?

NegativeK• 13 years ago

If he's going to build it over farmland, whether he uses solar panels or not is irrelevant to the farm. The land would be rented/bought/imminent domained just like normal rail would.

ars4• 13 years ago

He makes a point that by building on pylons he specifically doesn't need to do any of that.

Thiz• 13 years ago

Pretty but absurd.

With all that money I rather give a Cessna to 1M people so they can fly anywhere without restriction.

Or make special small airports for direct flight between cities. Much less infrastructure.

Kudos to Elon, I love they guy and his incredibly visionary mind.

Florin_Andrei5• 13 years ago

I rather give a Cessna to 1M people so they can fly anywhere without restriction.

"What could possibly go wrong..."

Turing_Machine11• 13 years ago

"I rather give a Cessna to 1M people"

The average driver can't control a vehicle safely in two dimensions, much less three. :-)

rdl3• 13 years ago

Wow. I was expecting it to be something like the UW Ram Accelerator (RAMAC), but he put a fan in front. I was thinking it would have natural gas/detonation for propulsion, using the ram jet principle, and continuous acceleration, but I guess that rapidly gets you to totally absurd speeds (10km/sec+) and wouldn't really be viable, plus humans aren't so into 10G+ acceleration even when mounted laterally.

I would totally ride this. I hope there's a way for California to build it, and more importantly, I hope we can fix our government somehow to allow projects like this to actually happen in multiple fields.

Osmium3• 13 years ago

Note that the UK's new high speed rail (HS2) is budgeted at £33bn ($51bn) and likely to exceed that[0]. Being mostly straight, and across land already approved for rail use, it seems like an ideal candidate for a hyperloop alternative.

At 120 miles long[1] compared to the SF<->LA ~350 miles, a UK hyperloop would be even cheaper, especially since the major cost is the tube itself. A back of the envelope calculation[2] gives a cost of about £1.9bn ($2.9bn) which is suspiciously, almost absurdly, cheap.

If anyone can find any flaws in this argument (specifically related to e.g. UK-specific issues/laws that I may be unaware of) I'd be very interested to hear them!

[0] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revealed-hs2s... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HS2 [2] using average cost values from the pdf, not accounting for differences in pylon height/amount of tunnel required etc.

gsnedders3• 13 years ago

The two biggest budgeted costs in the latest report I can find (£16B) are stations (£1.7B) and tunnels (£1.4B). (Also noteworthy is that almost £10B of the overall £16B figure is for risk provision.) More directly comparable is the £1B figure for land acquisition: that isn't going to fall by much.

205guy2• 13 years ago

Wow, 300 comments in 2 hours--this is reaching the limits of readability. My first thought is that this release of Hyperloop details is like the geek's version of the Breaking Bad season premiere that is being so talked about in the US (didn't see it myself).

First of all, I think it's genius how nobody saw this solution coming, despite all the speculation. Put the air compressor on the pod, and use Tesla's battery technology to power it. Seems evident in hindsight.

My biggest gripe is the non-inherent safety and thus the security issues. The evacuated tube is a real issue in my mind, and saying it will be re-pressurized in case of an accident seems dubious. Yes, like a modern jet, but planes can descend to 15,000 and people live. Also, planes don't fly at 150,000 feet (the pressure equivalent in the tube) and there may be other biological hazards other than breathing. But mainly, the vehicles are subject to the same exterior threats as airplanes, so security will need to be similar. In addition the tubes are also a target of threats, which is less of an issue with trains and not an issue with planes.

hristov3• 13 years ago

Sorry, but I do not believe this will be cheaper than conventional rail. This is essentially a vacuum tunnel. Ok it is not a perfect vacuum but it is still supposed to keep 1/1000th of the earth's pressure.* Keeping such a vacuum over several hundred miles of metal tubing would be very very expensive.

This may work but it will be several times more expensive than the HSR system.

* Oh and by the way, it is completely misleading and annoying for musk to refer to this as merely 1/6th of Mars's pressure. That would be a really relevant statistic if he was building his thing on mars.

jkn• 13 years ago

Would it really be expensive? 1 mbar is a low grade vacuum. You can achieve that with mere rotary vane pumps:

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

Geee• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure the first Hyperloop will be built in China.

lnanek22• 13 years ago

It's nice that it doesn't have drivers. As someone who visits the SF area a lot, the BART drivers strike way too much and have to be replaced by automated trains. So this is a nice step forward.

wpietri2• 13 years ago

They go on strike circa every 20 years [1]. I guess you could call that "way too much", but that seems hyperbolic to me.

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

lsllc• 13 years ago

So ... it's a series of tubes?

DonPedro14• 13 years ago

ROFLMAO

guelo• 13 years ago

Let the tech workers test it out on their SF-Silicon Valley commutes first. Maybe Elon's musk will help convince all the millionaire tech NIMBYs that own the peninsula.

QuantumGood• 13 years ago

Most fascinating likely medium-term event: The hyperloop will be built outside the US, most likely in China, after changes and development that help China claim it as primarily Chinese in design.

vermontdevil• 13 years ago

I agree. This is great but it won't be built in the US.

We have become risk averse. No grand sweeping visions of building interesting infrastructure like TVA, the Interstate (though that was poorly implemented in many areas), etc.

chourobin• 13 years ago

at least they can build proof of concept for us

krschultz5• 13 years ago

This is very serious first proposal.

As a professional mechanical engineer I have worked on high quality steel tubes (nuclear submarines) before. The immediate thing that sticks out to me in this proposal are the tight mechanical tolerances that have to be maintained. Talking about tens of thousandths of an inch tolerances on a 10' diameter tube is not to be dismissed lightly. That is going to be tough to maintain - especially with welding heat distortion. I would image the tubes will be joined with automated friction stir welding or something similiar, but that will still require a fair amount of post weld machining which has its own pitfalls. Not to mention simple thermal expansion and contraction as the temperature changes could change the circularity and inner diameter.

I would be more interested to see a tolerance stack up of those considerations than an FEA model of the concrete pylons. I can gaurentee that we can build concrete pylons capable of holding up a steel tube, that is done all over the country dozens of different uses cases. But can we build a multi-hundred mile long steel tube to the required tolerances?

I would be inclined to trade off efficiency for manufacturability. I.e. maybe a higher internal pressure or larger diameter to make it less sensitive. There should be plenty of power from the solar panels so it doesn't have to be perfectly efficient.

I'm also surprised that the I-5 plan is cheaper than buying private land. I may be naive here, but the pylons really do take away most of the objections from farmers and installing tubes over farmland has to be a lot cheaper than doing construction above a highway. I just look at boondoggle that was the SkyTrain in NYC (tram running over a highway out to JFK airport) and wonder if that is a great option.

ricardobeat4• 13 years ago

I would image the tubes will be joined with automated friction stir welding or something similiar, but that will still require a fair amount of post weld machining which has its own pitfalls

The document mentions standard orbital seam wlelding, plus specialized machining equipment that travels along the tube to smooth out the gliding surface.

The capsules are only 60% the diameter of the tube, or 36% it's area (68/47% for the vehicle-carrying version), it doesn't seem to require tight tolerances for operation. I got the idea that tube distortion and movement is taken into account into the system.

jholman2• 13 years ago

it doesn't seem to require tight tolerances for operation

Well, it's true that the top and sides of the tube don't get too close to the capsule, so those parts seem relatively low-tolerance, as you say.

But the load-bearing skis ride on an air bearing of 0.5mm to 1.3mm (see page 20), moving at over 1000km/h. As rossjudson notes, the skis are on mechanical suspension, to smooth out shocks to the riders, but it's not clear (to ignorant me) how much of a bump those skis can glide over. 0.1mm, no problem. What about 1.0mm?

On a related note, Musk seems sanguine about the sag you'd get in any structure supported by pylons (see e.g. page 27). Even with inch-thick steel walls, with pylons an average of 30m apart (100'), you'll see some sag, right? Any engineers want to comment on the deviation in 30m of inch-diameter-wall steel tubing? Let's see, 1200kph, 30m, so you pass a pylon 11 times per second. So in 0.09 seconds, you have to go from the top of one pylon, to the valley between two pylons, and back to the top of the next pylon. I guess that's all absorbed by the mechanical suspension?

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

Offtopic, but please consider writing some blog posts or articles about your experiences working on nuclear submarines. That just sounds so cool, and while the work is probably dull, I'd nonetheless be fascinated to read some detailed stories.

krschultz5• 13 years ago

Unfortunately I walk a very fine line about what is sensitive and what is not. I really couldn't go any deeper than what I posted here.

acqq4• 13 years ago

Thanks for writing! I can also imagine that when there's one very long tube there's going to be a lot of the length change with the temperature, ideally one wouldn't want to have any hard joints at all to allow the individual pieces to extend and shrink. One hundreds of miles long welded tube does sound potentially problematic.

acqq4• 13 years ago

The biggest problem seems to be that Musk's costs don't include most of the costs actually included in High Speed Rail proposal that allow you to actually travel between SF and LA and not SF minus bay (they omitted that cost) and Sylmar (where you've still got over an hour to go on the Antelope Valley Metrolink Line to reach the LA city):

http://stopandmove.blogspot.fr/2013/08/hyperloop-proposal-ba...

It seems that the proposal is actully much less serious than on the first glance:

Amusingly enough, the California HSR budget for the Central Valley is under $10 billion. Ie, in the same ball-park as this proposal. The reason the HSR project is going to cost $60 billion is because it has to face an uncomfortable truth; actually getting to LA and SF is expensive. Very expensive.

Moreover, would you like to be sitting in the tube on the chair from which you can't even stand up for a half an hour without the chance to do anything but remain sitting, not getting any help the next half hour on the occasion when you get sick? Would you take your kid there? Your parent?

rossjudson2• 13 years ago

If I read the proposal correctly, the system is less sensitive than the tolerances you describe. There is a tight tolerance to maintain between the "air skid" and the wall of the tube, but the air skid is mounted on a suspension system that is probably intended to deal with small variations away from the ideal tube shape. Those variations will manifest to passengers as "bumps" and will also result in transient additional drag, I suspect.

It would be cool if you could take another look and see if the tolerances are truly what you describe, or if there's actually more room for variance.

willyt• 13 years ago

Back of the envelope, SI units.

13 × 10^-6 thermal expansion coefficient of steel

45 - -40 max temp difference

570k length of tube in meters

line1 × line2 × line3 = 629m (~1890') of thermal expansion over a 570 km tube.

Did I read it right that they will take out all that expansion at the ends? To get that down to say 30m between pylons you have to have about 30 expansion joints. Can they go full speed through an expansion joint?

DonPedro14• 13 years ago

They are taking it out at the ends. Assume a fixed point in the middle, and you have some 1000' of movement at either end. That should be feasible, but the tube needs to be designed for very significant longitudinal movement through the pylons, and the design needs to take into account the possible lateral loads on pylons from having to bend the tube away from the geometry it has at the baseline temperature.

mhandley3• 13 years ago

The tube is considerably larger than the vehicle, so really it's only the smoothness of the bottom part of the tube that is important, not the precise dimensions. And the surface the vehicle flies over doesn't need to be steel - you could line the bottom half of the tube with a wax, or something similar, and that would be much easier to smooth to the tolerances needed, and re-smooth if it suffers any damage.

In fact you might be able to handle some thermal expansion (at least seasonal, not daily) that way - release some clamps on a telescopic section, adjust, reclamp, melt and re-smooth the wax.

bitteralmond• 13 years ago

Aside from the whole "will they actually build it" debate, I'm worried that if they do, the capsule ceiling won't be high enough for someone fairly tall (let's say 6'5'' or taller) to sit in comfortably. I'd assume the height of the capsule will have some effect on the drag involved, as well as the necessary size of the tube, so it makes sense to make it as short as possible.

Musk himself stands just below 6', so he may not naturally think of us taller folk. I'd hate to have to slouch for the trip, even if it is only projected to be 35 minutes.

edit: dear tall people who have ridden in one of Tesla's cars: how's the headroom in a Model S?

DonPedro14• 13 years ago

Re. headroom in Model S: http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/10879-Any-tall...

abdullahkhalids• 13 years ago

Just remember people, the real future of travel is SpaceX, not Hyperloop.

The final frontier is space, not San Fransisco.

(I am wide eyed and crazy about the Hyperloop)

VladRussian210• 13 years ago

the real future of space is Hyperloop v2.0 - 20 miles long or something like it, pointed at the end toward the sky with final exit speed of let's say 10 Mach (and this also will help to reach Hong Kong from SF in 1-2 hours)

stevep982• 13 years ago

A couple of points I would like to make:

* Structural requirements

The hyperloop has much less structural requirements than a traditional train. The reason is that its cars are separated, so it is 'less dense'. If a train goes over an overpass, the overpass has to be engineered to carry the weight of the rail and the train, whereas the hyperloop only has to handle the weight of the tube (30m between pylons at about 8 tons/m is 240 tons plus the negligible weight of the capsule).

The upshot of this is that the pylons can be much less invasive on the real-estate requirements. This is important because now you have more choices with regards to routes, which leads to less curvature and higher speeds. Looking at it from the reverse angle, High Speed Rail design suffered because the massive real-estate requirements imposed such a burden that route choices were compromised, and thus the projected travel time was lengthened.

* Tube manufacture.

It occurs to me that there already exists expertise in manufacturing elevated, highly reliable large diameter steel tubes hundreds of miles long. Oil pipelines. Moreover, these companies perhaps would be interested in diversifying their business away from oil.

* Development

High Speed Rail has issues, but they are political and financial, not technological. We're really just buying the technology from other countries. Much of the cost and the incredibly lengthy construction time for HSR is coming from building overpasses and the foundations for the rail, so far as I can tell.

But hyperloop is something that requires some development. This is a good thing because investors can sell that technology and get some return. It's difficult to attract private funding for HSR, but I can definitely see someone stepping forward to fund the development of the technology.

Pretty much once someone builds the hyperloop demonstration system, you'll know if you have a winner on your hands, but with HSR, you don't know if you'll be successful until the whole thing is built (and with a 2:30 travel time LA->SF, it's not going to be a slam dunk against air).

There are plenty opposed to HSR, but I see very few alternative solutions being proposed. This might be something those opposed to HSR jump onto, and it might get a lot of support quickly.

jimmcslim2• 13 years ago

Someone needs to convince Musk to build this on the east coast of Australia; linking Brisbane-Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne. The Sydney-Melbourne air corridor is one of the busiest in the world (6,795,000 passengers in 2007, vs 6,306,638 for LA-SF in 2009 [1]). We recently had a feasibility study into HSR along the east coast (a condition of Greens support of the current Labor minority government) but it suggested that such a project would be ridiculously expensive and take upwards of 30 years to complete (some say the study was doomed to fail and the numbers are wrong).

The geography is probably less favourable for Hyperloop in the eastern Australia context (e.g. Sydney is in a basin bordered by low mountains north, south and west), whereas the route it would follow in California is mostly flat?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_busiest_passenger_air_r...

DonGateley• 13 years ago

Great KickStarter project! I'm only half kidding. Public source, why not crowd funding?

yk3• 13 years ago

I have somewhere read, that large cities are usually the size one can travel in under an hour. So this could have quite interesting effects in effectively joining LA and SF.

LAMike• 13 years ago

San Angeles?

robomartin10• 13 years ago

None of this is to say that Hyperloop is a bad idea. The idea sounds very interesting and I'd rather spend sixty billion building a Hyperloop --even if it fails-- than the ridiculous California high speed rail project.

Cost is probably off by an order of magnitude, if not more. Why? Unions and other groups. Building anything in this country costs massively more (and takes significantly longer) than one could imagine because of our unions are not business symbiotic. The goal of union leadership is to extract as much as they can out of the businesses they infect, even if this means their demise.

A lot of the unions that would be part of such a project have some of the laziest and most problematic people working for them. If you come from the Silicon Valley tech world my words make no sense to you. In fact, you might think I am nuts. All I have to say is: Do a good size trade show exhibit at a few of the unionized convention centers in the US and then see what you think about US unions. Then repeat that experience at various locations in Europe and Japan and see the difference. I have done just that. US labor unions are destroying our country from the inside out.

How many significant new civil engineering projects in the US can you name over the last, say, fifty years. Right.

Hyperloop cost would be way more than this paper seems to predict.

The political factor is grossly underestimated. Our reality is that we live at a time of political deadlock. Nobody can or wants to make a decision and the decisions we do make tend to be suboptimal, sometimes grotesquely so: example, California high speed rail.

Finally, it addresses the wrong market. I am not sure why people insist on applying trains to transporting people in the US. Sorry to resort to reality folks: If you build it they will NOT come. We do not have that culture and you will not inspire it simply by building trains. You'd have to forcefully push people in that direction through legislation that would make it too expensive to not use rail. In other words you'd have to declare war against other methods of transportation through punitive actions.

The right place for high speed rail in the US is cargo, not passenger rail. If we could evolve our cargo rail systems to move at 300 km/hr rather than 50 the consequences would provide economic benefits and development beyond a century.

The final point is related to politics. We have a decision making system that allows anyone to vote. And, while this is commendable, it does create horrible problems. Imagine allowing a random group of, say, ten people deciding whether or not your child should have surgery. I'd be surprised if anyone thought this to be a good idea. No, most people would rather have a group of experts in the field, more than likely MD's in this case, vote for such a decision. The ridiculous California high speed rail project is a result of hordes of low-information, mathematically challenged, technologically ignorant and financially ignorant voters being led by the nose by unions, media and political forces.

How do you move forward when people like that can vote on these issues and their vote has equal value to that of an expert in the relevant fields: a PhD in Physics, an engineer, a financial expert, etc.

Regrettably this is not a technological problem. It is far more complex than that.

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

Cost is probably off by an order of magnitude, if not more. Why? Unions and other groups. Building anything in this country costs massively more (and takes significantly longer) than one could imagine because of our unions are not business symbiotic. The goal of union leadership is to extract as much as they can out of the businesses they infect, even if this means their demise.

Musk is in the car industry, one of the hardest hurt by unions and their ilk, so I would find it hard to believe that he didn't take that into account.

Finally, it addresses the wrong market. I am not sure why people insist on applying trains to transporting people in the US. Sorry to resort to reality folks: If you build it they will NOT come. We do not have that culture and you will not inspire it simply by building trains.

Again, Musk is building and selling electric cars in a country that LOVES gas guzzlers. His track record would suggest that he knows what he's doing.

Regrettably this is not a technological problem. It is far more complex than that.

I don't know why you think that this paper/concept only addresses technological issues, because it is clearly much more broad in scope than that.

robomartin10• 13 years ago

Musk is in the car industry, one of the hardest hurt by unions and their ilk, so I would find it hard to believe that he didn't take that into account.

That is irrelevant. He did not go into Tesla honoring the contracts that were put into place by GM, Ford, Chrysler and others. Those companies actually have tens of thousands of very well paid workers sitting around --literally-- all day doing nothing due to union contracts dealing with automation and other issues. He, in other words, did not experience the almost surreal lunacy that the full union experience can be.

I'll give you an example of this. Las Vegas Convention Center. Trade show. Small booth, 20 x 20 ft. I needed the lights on top of my booth turned off so that I could control my own lighting. No problem, we can do it for $360 per light. I asked what was involved. The response was that they'd have to throw a switch. Same thing at the RAI in Amsterdam. Free. Same thing in Munich (forgot the name of the venue), free. Same thing in New York City, $400.

Want another example? Again, Las Vegas Convention Center. I could not hookup my own computers. Somehow, magically, once you enter union-land the engineers who actually design the equipment are suddenly incapable of properly connecting equipment into power outlets. No, union electricians have to wire your booth at a massive fee. If you screw around with them they will literally use mafia techniques and shutdown your booth without so much as a hint in the middle of a show. I've seen it happen.

So, yes, again, just because the science is brilliant it does not mean it can be built. I've made that mistake before. I've dealt with city and state governments. I have sold product to the US government as well. I have equipment in places like the White Sands Missile Test Range and other notable spots. In some cases things flow smoothly. This is ALWAYS --and I do mean ALWAYS- the case when unions are not involved. If unions are involved, watch out! Enter surreal nightmare. The only way to have it not be surreal and not be a nightmare is to have some kind of an in or pay off the right people. What, that doesn't happen in the US? Please.

Again, Musk is building and selling electric cars in a country that LOVES gas guzzlers. His track record would suggest that he knows what he's doing.

Tesla sells 20K cars per year to folks who can afford an $80,000 car. I love what they are doing. I am waiting for their SUV's and will likely buy two of them. But, please, don't make the comparison you just made. The other car companies are selling nearly A THOUSAND TIMES more cars than Tesla per year.

He does know what he is doing. I did not say he is not. I am simply proposing that the Hyperloop might be brilliant on paper but, barring a political, labor, fiscal, environmental and who-knows-what-else miracle it has zero probability of ever being built beyond, perhaps, a very expensive test setup.

I don't know why you think that this paper/concept only addresses technological issues, because it is clearly much more broad in scope than that.

I don't think it addresses enough of the real world issues. When everything else is cleared off the table you still have to build it in the real world. And I think that's where the real problems lie, not in the science.

revelation2• 13 years ago

Wow, can you not abuse this wonderful idea for a political forum on unions, of all things?

robomartin10• 13 years ago

There's a difference between theory on a piece of paper the the reality of building something. In the real world unions will be all over a project like this. Up every crevice. So will environmental groups and other special interest groups. None of this is good for any major civil engineering project.

I asked a question in my post. Can you name any new major civil engineering project in the US in the last fifty years? Refurbishing an existing project does not count. I am talking about something major, say, a new conventional railroad.

The reality is that these kinds of projects are just-about impossible to realize given our political and, yes, labor framework. So, yes, unions are very relevant because it matters not if the physics of the project is brilliant and utterly peer reviewed. The various externalities I mentioned almost guarantee that it cannot built.

I'd love to be wrong.

enraged_camel4• 13 years ago

I'm with you that Musk seems to have ignored the human factor when estimating the cost or even the feasibility of the project.

But think about how many aspects of our lives it would revolutionize. Simple example: can you imagine what would happen to the SF real estate market if it suddenly had to compete with the LA real estate market? If talented people who live in LA could suddenly commute to and from companies in SF?

And that's just real estate.

robomartin10• 13 years ago

A number of years ago a friend gave me a coffee mug that read: "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?".

I eventually threw it away. Every time I saw it I was reminded of the huge chasm between ideas and their realization. Sure, if you knew you could not fail you'd do anything. "What would you do if you were Superman?. Same thing. Things are different in the real world.

So, how would LA/SFO change if we had Star Trek transporters?

Not sure. My guess is, not much. SFO real estate is about living in SFO. Just like Santa Monica real estate is about living there. The same being true about Beverly Hills or Hollywood.

The HUGE problem something like the Hyperloop has to deal with are the stations. You can't declare that you are going to have one every ten miles. The real world doesn't work that way. If I have to drive an hour to get to downtown Los Angeles (a place I personally avoid as much as possible) it is nearly a deal-breaker for me. Not interested. I'd rather get on a plane in Burbank.

The nature of Los Angeles is that the talented people you are referring to don't all live within biking distance of a Hyperloop station. Los Angeles talent is seriously dispersed all over the place. I know people who would be interested in working at SpaceX yet don't pursue it because it would take them two hours to get there in real-world traffic and they can't move because their kids go to good schools where they live.

Ultimately, I think that anyone who wants to work in SFO needs to move there or to a surrounding city.

I insist that cargo is where high speed rail belongs in our country. I don't see it happening for passenger transport.

rwhitman2• 13 years ago

I would say any stop in between the two cities would have a large spike in growth, as they suddenly become viable commuter communities, much like how suburban towns on the east coast grew out of proximity to regional rail lines. Suddenly a little rural truck stop town like Lost Hills becomes a viable commuting suburb.

platz3• 13 years ago

I think I'm going to have to go over michaelochurch's article again on unions and bloc voting power, which are very relevant to these ideas:

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/statistics-co...

robomartin10• 13 years ago

Good article, until I realized he was setting-up to make an argument for software and hardware engineers unionizing. I did enjoy the first part though.

To be clear, I am not one to say that unions are not necessary. I think they most definitely are in a number of industries. I am also not saying that union membership is evil in any way. A good deal of union workers are nice hard working people who are only after stability and a decent wage in their lives. Nothing wrong with that.

The problem is that our unions have become monsters that have gobbled-up massive amounts of resources to the point of bankrupting companies and cities and making every US taxpayer liable for the benefits they have extracted. Union leadership AND the industry or government representatives they sit down to negotiate with are the evil in the system.

And, yet again, I am not sure I can even place the blame on union representatives. What's their job? To extract as many benefits as possible from the employers to the benefit of the membership. They do, and have done, that very well.

So maybe it is a case of a set of systems that have taken an optimization almost to the highest possible level and, as a result, caused a paradox of sorts: At the limit, making things better for members ends-up making things worst because they can cause irreparable damage not just to the company or entity they work for but the the entire "ecosystem" (the town, city or country) that supports them.

In other words, the optimization kills the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Unions need to learn to be better citizens and to truly understand and partner with businesses. Then, and only then, everyone wins.

aphelion• 13 years ago

This is all rather absurd given that the Western European nations that haven embarked on major infrastructure projects in recent decades tend to have higher rates of unionization as well as stronger labor and environmental regulations than the United States. That Europe has high-speed rail and the United States doesn't can hardly be chalked up to unions.

robomartin10• 13 years ago

European unions do not behave as American unions do. They seem to know how to balance their wants with the idea of allowing their host to survive, grow and succeed. American unions tend to extract as much blood as possible out of their hosts. They are really selfish, to the point of causing terminal damage. Look at the cities they've killed off.

stcredzero4• 13 years ago

Cost is probably off by an order of magnitude, if not more. Why? Unions and other groups.

If this was done right, why would the unions would be involved with anything other than the pylons?

smegel• 13 years ago

Is that a jet turbine in the nostril?

dmitrygr• 13 years ago

How about some physics about this? Here is some...

http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=01.%20Hyper...

damian20003• 13 years ago

I think it mentioned in the PDF that speeds would be reduced significantly while in or near residential areas?

dmfdmf• 13 years ago

Best comment on reddit so far "this is a pipe dream"

* I don't think the Hyperloop is viable and I hope they kill the $100B High Speed Rail (HSR) project before it ruins the SF Peninsula and budgets across the state.

* Setting aside the $100B HSR cost (yes, I know current estimates are $70B but it was sold at $10B and will easily exceed $100B if/when completed) the operating costs will have to be subsidized for every minute of its existence just like every other govt boondoggle. This is a white elephant and, in case you weren't paying attention, California and most cites are or soon will be bankrupt. We can't afford this, cut our losses now.

* If I was made Bay Area/CA public transportation csar (with suitable budget and dictatorial powers) my first step would be to extend BART through San Jose so it actually loops the bay and (finally) complete BART. (I am old enough to recall that that was the original design)

* I do think a high speed rail connection SF/LA is economically viable but would need to do research and crunch numbers while finishing BART. I would move the SJC airport south (with a BART extension) to Morgan Hill/South San Jose and build the connection from there to LA.

* From SJ to LA I would confiscate I5, leave two lanes for truckers and local traffic but build a high speed (300MPH) car/ferry train system so you could be blasted to LA in a little over an hour and have your car there when you arrive. Home by dinner.

* I would build a nuclear plant somewhere halfway between LA and SF on I5 so my trains would not have to use diesel fuel (too smoggy) or solar (too expensive).

Nothing here is any less fanciful than Musk's musings and far, far more practical.

kamjam3• 13 years ago

Did anybody ever see Discovery Channel's Extreme Engineering episode about a possible high speed train from London, UK to NYC, USA?

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/new-york-...

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

This reminds me a lot of that, but without the vacuum tunnel... there was a proposal in 1960's apparently... so no so new after all.

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

shirro• 13 years ago

Australia needs to build this between Sydney and Melbourne. Plenty of sunlight to power it. Not much risk of earthquakes.

There is enough traffic to support it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_busiest_passenger_air_r...

vacri• 13 years ago

The Victorian government won't even build new rail out to the airport; one wonders what would push them to want new rail all the way to Sydney.

damian20003• 13 years ago

Perth > Adelaide > Melbourne > Sydney > Brisbane would be better.

Not going to happen, but would be awesome if it did.

prawn4• 13 years ago

"... each passenger will have access their own personal entertainment system."

Only a small point. Other than to display ghastly advertising, why not a dumb monitor that interfaces with your phone/tablet? It's not like you're going to be able to watch a movie. And if we're seven years into the future on this, I'll be wearing my Oculus Rift 4.0 anyway.

Maybe I'm just too disillusioned by the systems used in aircrafts with their awful interfaces, lag, etc.

praguebakerr• 13 years ago

I think you should improve rail network in overall than work on this crazy idea. Anyway good luck.

tankbot2• 13 years ago

Just finished reading the pdf and now I understand why this is by far the most popular HN post for a long time (ever?). I now post my feeble comment to be lost in a sea of enamored nerd buzz.

Fucking awesome, Elon.

ponyous• 13 years ago

Can you explain? I'm at job and don't have that many time to read whole PDF.

tankbot2• 13 years ago

Just read the first part, it's only a few pages.

It's an exciting approach to high-speed land travel at a proposed cost of far far less than the California coastal rail's $70 billion minimum price point.

damian20003• 13 years ago

Originally I thought it was going to be inside a transparent tube that you could see out of - one of the only downsides to this is that you are inside a steel tube with no view. Technically not important, but may be important for some passengers.

j2d33• 13 years ago

Why not go ahead and build the Hyperloop, and when CA HSR gets around to actually building the links into downtown LA and SF, design them to connect up to the Hyperloop, which will surely be complete and running by the time HSR is projected to be available. The Hyperloop can even share some rights of way with HSR. Why not have both?

Hyperloop should be an AND proposition to HSR, not an either/or.

linuxhansl• 13 years ago

I have an anecdote here that is both funny and sad. My friend's mom visited a few years ago from Germany.

After she returned home she said that she really had enjoyed the trip, especially the trip on "the old, historical train".

She was talking about Amtrak.

jballanc• 13 years ago

A country like America in the '60s, '70s, or maybe even '80s would build this in a heartbeat.

A country like America today...who knows?

This plan has the perfect mix of reasonably practical yet slightly unsettlingly new and unfamiliar. It is just the sort of thing that meaningfully evolutionary changes are built on, like airliners or cross-country trains or steam-powered ships. If America builds this, great! If not, watch for which country does and move there post-haste!

liuh• 13 years ago

James Bond used Hyperloop prototype, a modified pig, in "Living Daylights" back in 1987. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AzJ5_8Cqdc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging

designpete• 13 years ago

One part that's not getting nearly enough press: you can bring your car with you!

This is the key that will drive massive adoption. Wrote about this here:

"Hyperloop = Warp Speed for Your Car" https://medium.com/hello-hyperloop/82cb2069112f

chmars• 13 years ago

Could it be that Musk got some of his inspiration from the (stalled) Swissmetro project in Switzerland?

http://www.swissmetro.ch/en/content/technology

Same idea, different technology. Anyway, implementation is important, not the idea itself.

webbedhands• 13 years ago

It might not be built in real life, but somebody should at least build it in a mod for GTA5.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

So, a sealed tube from A to Z, passing B through Y. No benefit to B through Y at all. So why do B through Y allow the tube to pass through?

When railways happened, B through Y believed they would see economic benefit, and often did. They got a station. Not so here, correct?

There for, wouldn't this need a government to force it through? How would that happen in the USA?

To me this is where the idea runs in to the buffers, as it were.

shawabawa32• 13 years ago

No benefit to B through Y at all. So why do B through Y allow the tube to pass through?

Easy. You pay them.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Easy? Think it through.....

Who? How much? All the same? When?

Then imagine all the people from B to Y who see an opportunity to screw the project for huge amounts of cash. Decades of lawyers arguing in court over every conceivable point, or opportunity.

And that before environmental, and god know what else, groups get involved.

Sorry, no, not easy at all. Not even slightly.

fr0sty• 13 years ago

The tube will hew closely to existing highway I-5 eliminating most right-of-way issues (since the state controls the land already.

Also B-Y is currently very low density and paying someone $X,XXX/yr for this nearly silent tube to pass through their field is not exactly a hard-sell.

JulianMorrison2• 13 years ago

Something interesting my friend said: this would make an awfully good roller coaster.

Could that be a path to getting it prototyped, profitably?

bsherrill3• 13 years ago

Why not build a tube around the span of earth? A joint world project.

hoffcoder• 13 years ago

"In addition, safety emergency exits and pressurization will be added in key locations.." How could anyone predict what 'key' locations an emergency is going to happen at? And how would eviction happen, given the tube's low pressure?

bsherrill3• 13 years ago

I like the idea of transporting cars with passengers or just cars/SUVs. That would be ideal. Travel from point a to point b like a ferry. Or extension of our current super highway network. Use your personal transport machine after arrival. In most of the USA when traveling outside the dense urban areas driving a automobile is the preferred form of transportation. It would make the world a smaller place much like how cars and paved roads did 100 years ago. If we could hyper transport our vehicles at large chunks of distances say 300+ mile integers. I could only imagine this future.

Freight shipping would greatly benefit. Build a freight tube only across the US mainland. Amazon Prime? Same day delivery.

newbie123• 13 years ago

It's actually really stupid. Car sharing models mean you'll have a car waiting for you at the destination. There's no reason to bring your own steel and rubber.

bsherrill3• 13 years ago

What is Car sharing models ? It's simple and could be the best use of this technology. Make all the US superhighways major and key corridor stretches hyperloop. Enabling you as a driver to get around the country faster saving energy and time.

nell• 13 years ago

What is the feasibility to construct one within a metropolitan area, like Greater Boston, Bay area etc. Example: One between South bay and SF in the Bay area?

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I'm really curious about turns and switches. The latter more about loading and unloading. If you have a platform to carry 300 people / hr to or from the other city how do you load them and keep them organized.

The failure scenarios are interesting too. Lets say a tube breaks, if the linear motors are spaced out, how do they brake? Turn off the air lift? Does that then destroy the tube they are in? What is the emergency exit like?

tocomment2• 13 years ago

A thought I just had, could a hyperloop like technology be used to launch ships into orbit? Why or why not?

DonPedro14• 13 years ago

Not by itself, but maybe in combination with another technology: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-11/nasa-engine...

Whatever you were launching would have to move through normal air, not the minimal pressure you have in the Hyperloop tube. It is hard to pass an airlock at supersonic velocities...

tocomment2• 13 years ago

Could you gradually re-introduce air pressure at the end of the tube before the payload exits towards orbit?

adriano_f• 13 years ago

I just posted a link to the Hyperloop spec, written as a "tree document"... Makes it easier to quickly absorb the main points.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://gingkoapp.com/hyperloop

laxatives2• 13 years ago

I'm curious how well this thing can "maintain distance between the capsule and tube walls". It seems like this is a much tougher problem than simply levitating the whole thing off the ground where the forces are relatively stationary. It also doesn't look like any of the artist renderings address this, and only consider the airflow lifting the thing off the ground.

transfire• 13 years ago

I don't know where he got his stats, but the energy per passenger for a train cannot be right. CSX advertises daily they can move a ton of freight 400 miles for a dollar. A person weighs much less than a ton. Granted there are additional expenses to make a human comfortable, but these are relatively low fixed costs --you know like a chair.

acqq4• 13 years ago

High Speed Rail is still better:

        High Speed Rail between downtown LA and downtown SF:
        2 hours, 28 minutes

        Hyperloop trip between downtown LA and downtown SF:
	1 hour from LA to Sylmar via Metrolink
	20 minute transfer
	35 minutes to Dublin
	20 minute transfer
	1 hour 10 minutes from Dublin to SF via BART
	Total: 3 hours 25 minutes

http://stopandmove.blogspot.fr/2013/08/hyperloop-proposal-ba...

The project also doesn't even attempt to price the connection into LA or SF. That's where the high costs are.

Is Elon Musk's s mega-announcement really just a last-ditch attempt to sabotage the California High Speed Rail (HSR) project, rather than a serious proposal to revolution travel? Something smells very fishy.

The motive is clearly there.

rottyguy• 13 years ago

A few thoughts:

1) We don't have to hit the ball out of the park on our first time out. I'd be happy to see a hyperloop prototype from, say, Manhattan to JFK built.

2) Which countries might "race" to get something like this sorted out (which may compel a more world-wide movement)? China? Spain? Japan?

paulus99• 13 years ago

A wonderful proposal and inspiring: I think the air bearing, partially evacuated tube and axial flow compressor powered by onboard battery are an innovative combination worth exploring, and I am sure with the correct leadership and political will could produce a really useful enhancement of transport infrastruture. However on reading many of the comments bemoaning current state of construction in the US, as well as unions and vested interests; had to provide this quote of Machiavelli's: It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

Hyperloop

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