Is Hyperloop the future of travel?(bbc.co.uk) |
Is Hyperloop the future of travel?(bbc.co.uk) |
One of the largest problem I can see is not technical. The consensus is that a "standard" Hyperloop track (between 2 cities, 300 to 800km apart) would have a ~1,500 passengers/hour max capacity. High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour.
Even if Hyperloop managed to get built at half the price of HSR (which would already be a feat, there's zero chance they'll do it at 10% of HSR price), this makes a very thin passenger flux to deliver reasonable amounts of operational cash.
Where HSR can deliver $7M to $14M daily with $150 ticket price at peak time, Hyperloop would max out at $2M daily with $300 tickets during peak hour. And those prices would probably kill their market anyway.
And that's with an entirely new transport platform to fund with many unknowns such as metal fatigue for pods in near-vacuum at those speeds, passenger tolerance for accelerations and lateral movements etc.
Maybe the business plan for passenger planes and trains was also that hazy back then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen
The newest trains have capacity for 1323 seated passengers each, plus plenty of room for standing passengers, and run 13 times an hour in each direction. These things do regularly fill to capacity, too; I've ridden them standing in the door vestibule.
https://www.japanrailpass24.com/about-japan/shinkansen/
I'm sure the Chinese system, such as the line between Shanghai and Nanjing, also has really high ridership, particularly during Chinese New Year.
To me, Hyperloop is a distraction from high speed rail... I'd love to be able to ride an efficient train from SF to LA.
As for passenger capacity, who cares? This is not Japan, where density is very high and lots of people don't have cars. What's important is demand: how many passengers are actually flying between LA and SF right now? And how does that compare to the capacity of Hyperloop? Hyperloop is being positioned as an alternative to regional air travel (and maybe later for cross-continent air travel). I'm sorry, but I seriously doubt 23,000 passengers are flying in jets from LA to SF every hour right now.
How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into account the fact that Eurostar can go from London, Paris and Brussels) and 1500 passengers/hour is comparable to the number of passengers the Eurostar carries in an hour.
[0] http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service-inf...
Weirdly enough, the only source I found was German wikipedia on the train track (LGV Sud-Est[1]). Neither English nor French wikipedia have capacity information, and neither of the respective articles on the train itself have capacity information, even though the TGV duplex was introduced for this very reason.
"Eurostar, the high-speed passenger rail service between the UK and mainland Europe, today reported the highest ever number of passengers transported on Eurostar in one quarter with over 2.8m customers travelling between the UK and the continent in Q2 2015. This represents a year-on-year increase of 3% in passengers compared with the same period last year (2.8m 2015: 2.7m 2014)."
2.8m in a quarter = 31,000 a day. Given the trains only run for just over 14 hours a day (London departure board for tomorrow) - then that's a mean passengers per hour over the quarter during operating hours over all days in the quarter of 2,214. Note this actual passengers not capacity. If you assumed say an average load ration of perhaps 70% (over all times of day all over the quarter) then the mean capacity per hour would be 3,100. Then at some times there are more trains than others, so the peak capacity per hour is probably at least 4,000.
Add the capacity of those in.
Say 3x Eurostar, 5x southeastern hsr and 4x eurotunnel.
The new e320 trains have 900 passenger capacity (could be more with less first class, so let's call it 1000). With 12x departures per hour that's 12,000, and there would be more spare capacity left over because there wouldn't be local and express trains mixed together which kills capacity.
I think you could easily do 15k p/h on Eurostar + related infrastructure. Maybe more if you used TGV Duplex double decker trains.
In Germany and Japan on select few HSR lines trains are operating with a frequency of 2 minutes, and 800 passengers per train.
That’s 24'000 per hour.
Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Tech) said in an info session last Fall that they were targeting launch intervals below 15 seconds. They also want a pod to comfortably carry a single intermodal container - 8'x8'x40'.
That space can seat around 40, which works out to 9600 passengers/hr capacity at 15 second intervals, on a single track.
The other angle to consider is that tracks very likely won't be singular. The tubes are light by infrastructure standards, you could pack two for each direction onto a route without dramatically increasing pylon costs. Add in the relatively low trip times, and in route segments with varying asymmetric demand it's feasible to switch one in four tracks' direction at midday. Eg a route into the city could easily run 3 in 1 out for mornings and 1 in 3 out for evenings.
Thanks, didn't have those figures. I used a study from a Hyperloop study group (can't find the URL) who found that the most efficient setup would be to assemble 5 pods together (total ~100-150 pax) , with 1 departure every 5 minutes so ~1500pax/hour.
Now a realistic turnover time (unload, clean+inspect, load, launch and contingency) would be 10' per pod - and this would already be pretty agressive.
So if you launch a pod at 15 seconds intervals, a station would need capacity for >40 pods. Inbound and outbound pods would need to station 3' upon arrival and pre-launch - again, super aggressive figure. Imagining we keep the whole setup on 6 tracks with a swapping device at the end of the tracks and relatively narrow 3m wide platforms, a station would be >40m wide and long, not accounting for circulations etc. Realistic figures would be 100x50m stations - or an equivalent volume if tracks are stacked instead of juxtaposed.
This amount of underground real estate would just not be found in most Europe cities, or at punitive prices, not even mentioning NYMBYism. HSR managed to take off thanks to heavy direct or indirect subsidies and by leveraging existing infrastructure (stations and many rail connections). Hyperloop won't get the same sweet deals.
I'm a Hyperloop supporter for the scifi potential in it, though I just don't get how and where it can get built in this world.
This observation fails to take into account real-world requirements of building this sort of infrastructure. Pylon costs (queue the starcraft references) are irrelevant. The relevant bit is building all the tunnels, bridges, and earthworks required to get a smooth-enough train route that is able to safely support the track, provide a safe ride at Hyperloop's projected speeds, provide a conformable ride, and do it all in cost-effective an easy to maintain technology.
In high-speed railway, track defects are measured in wavelengths of fractions of a milimeter in amplitude and periods of 6 to 10 to 50 meters. If you increase the speed, either the limit for the wavelength period increases or the amplitude limits need to be further reduced. Setting up a 200-meter track segment with a sub-milimeter tolerance limit isn't cheap.
I don't want to get from Montreal to NY in 40 minutes. Or 10.
I want to be able to live somewhere where I do not have to commute because tech has solved remote working. I don't want them to make me travel further for the same time.
For example were they to build radial hyperloop around NY it's just more of the same drudgery. Only now bigger.
Can tech solve the problem of getting a coffee with a couple of coworkers and feeling connected to them in a way that helps the technical argument two months from now?
Can tech solve the "Do I have my coworker's undivided attention or are they multitasking and ignoring me" problem?
Can tech solve the "I'm in the room with my boss and he can't ignore that I'm a human being" problem?
We are social creatures. A slack conversation isn't the same, and I don't think a VR conversation will be the same, especially with further distances. Do we say that everyone must live within 1,000 miles?
I find it rather doubtful that it will change anything for a number of reasons, including:
- governments don't even care to invest in their existing railway network, and are highly resistant in finding any justification for high-speed networks (not even very-high speed)
- the hyperloop concept is only a concept, it's disastrously expensive, based on untried technology, and highly vulnerable to a disastrous PR campaign. Keep in mind that it took a single accident to ground the whole Concorde fleet, in spite of all its history and having major backers.
- mass transit decision-makers are very conservative and highly risk-adverse. Money is spent only on tried-and-true technology. In the rare cases that it isn't, all hell breaks loose (see BART)
- no one knows what will it cost to maintain it, or its reliability.
- High-speed railway only makes sense in the small window of opportunity sandwiched between cases where air travel and car/roadway travel makes sense. That window of opportunity is located somewhere, IIRC, between travel distances between 200 and 600km. Additionally, for high-speed railway to make sense, it needs to be connected with other mass transit systems through effective multimodal transport hubs. This is very expensive and takes a lot of planning respected throughout centuries of investment in infrastructure and urban planning. The hyperloop concept fails to deliver in any of the requirements while in return bringing nothing to the table.
Let's keep things in perspective: France, Germany, and Japan already have decades of high-speed railway under their belt and are packed with success stories. Yet, the whole world in general, and the US in particular, decided not to follow them in their successful venture. These decisions are made rationally. Why would anyone suddenly invest in a high-risk concept that fails to justify itself?
Except flying is fast, safe, and cheap. Our problem is airport design and airport security. Fix those so we get on a plane in 20 minutes instead of two hours and everyone will be happy.
There's no real way I can see to improve airport design with those constraints.
You can fit maybe 4 platforms each holding 10 car trains in the space of one gate at a train station.
A380s require even more space and take even longer to deplane and board, so I don't think fewer but larger planes would work either.
EG: Atlanta airport does around 100m pax. So does Waterloo station in London. Look at the land take and size of terminals required in each of those cases.
"May" be it will work in US or EU where it is less populated, but it seems hard to scale in places like China and Japan
> Mr Musk says the cost of building the route would be in the region of $6bn (£4.1bn), an estimate most agree is extremely conservative.
I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic". Musk's estimate of $6bn is over 10x cheaper than the high speed train line cost for the same route
It seems likely that for the same amount of service as high speed rail, the hyperloop would be a lot more expensive.
> I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic".
A conservative cost estimate is essentially an optimistic cost estimate. A stronger statement might be that it is unrealistic.
There's also the Vactrain concept. Several variants were pursued from 1914 on, with Robert Salter of RAND writing a couple of proposals in the 1970s.
The idea's not new, has been seriously explored previously, and has been rejected or failed on technical, cost, political, practical, and economic grounds.
Some forms of local or highly-dedicated application, possibly. But for general use, no.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
Salter, Robert M. (August 1972), The Very High Speed Transit System, RAND Corporation
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html
Salter, Robert M. (February 1978), Trans-Planetary Subway Systems: A Burgeoning Capability, RAND Corporation
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html
And, despite Musk's ability to prove me wrong, I'll stick with this projection for now.
1. Announce Hyperloop to the world
2. Let someone else build it with tubes
3. Go to Mars
4. Use everything people have built - and went bankrupt - in the thin atmosphere on Mars with success without expensive tubes.
Now the SpaceX plans, the Mars plans and Hyperloop come together.
The mag-lev systems could perhaps run on exposed pistes though.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
Not a roaring success though!
I think the deal breaker is the high speeds, which require a much straighter track and much larger turn radius (410ft for a train, ~4.6 mi. for HL). That means a lot of tunneling through mountains and bulldozing expensive buildings. Land is the biggest expense in these projects.
I'm more hopeful of NASA's current work trying to reduce the sonic boom on airplanes. Flying high solves the air resistance problem, and going in a straight line isn't a problem up there.
High speed rail has the big advantage that it can use existing tracks, at slower speed, to reach the center city train stations.
And for air travel, I think suborbital flights are definitely the future.
I love trains, and use them whenever possible.
However, with static start and endpoints, and existing low-cost air infrastructure that is dynamically reroutable and equivalently fast, why spend the hundreds of billions of dollars to recreate something so fragile and limited?
Municipalities are wisely, generally in a 'wait and see' phase for the next decade, as autonomous personal transport guarantees to spur the redesign and redevelopment of entire cities and transportation infrastructure.
Here's a technical paper on the maglev system used.[2] They discovered a problem with bumps in the magnetic field at rail joints, and figured out a way to fix that.
Maybe that's the future. If you're going to have a maglev system, you may as well go all the way and ditch the air turbine propulsion.
[1] http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154 [2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3
The Hyperloop has the same problems (technology still developing, requires new, incompatible infrastructure) but it has one big advantage:
In contrast to the Transrapid, it can compete with planes regarding to speed.
What both technologies share: They require electricity, which is good. Electricity can be generated easily, possibly with thorium reactors in the future. It is hard (but possible, e.g. reduction of CO2 to methanol) to create combustible fuels for plane engines from electricity. Electric transport will likely overtake all kind of combustion engines.
Yes, you could put them underground but this will increase your costs.
Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible.
Alternatives are to slow down massively as you approach / traverse urban areas, but this further increases trip time, changes acceleration and energy needs, and reduces the already abysmally low net passenger throughput.
You'll have to arrive days ahead of time.
A terrorist would only be able to kill ~28 people at a time (1 pod), compared to >200 for a plane
But then again, someone could just plant a bomb on the outside of the tube so I guess it's moot.
1) There's very little merchandise that needs to be shipped trans-Atlantic that quickly.
2) Shipping containers are huge and heavy. Transporting a cargo-ship's worth requires a lot of energy, which translates into high expenses.
3) If shipping a cargo-ship's worth of containers, this will become an impossibly long train, nearing 70 miles long (around 18,000 containers per ship, and each container is about 20ft long)[1]
This has been the crux of the hyperloop since inception. The numbers really don't add up to making it more economical than any already existing alternative (even for transporting people). Shipping things via slow boat in a container is surprisingly not very expensive (given you've filled a container with goods, the goods value will greatly exceed your transport costs).
Now the question is what problem is this solving: you have cheap novel transport system for passenger between 2 points nobody is really interested in.
And that's the wall all the project around hyperloop are hitting. Either you need the government to step in to make it competitive for endpoint that people are currently interested in. Or you keep the original design, but you need the government to step in to ensure those uninteresting endpoints become interesting.
I hope I can Hyperloop from NY to LA some day, and if we can leverage the current high investment traffic to get that to happen, I'm all for it.
Please don't diss the community as a rhetorical device. There's no substance in that, and since you're also an esteemed commenter on HN, it's false.
I was hoping to put some red ink on the trend and maybe curtail it slightly, for what that's worth.
The only real problem is the financial viability of such a project.
Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs. Just the land rights alone will quickly balloon the cost into 100s of billions for any sizable project between two major cities that people want to travel between - and until that gets figured out, this will never happen.
The recent news around a startup raising 80M is meaningless because they will waste all that money chasing tech without realizing that they will never be able to successfully lay track anywhere.
Hyperloop is very specifically aimed at medium distance routes. SF to LA, for example, where the plane has relatively little time cruising at altitude, where it can fly efficiently. If a plane is spending most it's time flying through denser aid, then it's not flying efficiently, and burns a lot of fuel on a per-mile basis relative to a longer flight. Hyperloop is specced to be more efficient than air travel at the distance it's proposed.
The only thing that matters is what people are willing to pay, and that's not much for medium distance. And for the billions it costs to install the track in the first place, you can buy several airlines and operate them for years.
Honestly, even $50Bn sounds like chump change for a project as ambitious as the Hyperloop. Nearly all large scale public infrastructure projects end up costing billions of dollars over estimated costs anyway.
$6 Billion is something that I think many civil engineers would consider to be a dubious figure, even as a first estimate. I'm sure Musk is cognizant of this.
Another consideration is the faster you travel the straighter your path needs to be. 4,000+MPH paths require incredibly strait designs.
The new hyperloop concept is just a fan-less capsule hovering on a MagLev track.
It’s just VacTrain over again, but more expensive and with lower capacities.
Mars
According to Musk, Hyperloop would be useful on Mars as no tubes would be needed. This is because Mars' atmosphere is about 1% the density of the Earth's.[10][45][46] For the hyperloop concept to work on Earth, low-pressure tubes are required to reduce air resistance. However, if they were to be built on Mars, the lower air resistance would allow a hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track.[47] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
The important point is 0.01 ATM is a long way from high vacuum. Pumps can get down to that pressure very easily and individual Pumps can cover wide sections of track.
"Hyperloop is a conceptual transport system in which passengers are loaded into pods and fired through vacuum tubes at more than 600mph (1,000km/h)....
"Pumping the air out of the tubes reduces resistance, allowing high speeds to be achieved, potentially using less energy than a train."
As with most very large scale projects, PR is the game changer. Elon Musk's backing of the concept and investment into competitive solutions for a hyperloop has created publicity and driven interest. The hyperloop doesn't need to be an innovative technological advancement to benefit society. It just needs to be safe, fast, and cost effective.
I'm not sure he's any more "automobile" than he is "rocketry" or "PayPal".
In any case Tesla sales are not going to be impacted much by rail.
Says who? I have light rail/uber/bus/cabs in my city and if I had HSR to neighboring regions I could just give up my car entirely with no anxiety.
I wonder if people will start throwing tantrums once they are getting yanked from their cars just going down the highway to work or the store.
Also, a standard Shinkansen seat is far more spacious and comfortable than any economy plane seat.
HSRs main justification is reducing the increase in long-range intrastate auto trips.
Also, whether an air travel or auto trip replacement, the hyperloop paper relied for its low cost on a route that doesn't have the transit connections to either where people are from or where they are trying to go be useful, whereas HSR both connects population centers and includes investments in improving connecting regional transit around the termini (and other stations). Hyperloop aims for a much smaller goal than HSR, and even at that has an alignment which makes it useless for the goal.
Good question. About 3.4 million per year (I think that's both ways based on other sources) according to this:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/536977/domestic-air-route...
The trains travel (on average) about 1/10th the speed, and the distances covered are much smaller.
The Hong Kong MTR (the worst commuter crush I've personally experienced) handles an eye-popping 75,000 commuters per hour per direction: https://www.mtr.com.hk/en/corporate/operations/detail_worldc...
And with Hyperloop it will the same thing. It might work to go from LA to San Francisco without too many stops but Think about Boston to Washington DC.
Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible.
Again, my understanding was that this was part of the original TDD (SF to LA) and they found that it was, indeed, feasible.
It's really hard to assess that objectively because the cognitive biases affecting such perceptions are so strong. Certainly we don't want HN to be that way and try to nudge it in more fruitful directions. But the way to fight an undesirable pattern on HN is not with another undesirable pattern.
That said, it suggests that the HyperLoop concept is not viable which is not that surprising IMO. However, it might also just be a case of lower R&D costs.
Sadly, this also means we have a lot of people think this is something revolutionary, although I guess that’s intentional.
It’s really annoying when you consider how the US refused a proposal from japanese companies a few years ago to build a MagLev system between Boston, NY, Washington, with capacities around 10k people per hour.
Hyperloop One is by far the most credible project, with HTT somewhere behind them in second. They haven't revealed anything about their compression systems or lack thereof. HTT has backed off air levitation, but they're still using Inductrack which is radically cheaper than conventional MagLev and hasn't been applied commercially yet.
Several of the competition teams (like the one in this article) have built MagLev sleds with nice brakes, but they're just trying to win a speed record competition. That has no bearing on the real Hyperloop. Other teams are focusing more on scalable tech and doing some pretty innovative work.
The lower per-vehicle capacities also aren't a negative if launch cadences can be kept high enough to maintain throughput. Smaller vehicles let the network operate in a more point-to-point manner instead of the stop-and-go crap that trains have done since day one.
But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.
Hyperloop transports less people than a single lane of highway. And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.
So what? Airplanes also transport fewer people than a highway. How many people travel by air between LA and SF right now per hour? Probably no more than the capacity of Hyperloop.
>But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.
What makes you think 10k people per hour actually want slow train service between LA and SF, when they can just use their car, get there in about the same time, and then not have to rent a car at their destination?
>And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.
You're placing passenger capacity above speed. The whole point of Hyperloop is speed: it's faster than an airplane, without all the downsides of the airplane (terrorism, TSA, crashing, etc.) HSR is not, it's slow (esp. the way they'll build it in this country). Of course, Hyperloop doesn't have the advantage of not having to rent a car like driving yourself does, but it makes up for it with very high speed.
> HSR is not, it's slow
Have you ever seen an actual HSR system?
We’re talking about 220mph minimum. That’s quite a bit faster than per car.
And, due to TSA, it’s faster than an airplane, and without the annoying stuff. And cheaper.
Hyperloops only differences over HSR is that it’s 15min faster, is a lot more uncomfortable, a lot more expensive to build, a lot more expensive to use (due to few people per capsule), etc.
Don't we call that a “train?”
It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed. This is California and environmental aspects need to be taken into account. Airlines are a major source of CO2 and California wants a more environmentally friendly solution. There is a proposed high-speed rail project with a $10B initial estimate that's sure to at least double by the time the project is complete. The high-speed rail project is only high-speed compared to existing rail since the max speed will be around 200 mph.
It's into this environment that Musk proposed the Hyperloop. On paper, it's better than the high-speed rail in every way. Cheaper, faster and with less pollution. The "more airplanes" alternative may be cheaper and probably faster (with the TSA is doing its best keep air travel slow) but fails horribly on the CO2 emissions front.
I don't think it really is, because the proposal was a comically unserious one designed to generate interest in the underlying technology. The route proposed in the paper as a supposed alternative to HSR which has termini outside of the immediate area of the population centers which it notionally connects would never be useful and will never get built.
OTOH, the interest the technology has drawn from that splashy initial PR campaign means enough people are working to develop it that that, if anything like it is viable, one or more commercially-viable variants will likely be ready for Musk's Mars colonies.
> On paper, it's better than the high-speed rail in every way. Cheaper, faster and with less pollution.
Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.
Unlike HSR, which not only terminates near the population centers, but includes as part of the same project improvements in the local connecting transit systems.
The proposed Hyperloop route was the high-tech version of a bridge-to-nowhere.
It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.
Outside of governmental regulations, the market is what determines progress and there isn't much push by consumers for environmental impacts. They just want cheap and reliable transit. Price also wins over speed (and it's been show things like wifi have a greater effect on travel comfort than speed).
Unless you cut down the travel time significantly, it just doesn't matter. And at those speeds there are more engineering, operational and logistical costs that increase the ticket price so the value is reduced further. I also don't see how the engineering for a pioneering vactrain concept will somehow be cheaper than existing understood infrastructure.
Unless you can charge $50 and get from LA to SF in 30 mins while building the entire thing for just a few billion, this won't work.
That's only because externalities haven't been included in the pricing. What about the $14t that it will take to relocate people displaced by rising oceans? The repair costs from the increasingly-common severe weather events? There are real costs of climate change that aren't being accounted for and will have to be paid by future generations.
See wikipedia [0]: "pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors"
> incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors.
So the tubes are low pressure. Perhaps not vacuum, but in reality so called vacuum tube delivery systems aren't actually a vacuum either, that's why a more accurate name for them is Pneumatic Tube Systems.
I'm not sure what it is exactly you're trying to argue, above you made it sound like the system isn't low pressure at all.
A maglev system needs a much more expensive track and/or a lot of energy from the vehicle to power the lift. This is the big problem with maglev - track cost. Maglev works fine; the Transrapid system in Shanghai has been running for 12 years now without serious problems. Top speed 300 MPH.
The Hyperloop is only interesting if it's far cheaper than a maglev. The Transrapid maglev system has far more capacity, can corner better, and can climb steeper grades.
Anything good you've read that explains why they've abandoned that route?
The distinction between "very low pressure" and "vacuum" that is implied by the "hyperloop is not a vactrain" camp is a fantasy.
Sorry, that's complete bullshit.
We're not talking about HSR in Japan, China, or Germany here. We're talking about "HSR" in California, USA.
The California system will be very, very lucky if it manages to ever hit 200mph in a short stretch. Realistically, it might be about the speed of the Amtrak Acela Express, which is basically no faster than any regular train, except that it manages to hit 150mph once or twice, briefly.
You seem to be making the ridiculous assumption that HSR in America will resemble HSR in other countries somehow, in both speed and cost. Nothing could be farther from the truth. HSR here is a horribly expensive boondoggle. It'll be worse than the F-35.
Worst case, you just let some Germans build it for you.
This is your problem then: you're speaking from ignorance. Yes, it really can be that bad. Acela Express is a total joke compared to foreign HSR, and the one in California isn't even built yet, the cost projections are insane, and the proposed top speed is only 200mph.
>Worst case, you just let some Germans build it for you.
We can't do that. I'm not joking, I mean that literally. We simply cannot do that, and will not do that. Sure, it'd make sense to just let a company that's already an expert do that, but we won't. We'll do it with crappy domestic companies (though perhaps getting the passenger cars made by Bombardier in Canada) at an absolutely astronomical cost, because that's just how things are done in this country now for anything that's government-funded. Just look at the F-35 jet for proof.
> It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.
It was pitched as an alternative to the actual HSR proposal, which both connects the population centers and includes connecting improvements on both ends to regional transit. So, yes, as an alternative to HSR, it was comically unserious.
(Even as an alternative to air travel, its still comically unserious for the same reason -- while the major airports are farther from the population centers than the proposed HSR termini are, they are much closer than the termini for hyperloop that were proposed, and do have significant transit connections into the population center and the surrounding region, so terminating in place without either that proximity to where people would want to come from and go and without including the cost of transit improvements to make the termini useful in the cost of the proposal is ludicrous.)
The "flying height" in the original proposal was to be about 1mm, so this thing has to be really well behaved aerodynamically. And the tube has to be really smooth. (Expansion joints, emergency escape hatches, pressure doors, and switches would be problems.) The whole point of the Hyperloop is that it's cheap because the tube is simple and dumb.
When you look at the MIT design [2] it's really a maglev monorail that operates in an evacuated tube. (Or outside of one, as they've demonstrated by sending down a rail). It doesn't have any of the fan propulsion or air cushion lift or tight tolerances from the original Hyperloop proposal.
[1] http://www.ansys-blog.com/20130925hyperloop/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiyPQU48Ef0
The market won't do this, it's human behavior.
His last bid was 40% less than United Launch
Hyperloop doesn't have anywhere near that amount of free R&D or established, easy-to-increment-to-get-there technologies to draw on.
I think almost the sae can be said for Hyperloop. There's no fundamentally new technology that needs to be engineered for it to work. Maglevs are common in many countries, evacuated tubs aren't complicated.
All that said, the US seems to be the wrong place to start Hyperloop. Regulation and land property will most likely be the biggest hurdle, not technology, especially in California. Hyperloop seems to me like a perfect project in China though, in regard to property rights, regulation, city planning, human capital in the high speed train sector, as well as crazy supply side economics.
Thus the argument needs to be that Hyperloop is intrinsically cheaper, whether built by Musk's company or any random civil engineering company. I don't see any reason why that is the case, Hyperloop looks a lot more complicated than HSR to me.
SpaceX has and continues to do amazing things, that doesn't mean suddenly everything we want is feasible.
A simpler way to make the same argument:
If Musk can actually build a Hyperloop across California at his proposed cost, he's made revolutionary improvements to civil engineering that will be far more impactful than the Hyperloop itself; the same techniques should revolutionize, well, much of conventional civil engineering! Why isn't that happening?
IDK, indeed $X/10 is ambitious but he does have a decent track record with this already. SpaceX is already $X/3 or $X/4 and is on the path to $X/10 with reusable rockets, and it's also more ambitious (rocket reuse, highest payload in the world by 2x, new capsule has powered rocket landing on any surface in the solar system).
In my mind he's earned some benefit of the doubt. Of course, there's still a ton to prove, and the idea sounds looney. You'd also have said that about SpaceX 10 years ago, though.
Why haven't we gone to the moon since the 1970s? Because there wasn't the political will to keep funding the programs that went there. Why was the Space Shuttle such an awkward and ultimately non-viable way to go to space? Because there wasn't the political will to fund genuine reusable launch technology. SpaceX's big advantages are in having the hard up-front R&D already done for it by someone else, and in not having to rely solely on political decisions for the existence of its market; even if there are no more nice-PR resupply missions to the ISS, there are still going to be private actors who want to launch satellites.
