8 ms·
Regardless, that sled is in the mile-long track they built for the competition they held. They may not have depressurized it, however. The actual tunnel is jus
by rory096 9y ago
Regardless, that sled is in the mile-long track they built for the competition they held. They may not have depressurized it, however.
The actual tunnel is just a starter currently, as Musk said. They're only now putting in the TBM.
- Robotbeat 9y agoRight, both the sled and the track/tunnel are left over from the student Hyperloop competition. Hyperloop was kind of a brainstorm of Musk to get around traffic. But now that he has a track and a sled, he figured what the hey, don't even really need the vacuum part just for travel within a city. Just need to scale up a bit (maybe a factor of 3 in each dimension from the existing sled) and get good at tunneling and you can get fast travel within a spread-out city without bothering with the harder engineering problems that a Hyperloop would require. Hyperloop still a good idea for faster travel, but as far as an initial step, this tunnel system seems pretty straightforward (except for fast tunneling and permits for tunneling, etc) and gets Musk to his goal of getting around the traffic problems of LA.