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SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition

244 points by dtparr 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
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robin_reala 11y ago
Site was erroring when I visited; Google cache is here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.spacex.com%2Fhyperloop%2F https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.sp...
moey 11y ago
"Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies. While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype." I thought Elon wanted to create the Hyperloop. Here I was thinking I would see it in the next 5-10 years :(
- dtparr 11y ago
  I think he wants it to be created by someone, but my recollection is that when he announced the plans he specifically said he didn't have time to do it himself and wanted others to take the ball and run with it.
zacharypinter 11y ago
Very cool announcement. It strikes me that this is a pretty good insurance policy against a poor implementation of Hyperloop being used as an argument against its feasibility. SpaceX/Musk gets to put out a proof of concept track and pod without committing to building the full thing themselves.
databound 11y ago
It's funny they are building a 1 mile test track but don't have any interest in running with the idea... seems pretty committed at this point.
fitzwatermellow 11y ago
They plan on releasing the full requirements for the final design in Aug, but the rules document includes some example technical questions. Most calculations I imagine can be estimated using college physics and mechanics: drag coefficient, pneumatic pressure, heat flux, etc. But I'm curious if anyone has any references specific to air compresser propulsion systems? I'm thinking it would make a nice WebGL simulation that shows the relationship between speed and heat generated ;)
lisper 11y ago
> SpaceX will construct a one-mile test track adjacent to our Hawthorne, California headquarters I'm not sure which would be the more remarkable achievement, getting the Hyperloop working, or obtaining the real estate to build a mile-long test track in Hawthorne.
- bhauer 11y ago
  I live in Hawthorne. Residential real-estate is fairly expensive in some areas (western side, where ~1200sqft goes for ~$700K), but commercial real estate is still not that expensive. Plus, Hawthorne is very diverse and Spacex is located on the less expensive east side of the city. Nearby El Segundo is quite a different story, which I assume is part of the reason SpaceX moved from El Segundo to Hawthorne. I also expect that they will run the test track around their current airport campus. I'm not even sure if they need to buy all that much new property to do so. They may just need to cut a deal with (or buy) the airport. The cool thing is that this test track should be visible from the 105 freeway (along with the massive Tesla logo). So even people not familiar with the project will be enticed to find out more! As a Hawthorne resident, I am excited!
- smackfu 11y ago
  They are right next to Hawthorne Airport... that's the only place I can see the track being located. The rest of the surroundings are industrial buildings.
  - odonnellryan 11y ago
    Aren't these meant to be underground?
    - myth_buster 11y ago
      I believe it would be overhead too as shown on their site. I assume it would be easier to construct overhead tracks adjacent or over the freeways.
    - uptown 11y ago
myth_buster 11y ago
For those who couldn't access the site: Webpage screen grab [0] Guidelines [1] [0] http://i.imgur.com/iq3W18x.png http://i.imgur.com/iq3W18x.png [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/18IkkbuxMbrzaVKHRnqXqtWimxF5FfiBwo27WMgtvTstKQMWpHVL37LScQxx7Q_LryBuqfgPs9WNhrZ1D/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/18IkkbuxMbrzaVKHRnqXqtWimxF5...
loceng 11y ago
I'm really happy to see Tesla and SpaceX being run properly as platforms. Clearly Elon Musk has a great understanding of platforms with his online involvement with PayPal, however there aren't as obvious examples of it occurring in the physical product world; there are attempts though they seem more to control a user's behaviour and entrench people into a recurring business model than actually disrupting an unmanaged-disorganized system. Platforms that generate a lot of value from APIs succeed by getting developer adoption by running things like hackathons - and this effort seems no different. Kudos.
dtparr 11y ago
I thought this was an interesting tidbit from the linked rules pdf: > In addition to hosting the competition, SpaceX will likely build a pod for demonstration purposes only. This team will not be eligible to win.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I think that's admirable, and doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary for Elon. SpaceX has some remarkable engineering talent (which also transfers tech to Tesla; see their friction stir welding technique that is used by both companies now). It wouldn't be fair for SpaceX to be able to win.
  - dtparr 11y ago
    I agree SpaceX recusing itself from winning its own competition is the right thing, but the bit I found interesting was just that they were building a pod as well as the track, putting even more skin in the metaphorical game. I've had projects before where I came up with an interesting idea but dismissed it as too costly (in time or money or what have you), but it stuck in my head. So then, well maybe I'll just do a quick proof of concept... And then, well, maybe I can hack something a bit more complete together. Eventually, despite myself, it makes it to being a fully formed thing just because it was so interesting I couldn't ignore it. I'm wondering if the Hyperloop is going to be that sort of thing for Elon et al.
    - kiba 11y ago
      Elon Musk doesn't have the time to learn civil engineering, property development, let alone the politics surrounding it.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        After Elon said "fuck it" and built his own rocket motors after getting screwed by the Russians, I don't see him wasting any time with politics or property development (who I'd argue would be leeches/vultures trying to extract their tax on the project). He's just commission 2-4 TBMs (tunnel boring machines, about ~$20MM/each), drop them in the ground, and have them start digging hyperloop tunnels.
deleted 11y ago
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- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > Now if only I had an idea that had this much interest... Or perhaps, more importantly, the resources to bootstrap the ideas.. > By the way, what kind of business strategy is this called? Patronage or philanthropy, depending on how you see it. It's okay for DARPA to do grand challenges, but not Musk portfolio companies?
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Don't forget the track record to get people interested in your ideas. If just about anybody besides Elon Musk had proposed hyperloop, nobody would have paid attention, but when it's a guy who runs a company that routinely puts stuff into space on their own rockets, and runs another company that went from zero to "best car in the world" (in the opinion of many serious car folks) in under a decade, people naturally pay more attention.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      > Don't forget the track record to get people interested in your ideas. If just about anybody besides Elon Musk had proposed hyperloop, nobody would have paid attention, but when it's a guy who runs a company that routinely puts stuff into space on their own rockets, and runs another company that went from zero to "best car in the world" (in the opinion of many serious car folks) in under a decade, people naturally pay more attention. This is huge, and should not be discounted. “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that. It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed.” [1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-m...
- vonklaus 11y ago
  Open Source.
marbogast40 11y ago
Wait But Why - Tim Urban's take: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html
- camenk 11y ago
  Thanks for the article. I'm really hopeful that this competition will bring out something on the table (maybe a prototype). It would be really nice to be able to travel between nearby cities in the US without spending hours driving / flying. Flying itself is not really bad if it's not because of the time you need to waste until you actually fly.
ljk 11y ago
> Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies what does that mean? Didn't they come up with the idea of hyperloop?
- lnanek2 11y ago
  Elon has flat out said he is too busy with Tesla and SpaceX to do yet another company.
- GeneralMayhem 11y ago
  For things like this, "affiliated" usually has a very precise legal definition, which means that they don't help each other with research and they're not financially invested. It means they're not cheating by entering their friends (or themselves) in the competition. Compare with the small print on most lotteries and contests, e.g. Google Code Jam: > You cannot participate in the Contest if... you are a current employee (including intern), contractor, officer, or director, of Google or its affiliates.
omegant 11y ago
The 9 engineering points at the end of the text, are very important and extremely dificult each one of them. I would add a pod decompression, and the emergency braking emergencies. Common oxigen masks don't work above 50000' and you can not dissipate the kinetic energy of a pod traveling at 900km/h just by friction without a brake fire.
- MertsA 11y ago
  > you can not dissipate the kinetic energy of a pod traveling at 900km/h just by friction without a brake fire. Sure you can, just use water stored onboard to cool the brakes. Obviously the only case when you would need to use friction brakes in the hyperloop is in an emergency so we're fine with just boiling away the water into the steel tube. It takes 2,261 KJ per kg to boil water in the vacuum of the tube and assuming a pod weighs in at 1000 kg and is travelling 300 m/s that gives us 45 MJ of kinetic energy to deal with. That comes out to just under 20 kg of water to stop a 1000 kg pod moving 300 m/s. That's a decent size tank when considering the form factor of a hyperloop pod but still doable.
mixmastamyk 11y ago
If it works well, I'd like to see these in LA or other big cities too, not just long distance. Would be great to get on one of these and end up at the beach in Santa Monica at high speed instead of suffering through traffic.
- netfire 11y ago
  Would a Hyperloop system work well in a system with frequent stops, where you wouldn't be able to get up to full-speed because you needed to stop and the stops could disrupt other express traffic. Would you really be gaining that much over other traditional rail transportation options? It seems like the strength of the Hyperloop is extremely fast travel over long distances. Personally, I think having a line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles would be awesome, as the traffic can be horrible on that route, especially on weekends and probably significantly affects traffic in LA in general. Its also around 100 miles less than the LA to SF route, through mostly undeveloped desert, so it could be a lot cheaper to build.
  - mixmastamyk 11y ago
    I think it would, however I didn't realize until now how small the tubes and cars are, might make a metro-type system challenging. Or, it could be widened for metro usage, like the disneyland monorail.
    - netfire 11y ago
      Yeah, I wondered if some sort of on-ramp/off-ramp or multi-lane system might work, but given the distance it would take to get up to full-speed (or decrease speed to stop), that could greatly increase the cost of construction, especially if there are a lot of stations. For the Hyperloop to make any sense in a shorter distance metro setting, you'd probably want to have no stops between where you start and your destination. (So you might go directly from Anaheim to Santa Monica, for example) With smaller cars/trains, this may be possible (since you might be able to fill trains quickly enough to not make people wait too long), but potentially very expensive to build enough lanes to manage that amount of traffic with greatly varying speeds efficiently. Without that sort of system, however, I think the additional stops would delay you so much that the gain over a traditional metro train would be small and not worth the extra expense of building it.
imglorp 11y ago
I wonder what they will do about claustrophobia? > The capsule itself would need to be small—4.43ft (1.35m) wide and only 3.61ft (1.10m) high. No standing room No windows, pod inside a metal tube, seats reclined with minimal head room. There's no rational reason to panic in that position, but many people will not be comfortable. Video displays might help, but only to a point.
- cloudwalking 11y ago
  VR goggles.
  - unoti 11y ago
    I was about to say that sounds even more vomit-inducing, when you consider all the g-forces going on, and then add goggles on top of it. But then, if the g-forces match what the passenger is seeing through the goggles, that could actually be less vomit-inducing maybe? It's an interesting idea. I personally find the idea of spending an hour in a tiny enclosed space with no ability to move to be quite disturbing, and I'm not sure if the idea of doing it with VR goggles makes that less disturbing or more.
    - andrewchambers 11y ago
      Why are there lots of G forces? once you are at cruising speed it might not feel like you are moving at all.
  - Andrenid 11y ago
    VR goggles displaying a view of outside, maybe recorded from a plane that flew the same path then synced to your location to simulate your actual trip. The feeling to your body would then match the view too.
- capkutay 11y ago
  Innovation like this requires some getting used to from consumers. I'm sure people thought fear of heights would be a problem for commercial airlines when they started up. Early adopters have to be fearless and then it will become mainstream once everyone perceives it as safe and normal.
guynamedloren 11y ago
Any engineers or mechanically inclined folks around LA interested in assembling a team? Let's chat. About me: full stack software engineer with a degree in Systems Engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I work on classic cars and build shit with my hands when I'm not coding. I'm into efficiency, and I loooove the idea of building a better, faster cheaper CA high-speed railway.
- nether 11y ago
  I'm an aeromechanical engineer around LA and might be interested in contributing some design/analysis work in a non-leadership role. Current work is in structural analysis, interested in aerodynamics though (was my master's concentration years ago).
- harperlee 11y ago
  So now I'm very curious: can anyone comment on what's the biggest collaboration of this sort to have come out of Hacker News?
- newbook 11y ago
  I'm a Toronto-based Mechanical Design Engineer with an Electrical Engineering education, I've worked in Toronto and Mountain View. I've designed airborne laser LIDAR scanning systems and large-scale lighting solutions. I've also done a lot of work with stress and heat management, mass electronics production and packaging. I'd be interested in taking up a project like this and seeing how far we could go with it! If you're interested, shoot me a message: vpsanta@gmail.com.
michaelbarton 11y ago
This immediately reminded me of the early days of steam when, very similarly, at Rainhill a one mile test track of railway was constructed and people were invited to compete their different locomotives. The winner was Stevenson's rocket which amazed the large crowd by travelling at a heady top speed of 30mph. An "also ran" was the amusing cycloped, the only non-steam entry, a horse on top of a treadmill walking the carriage forward.
- abc_lisper 11y ago
  Hoping you were not old enough to know this first hand ;) This is fascinating? Where did you come across this info?
  - melloc 11y ago
    There's a Wikipedia article on this, it seems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainhill_Trials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainhill_Trials
  - michaelbarton 11y ago
    There's an excellent book on the start of the railways "Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain". It's very interesting and full of side stories about how people adapted to the start of the steam age. For example the one of the first railway lines was more like a toll road. A company built the tracks, and then other companies paid to run their locomotives on them. This lead to chaos where two locomotives would meet on the single track, neither was willing to back up, and so the passengers would often get out and fight each other over it.
    - abc_lisper 11y ago
      >> neither was willing to back up, and so the passengers would often get out and fight each other over it. Hahahaha..
    - abc_lisper 11y ago
      Adding it to my reading list. Thank you!
CodeSheikh 11y ago
"Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies" Yet it is hosted on spacex.com. I love the project but I hate the legalities here. What does that mean? If something bad happens during operation then these aforementioned entities cant be held responsible.
- vidarh 11y ago
  It means what it says. Various people have formed companies to try to commercialise the Hyperloop concept. SpaceX and Elon Musk are not affiliated with them. SpaceX and Elon Musk are behind this competition.
jackreichert 11y ago
I'm finding the center alignment of the text bothersome. Aside from that, very cool!
martinald 11y ago
The projections of capacity seem way too low. It says it can do 840passengers/hour. In the UK each 11 car train on the West Coast Mainline can take about 600 passengers seated + maybe slightly over 100 more standing. So around 700. We have 3 trains per hour between London and Birmingham, which adds up to a rough capacity of 2200 per hour. This doesn't even take into account the multitude of slower trains that go between the two cities. All these trains are generally congested as hell at peak (and increasingly off peak). How is 840 passengers/hour enough for two big cities? I would assume making each pod bigger and heavier would require a greater stopping distance between them so the only way I can see to add more capacity is to build parallel hyperloops. At that point you've got the land take and the expense that comes with it.
- DuskStar 11y ago
  To be fair, Birmingham <-> London is 125 miles, while Los Angeles <-> San Francisco is 380 miles. A better comparison would be Edinburgh <-> London, at 410 miles or so. At those distances, required capacity probably drops off.
  - martinald 11y ago
    Well, there's between one and two trains per hour between London and Edinburgh, each holding about 600 people. So that's more just on train capacity, and there's up to 53 flights a day between London and Edinburgh. So that's another 6000ish seats per day. Just doesn't add up.
- frankus 11y ago
  I had the same thought. The waitbutwhy article cites 840 per hour being slightly less than the current traffic for that city pair, but that's assuming quite non-peaky traffic (7+ million if run 24/7). It's also assuming that the demand at a cost of $20 and 35 minutes will be roughly the same as it is now.
- Gustomaximus 11y ago
  Rather than 2 parallel hyperloops would it be more efficient to make passing points? Orgainse timings so pods pull off at a platform and then car traveling in the opposite direction or overtaking can go past.
revelation 11y ago
It seems like theres way too little information here to build anything.
Animats 11y ago
The original Hyperloop system was supposed to be powered by linear induction motors spaced along the track. The pod doesn't have propulsion capability, except maybe an emergency system. So the pod/track interface is pretty much set by the propulsion system. For trains, linear induction motors have usually been paired with magnetic levitation, as in the Transrapid system. But they don't have to be. Many roller coasters with a linear induction motor launch system have been built; Flight of Fear at King's Dominion, by Premiere Rides, was the first, in 1996. For a 1-mile test track, outsourcing the whole job to Premiere Rides or Intamin would be a good move. Intamin, which mostly makes amusement park rides, also has a transportation division. They build monorail systems. Intamin would just have to combine the car design from their P8 monorail[1] with their linear induction motor launch system.[2] By Intamin standards, a fast 1 mile loop with no hills is easy. ("We can put in a vertical loop for a small extra charge...") [1] http://www.intaminworldwide.com/transportation/Home/news/Shanghai/tabid/203/language/de-DE/Default.aspx http://www.intaminworldwide.com/transportation/Home/news/Sha... [2] http://www.intaminworldwide.com/amusement/RollerCoasters/LSM+Launch+Coaster/tabid/138/ProductNumber/LSM+Launch+Coaster/language/de-DE/Default.aspx http://www.intaminworldwide.com/amusement/RollerCoasters/LSM...
- tallerholler 11y ago
  as an aside, holy crap that website is terrible!
jcchin41 11y ago
For those interested in getting a better handle on the vehicle thermodynamics, see[1]. Feel free to play around with the open-source python model here[2] [1] https://mdao.grc.nasa.gov/publications/AIAA-2015-1587.pdf https://mdao.grc.nasa.gov/publications/AIAA-2015-1587.pdf [2] https://github.com/OpenMDAO-Plugins/Hyperloop https://github.com/OpenMDAO-Plugins/Hyperloop [3] http://www.popsci.com/hyped-up-startups-race-hyperloop-life http://www.popsci.com/hyped-up-startups-race-hyperloop-life
- bsdetector 11y ago
  For those of us who aren't aeronautical engineers... if you just covered a normal expressway with a half tube, wouldn't the air start moving along with the vehicles and greatly decrease the drag at high speeds, making higher speeds more economical? Or at what point does the vacuum and ratio of vehicle to tube size make hyperloop work out, but a simple enclosed highway doesn't?
  - Swannie 11y ago
    IANA engineer... Only if the vehicles are self propelling from the ground, and if you refer back to trains really they are just pushing air in front of them, with some air escaping past them. If there were not ventilation systems to allow the air behind the train to be filled, the train would need to work harder to essentially pull the air behind it. At least, that's my understanding. If the vehicles are not self propelling from the ground, and propel with air, like the original hyper-loop proposal, they are actually pushing air backwards to their direction of motion, which would stop any such forward moving air flow develop.
capkutay 11y ago
Does anyone know about the relationship between SpaceX and Hyperloop Technologies? It looks like Hyperloop Tech has a lot of ex SpaceX engineers/execs, but they don't seem to have an active partnership with Musk or SpaceX
SapphireSun 11y ago
Hey Boston, want to join a feasibility meeting I'm setting up? Email me. :)

244 points by dtparr 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Site was erroring when I visited; Google cache is here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.spacex.com%2Fhyperloop%2F https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.sp...

moey 11y ago

"Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies. While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype." I thought Elon wanted to create the Hyperloop. Here I was thinking I would see it in the next 5-10 years :(

dtparr 11y ago
I think he wants it to be created by someone, but my recollection is that when he announced the plans he specifically said he didn't have time to do it himself and wanted others to take the ball and run with it.

zacharypinter 11y ago

Very cool announcement. It strikes me that this is a pretty good insurance policy against a poor implementation of Hyperloop being used as an argument against its feasibility. SpaceX/Musk gets to put out a proof of concept track and pod without committing to building the full thing themselves.

databound 11y ago

It's funny they are building a 1 mile test track but don't have any interest in running with the idea... seems pretty committed at this point.

fitzwatermellow 11y ago

They plan on releasing the full requirements for the final design in Aug, but the rules document includes some example technical questions. Most calculations I imagine can be estimated using college physics and mechanics: drag coefficient, pneumatic pressure, heat flux, etc. But I'm curious if anyone has any references specific to air compresser propulsion systems? I'm thinking it would make a nice WebGL simulation that shows the relationship between speed and heat generated ;)

lisper 11y ago

> SpaceX will construct a one-mile test track adjacent to our Hawthorne, California headquarters I'm not sure which would be the more remarkable achievement, getting the Hyperloop working, or obtaining the real estate to build a mile-long test track in Hawthorne.

bhauer 11y ago
I live in Hawthorne. Residential real-estate is fairly expensive in some areas (western side, where ~1200sqft goes for ~$700K), but commercial real estate is still not that expensive. Plus, Hawthorne is very diverse and Spacex is located on the less expensive east side of the city. Nearby El Segundo is quite a different story, which I assume is part of the reason SpaceX moved from El Segundo to Hawthorne. I also expect that they will run the test track around their current airport campus. I'm not even sure if they need to buy all that much new property to do so. They may just need to cut a deal with (or buy) the airport. The cool thing is that this test track should be visible from the 105 freeway (along with the massive Tesla logo). So even people not familiar with the project will be enticed to find out more! As a Hawthorne resident, I am excited!
smackfu 11y ago
They are right next to Hawthorne Airport... that's the only place I can see the track being located. The rest of the surroundings are industrial buildings.
- odonnellryan 11y ago
  Aren't these meant to be underground?
  - myth_buster 11y ago
    I believe it would be overhead too as shown on their site. I assume it would be easier to construct overhead tracks adjacent or over the freeways.
  - uptown 11y ago

myth_buster 11y ago

For those who couldn't access the site: Webpage screen grab [0] Guidelines [1] [0] http://i.imgur.com/iq3W18x.png http://i.imgur.com/iq3W18x.png [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/18IkkbuxMbrzaVKHRnqXqtWimxF5FfiBwo27WMgtvTstKQMWpHVL37LScQxx7Q_LryBuqfgPs9WNhrZ1D/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/18IkkbuxMbrzaVKHRnqXqtWimxF5...

loceng 11y ago

I'm really happy to see Tesla and SpaceX being run properly as platforms. Clearly Elon Musk has a great understanding of platforms with his online involvement with PayPal, however there aren't as obvious examples of it occurring in the physical product world; there are attempts though they seem more to control a user's behaviour and entrench people into a recurring business model than actually disrupting an unmanaged-disorganized system. Platforms that generate a lot of value from APIs succeed by getting developer adoption by running things like hackathons - and this effort seems no different. Kudos.

dtparr 11y ago

I thought this was an interesting tidbit from the linked rules pdf: > In addition to hosting the competition, SpaceX will likely build a pod for demonstration purposes only. This team will not be eligible to win.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
I think that's admirable, and doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary for Elon. SpaceX has some remarkable engineering talent (which also transfers tech to Tesla; see their friction stir welding technique that is used by both companies now). It wouldn't be fair for SpaceX to be able to win.
- dtparr 11y ago
  I agree SpaceX recusing itself from winning its own competition is the right thing, but the bit I found interesting was just that they were building a pod as well as the track, putting even more skin in the metaphorical game. I've had projects before where I came up with an interesting idea but dismissed it as too costly (in time or money or what have you), but it stuck in my head. So then, well maybe I'll just do a quick proof of concept... And then, well, maybe I can hack something a bit more complete together. Eventually, despite myself, it makes it to being a fully formed thing just because it was so interesting I couldn't ignore it. I'm wondering if the Hyperloop is going to be that sort of thing for Elon et al.
  - kiba 11y ago
    Elon Musk doesn't have the time to learn civil engineering, property development, let alone the politics surrounding it.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      After Elon said "fuck it" and built his own rocket motors after getting screwed by the Russians, I don't see him wasting any time with politics or property development (who I'd argue would be leeches/vultures trying to extract their tax on the project). He's just commission 2-4 TBMs (tunnel boring machines, about ~$20MM/each), drop them in the ground, and have them start digging hyperloop tunnels.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> Now if only I had an idea that had this much interest... Or perhaps, more importantly, the resources to bootstrap the ideas.. > By the way, what kind of business strategy is this called? Patronage or philanthropy, depending on how you see it. It's okay for DARPA to do grand challenges, but not Musk portfolio companies?
- mikeash 11y ago
  Don't forget the track record to get people interested in your ideas. If just about anybody besides Elon Musk had proposed hyperloop, nobody would have paid attention, but when it's a guy who runs a company that routinely puts stuff into space on their own rockets, and runs another company that went from zero to "best car in the world" (in the opinion of many serious car folks) in under a decade, people naturally pay more attention.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > Don't forget the track record to get people interested in your ideas. If just about anybody besides Elon Musk had proposed hyperloop, nobody would have paid attention, but when it's a guy who runs a company that routinely puts stuff into space on their own rockets, and runs another company that went from zero to "best car in the world" (in the opinion of many serious car folks) in under a decade, people naturally pay more attention. This is huge, and should not be discounted. “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that. It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed.” [1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-m...
vonklaus 11y ago
Open Source.

marbogast40 11y ago

Wait But Why - Tim Urban's take: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/hyperloop.html

camenk 11y ago
Thanks for the article. I'm really hopeful that this competition will bring out something on the table (maybe a prototype). It would be really nice to be able to travel between nearby cities in the US without spending hours driving / flying. Flying itself is not really bad if it's not because of the time you need to waste until you actually fly.

ljk 11y ago

> Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies what does that mean? Didn't they come up with the idea of hyperloop?

lnanek2 11y ago
Elon has flat out said he is too busy with Tesla and SpaceX to do yet another company.
GeneralMayhem 11y ago
For things like this, "affiliated" usually has a very precise legal definition, which means that they don't help each other with research and they're not financially invested. It means they're not cheating by entering their friends (or themselves) in the competition. Compare with the small print on most lotteries and contests, e.g. Google Code Jam: > You cannot participate in the Contest if... you are a current employee (including intern), contractor, officer, or director, of Google or its affiliates.

omegant 11y ago

The 9 engineering points at the end of the text, are very important and extremely dificult each one of them. I would add a pod decompression, and the emergency braking emergencies. Common oxigen masks don't work above 50000' and you can not dissipate the kinetic energy of a pod traveling at 900km/h just by friction without a brake fire.

MertsA 11y ago
> you can not dissipate the kinetic energy of a pod traveling at 900km/h just by friction without a brake fire. Sure you can, just use water stored onboard to cool the brakes. Obviously the only case when you would need to use friction brakes in the hyperloop is in an emergency so we're fine with just boiling away the water into the steel tube. It takes 2,261 KJ per kg to boil water in the vacuum of the tube and assuming a pod weighs in at 1000 kg and is travelling 300 m/s that gives us 45 MJ of kinetic energy to deal with. That comes out to just under 20 kg of water to stop a 1000 kg pod moving 300 m/s. That's a decent size tank when considering the form factor of a hyperloop pod but still doable.

mixmastamyk 11y ago

If it works well, I'd like to see these in LA or other big cities too, not just long distance. Would be great to get on one of these and end up at the beach in Santa Monica at high speed instead of suffering through traffic.

netfire 11y ago
Would a Hyperloop system work well in a system with frequent stops, where you wouldn't be able to get up to full-speed because you needed to stop and the stops could disrupt other express traffic. Would you really be gaining that much over other traditional rail transportation options? It seems like the strength of the Hyperloop is extremely fast travel over long distances. Personally, I think having a line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles would be awesome, as the traffic can be horrible on that route, especially on weekends and probably significantly affects traffic in LA in general. Its also around 100 miles less than the LA to SF route, through mostly undeveloped desert, so it could be a lot cheaper to build.
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  I think it would, however I didn't realize until now how small the tubes and cars are, might make a metro-type system challenging. Or, it could be widened for metro usage, like the disneyland monorail.
  - netfire 11y ago
    Yeah, I wondered if some sort of on-ramp/off-ramp or multi-lane system might work, but given the distance it would take to get up to full-speed (or decrease speed to stop), that could greatly increase the cost of construction, especially if there are a lot of stations. For the Hyperloop to make any sense in a shorter distance metro setting, you'd probably want to have no stops between where you start and your destination. (So you might go directly from Anaheim to Santa Monica, for example) With smaller cars/trains, this may be possible (since you might be able to fill trains quickly enough to not make people wait too long), but potentially very expensive to build enough lanes to manage that amount of traffic with greatly varying speeds efficiently. Without that sort of system, however, I think the additional stops would delay you so much that the gain over a traditional metro train would be small and not worth the extra expense of building it.

imglorp 11y ago

I wonder what they will do about claustrophobia? > The capsule itself would need to be small—4.43ft (1.35m) wide and only 3.61ft (1.10m) high. No standing room No windows, pod inside a metal tube, seats reclined with minimal head room. There's no rational reason to panic in that position, but many people will not be comfortable. Video displays might help, but only to a point.

cloudwalking 11y ago
VR goggles.
- unoti 11y ago
  I was about to say that sounds even more vomit-inducing, when you consider all the g-forces going on, and then add goggles on top of it. But then, if the g-forces match what the passenger is seeing through the goggles, that could actually be less vomit-inducing maybe? It's an interesting idea. I personally find the idea of spending an hour in a tiny enclosed space with no ability to move to be quite disturbing, and I'm not sure if the idea of doing it with VR goggles makes that less disturbing or more.
  - andrewchambers 11y ago
    Why are there lots of G forces? once you are at cruising speed it might not feel like you are moving at all.
- Andrenid 11y ago
  VR goggles displaying a view of outside, maybe recorded from a plane that flew the same path then synced to your location to simulate your actual trip. The feeling to your body would then match the view too.
capkutay 11y ago
Innovation like this requires some getting used to from consumers. I'm sure people thought fear of heights would be a problem for commercial airlines when they started up. Early adopters have to be fearless and then it will become mainstream once everyone perceives it as safe and normal.

guynamedloren 11y ago

Any engineers or mechanically inclined folks around LA interested in assembling a team? Let's chat. About me: full stack software engineer with a degree in Systems Engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I work on classic cars and build shit with my hands when I'm not coding. I'm into efficiency, and I loooove the idea of building a better, faster cheaper CA high-speed railway.

nether 11y ago
I'm an aeromechanical engineer around LA and might be interested in contributing some design/analysis work in a non-leadership role. Current work is in structural analysis, interested in aerodynamics though (was my master's concentration years ago).
harperlee 11y ago
So now I'm very curious: can anyone comment on what's the biggest collaboration of this sort to have come out of Hacker News?
newbook 11y ago
I'm a Toronto-based Mechanical Design Engineer with an Electrical Engineering education, I've worked in Toronto and Mountain View. I've designed airborne laser LIDAR scanning systems and large-scale lighting solutions. I've also done a lot of work with stress and heat management, mass electronics production and packaging. I'd be interested in taking up a project like this and seeing how far we could go with it! If you're interested, shoot me a message: vpsanta@gmail.com.

michaelbarton 11y ago

This immediately reminded me of the early days of steam when, very similarly, at Rainhill a one mile test track of railway was constructed and people were invited to compete their different locomotives. The winner was Stevenson's rocket which amazed the large crowd by travelling at a heady top speed of 30mph. An "also ran" was the amusing cycloped, the only non-steam entry, a horse on top of a treadmill walking the carriage forward.

abc_lisper 11y ago
Hoping you were not old enough to know this first hand ;) This is fascinating? Where did you come across this info?
- melloc 11y ago
  There's a Wikipedia article on this, it seems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainhill_Trials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainhill_Trials
- michaelbarton 11y ago
  There's an excellent book on the start of the railways "Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain". It's very interesting and full of side stories about how people adapted to the start of the steam age. For example the one of the first railway lines was more like a toll road. A company built the tracks, and then other companies paid to run their locomotives on them. This lead to chaos where two locomotives would meet on the single track, neither was willing to back up, and so the passengers would often get out and fight each other over it.
  - abc_lisper 11y ago
    >> neither was willing to back up, and so the passengers would often get out and fight each other over it. Hahahaha..
  - abc_lisper 11y ago
    Adding it to my reading list. Thank you!

CodeSheikh 11y ago

"Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies" Yet it is hosted on spacex.com. I love the project but I hate the legalities here. What does that mean? If something bad happens during operation then these aforementioned entities cant be held responsible.

vidarh 11y ago
It means what it says. Various people have formed companies to try to commercialise the Hyperloop concept. SpaceX and Elon Musk are not affiliated with them. SpaceX and Elon Musk are behind this competition.

jackreichert 11y ago

I'm finding the center alignment of the text bothersome. Aside from that, very cool!

martinald 11y ago

The projections of capacity seem way too low. It says it can do 840passengers/hour. In the UK each 11 car train on the West Coast Mainline can take about 600 passengers seated + maybe slightly over 100 more standing. So around 700. We have 3 trains per hour between London and Birmingham, which adds up to a rough capacity of 2200 per hour. This doesn't even take into account the multitude of slower trains that go between the two cities. All these trains are generally congested as hell at peak (and increasingly off peak). How is 840 passengers/hour enough for two big cities? I would assume making each pod bigger and heavier would require a greater stopping distance between them so the only way I can see to add more capacity is to build parallel hyperloops. At that point you've got the land take and the expense that comes with it.

DuskStar 11y ago
To be fair, Birmingham <-> London is 125 miles, while Los Angeles <-> San Francisco is 380 miles. A better comparison would be Edinburgh <-> London, at 410 miles or so. At those distances, required capacity probably drops off.
- martinald 11y ago
  Well, there's between one and two trains per hour between London and Edinburgh, each holding about 600 people. So that's more just on train capacity, and there's up to 53 flights a day between London and Edinburgh. So that's another 6000ish seats per day. Just doesn't add up.
frankus 11y ago
I had the same thought. The waitbutwhy article cites 840 per hour being slightly less than the current traffic for that city pair, but that's assuming quite non-peaky traffic (7+ million if run 24/7). It's also assuming that the demand at a cost of $20 and 35 minutes will be roughly the same as it is now.
Gustomaximus 11y ago
Rather than 2 parallel hyperloops would it be more efficient to make passing points? Orgainse timings so pods pull off at a platform and then car traveling in the opposite direction or overtaking can go past.

revelation 11y ago

It seems like theres way too little information here to build anything.

Animats 11y ago

The original Hyperloop system was supposed to be powered by linear induction motors spaced along the track. The pod doesn't have propulsion capability, except maybe an emergency system. So the pod/track interface is pretty much set by the propulsion system. For trains, linear induction motors have usually been paired with magnetic levitation, as in the Transrapid system. But they don't have to be. Many roller coasters with a linear induction motor launch system have been built; Flight of Fear at King's Dominion, by Premiere Rides, was the first, in 1996. For a 1-mile test track, outsourcing the whole job to Premiere Rides or Intamin would be a good move. Intamin, which mostly makes amusement park rides, also has a transportation division. They build monorail systems. Intamin would just have to combine the car design from their P8 monorail[1] with their linear induction motor launch system.[2] By Intamin standards, a fast 1 mile loop with no hills is easy. ("We can put in a vertical loop for a small extra charge...") [1] http://www.intaminworldwide.com/transportation/Home/news/Shanghai/tabid/203/language/de-DE/Default.aspx http://www.intaminworldwide.com/transportation/Home/news/Sha... [2] http://www.intaminworldwide.com/amusement/RollerCoasters/LSM+Launch+Coaster/tabid/138/ProductNumber/LSM+Launch+Coaster/language/de-DE/Default.aspx http://www.intaminworldwide.com/amusement/RollerCoasters/LSM...

tallerholler 11y ago
as an aside, holy crap that website is terrible!

jcchin41 11y ago

For those interested in getting a better handle on the vehicle thermodynamics, see[1]. Feel free to play around with the open-source python model here[2] [1] https://mdao.grc.nasa.gov/publications/AIAA-2015-1587.pdf https://mdao.grc.nasa.gov/publications/AIAA-2015-1587.pdf [2] https://github.com/OpenMDAO-Plugins/Hyperloop https://github.com/OpenMDAO-Plugins/Hyperloop [3] http://www.popsci.com/hyped-up-startups-race-hyperloop-life http://www.popsci.com/hyped-up-startups-race-hyperloop-life

bsdetector 11y ago
For those of us who aren't aeronautical engineers... if you just covered a normal expressway with a half tube, wouldn't the air start moving along with the vehicles and greatly decrease the drag at high speeds, making higher speeds more economical? Or at what point does the vacuum and ratio of vehicle to tube size make hyperloop work out, but a simple enclosed highway doesn't?
- Swannie 11y ago
  IANA engineer... Only if the vehicles are self propelling from the ground, and if you refer back to trains really they are just pushing air in front of them, with some air escaping past them. If there were not ventilation systems to allow the air behind the train to be filled, the train would need to work harder to essentially pull the air behind it. At least, that's my understanding. If the vehicles are not self propelling from the ground, and propel with air, like the original hyper-loop proposal, they are actually pushing air backwards to their direction of motion, which would stop any such forward moving air flow develop.

capkutay 11y ago

Does anyone know about the relationship between SpaceX and Hyperloop Technologies? It looks like Hyperloop Tech has a lot of ex SpaceX engineers/execs, but they don't seem to have an active partnership with Musk or SpaceX

SapphireSun 11y ago

Hey Boston, want to join a feasibility meeting I'm setting up? Email me. :)