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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 we
by 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 agoElon Musk doesn't have the time to learn civil engineering, property development, let alone the politics surrounding it.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoAfter 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.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI think it's reasonable to expect at this point that there would be quite a lot of people willing to help Musk battle various leeches and vultures.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI don't disagree whatsoever. I frequently wonder, "What could Elon Musk do with another 100K employees and Apple's war chest?"
- dragonwriter 11y agoAnd a quite a lot of people presenting themselves that way will be various leeches and vultures.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoHow do we differentiate them then?
- TeMPOraL 11y agoProbably those willing to do it pro bono would be ok.
- krschultz 11y agoYou're off by an order of magnitude on the cost of a TBM.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago"The machine is a remarkable and unique piece of equipment. Purpose-built for Crossrail by German firm Herrenknecht – one of a handful of TBM manufacturers in the world – it cost around £10m ($15m), weighs close to 1,000 tonnes, has an external diameter of 7.1 metres (23ft) and from cutting-face-to-end stretches 150m (500ft)." http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150602-crossrail-the-monster-tunnelling-under-london-streets http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150602-crossrail-the-monst...
- abduhl 11y agoTBMs are typically built specifically for a job and its ground conditions. Depending on the type of ground, the machine can be a different type of machine that uses different tooling. This will ultimately drive TBM cost. It is possible to reuse machines but this is, again, dependent on geology. Anyways, the cost of a TBM is generally not the most expensive part of a tunneling operation.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> Anyways, the cost of a TBM is generally not the most expensive part of a tunneling operation. What is the most expensive part?
- phpnode 11y agoLabour costs. TBMs are amazing but they are slow and require a whole lot of infrastructure. It's not just a case of sticking them in the ground, turning them on and waiting for a nice tunnel to materialize. For instance, what do you with the excavated dirt? To give you an indication of the sheer cost here, London's crossrail project runs at approximately £4m/day - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
- cpeterso 11y agoHyperloop tubes are elevated, not buried underground.
- skorecky 11y agoSays who?
- marssaxman 11y agoSays Elon Musk, who came up with the idea...?
- toomuchtodo 11y agoThey don't have to be elevated; they simply need power for the stator plates.
- btilly 11y agoYou don't want to do that for reasons that Elon understands well. Part of Elon's design for the pylons allows the track to remain stable even when the pylons are moved by an earthquake. Which is kind of important with pods moving around Mach 1. Doing the same thing with a tunnel requires you to have cut a large enough hole to shift the tube inside of. Which is a massively harder piece of engineering.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoInterested. TBMs are designed to drill through the earth, and then to wrap the tunnel walls with concrete blocks that are rated to last over 100 years. I'm curious if a TBM could cut through the earth and build hyperloop infrastructure behind it as well. As with everything, there are tradeoffs. Building above ground means land use issues, and the tunnel needs to be so small you can't stand in the hyperloop pods. Building underground means more support infrastructure, but you're limited less by politics and land use problems and more by engineering. The questions is: which is cheaper to solve? Engineering? Or politics?
- btilly 11y agoThe answer is an emphatic no. Concrete can do many things, but it will not hold back a slip fault. Concrete roads, bridges, etc will buckle and break in the slip zone no matter what they are rated for. Take the 1906 earthquake as an example. As http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/earthq3/move.html http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/earthq3/move.html says, the horizontal slip was 21 feet at one point. Something like the Hyperloop has to be designed with the expectation of facing a similar event. Concrete is simply not strong enough to hold back a wall of dirt trying to move 21 feet. Or for more recent history https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/landers-and-big-bear-california-earthquakes-june-28-1992 https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/landers-and-big-bear-califo... where the slip was 18 feet horizontally and 6 feet vertically. And that one demonstrates that it isn't enough to build something special for every slip zone you know about. Because in a real earthquake you are likely to discover slip zones that nobody noticed.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
- ajays 11y agoIf tunnel boring was that cheap, why is it costing the city of SF $1B to bore a tunnel ~1 mile?
- gknoy 11y agoI am pretty sure you were joking, but just in case ... Elon already sat down and decided to learn enough rocket science to found SpaceX, and enough engineering to found Tesla. He's learned more in his "spare time" than most of us have learned at university, and then has gone on to apply the lever of business to it. If Elon felt that it were necessary to get his pet project done, I believe he'd make time to master civil engineering and politics to the degree that it were necessary. Basically, he's the real Tony Stark. ;)
- abduhl 11y agoCivil engineering is fairly rigid and defined by applicable building codes. There isn't any real room to innovate in the industry, at least in the public sector. "Mastering" civil engineering just entails becoming familiar with the code and then it becomes a game of politics and liability. More likely, he would just hire a civil engineering firm. Laws throughout the country are such that you can't really buy your way into the industry the same way he has with Tesla and SpaceX. Practicing civil engineering requires licensure everywhere in the USA.
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