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The Hyperloop The World Will Build Open Source
So Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley wunderkind, former Pay Pal mafioso, with a proven track
record of turning science fiction into science reality, has brought an old idea brought back
to life. The pneumatic rail road or vacuum tube train, as we've covered previously, is
an over 200 year old sci-fi dream once tested in the 1870s in New York City and that today
promises to transport people from LA to San Francisco in a half hour and at competitive
prices.
Evidently, Musk and 1000 others from Space X and Tesla Motors were inspired by California's
failure to deliver a sexy alternative, according to Musk "How could it be that the home of
Silicon Valley and JPL -- doing incredible things like indexing all the world's knowledge
and putting rovers on Mars -- would build a bullet train that is both one of the most
expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?"
Great question! Gizmodo's Mario Augilar last week speaking with Daryl Oster founder and
chief of Colorado-based ET3, a company working on a similar revolutionary design, explained
that their 'system could ultimately transport people from New York to Beijing in just a
couple of hours for $150 a pop.' In addition, '...ET3 designs scale easily and could be
used to cover distances as short as five miles.' California's $68.4 billion project by comparison
delivers a paltry 164 miles per hour and doesn't promise anything near ET3 and according to
Musk he doesn't 'believe in using other people's money' anyway. California tax payers should
be loath to find the Hyperloop would cost just $6-$7.5 billion, 1/10th the cost of California's
state sanctioned high-speed rail project. Yet to be fair when high-speed rail was first
proposed, it was only $33B, but at least the good people in Sacramento already specked
out a viable route through the mostly rural San Juaquin Valley and splurged on an environmental
impact study saving any potential hyperloop system millions.
Musk told us to think about the Hyperloop as "a cross an air hockey table, a railgun
and the Concorde jet." While the anticipated 760 mile per hour speeds along California's
I-5 corridor will trounce even Japan's JR-Maglev MLX prototype, recorded at over 300mph, a
1972 Rand Corporation study of Very High Speed Transit (VHST) put the potential speed of
vacutubes at over 14,000 ridiculous miles per hour! Musk's idea though utilizes a low
pressure system "maintained around 15 thousandths of a pound per square inch or about 1/6 the
pressure on Mars." His partially evacuated tube design would support "standard commercial
pumps [that] could easily overcome [any potential] air leak [due to passenger stations] and transport
pods could handle variable air density," leaks that would cripple the hard vacuum envisaged
by ET3 and the Rand Corporation.
The pods "assuming an average departure time of 2 minutes between capsules, [and] a minimum
of 28 passengers per capsule are required to meet 840 passengers per hour." Affixed
to the front scoop of each pod is a motorized fan resembling a jet engine in order to periodically
propel itself within the tube and overcome the Kantrowitz Limit, which is to say suck
air passed the module and prevent the capsule from becoming an oversized syringe blocking
airflow, "not good," according to Musk. Launching the pod is accelerating inverter technology,
which would showcase inexpensive semiconductor switches that would allow the central inverters
to energize only the section of track occupied by a capsule increasing energy efficiency.
Weeks ago Gizmodo's Matt Novak pointed out that the big hurdle of the hyperloop might
be tunnels, but ET3 and Musk aren't looking into digging underground. Yet to reach the
ungodly speeds suggested by Rand and considering that 'lateral accelerations' or sharp turns
in any case would obviously vault people into a hypersonic hell ride rather than a smooth
commute, underground is indeed the ideal place. After all going 14,000 miles per hour will
be impossible without a mitigating dangerous curves and going underground, save a sea route,
would free designers from having to tediously navigate all of developed civilization, but
who needs to go that fast? Musk would rather leave that arena to planes. And unfortunately
before the humans travel at 18 times the speed of sound innovations in tunneling technology
would definitely need to be addressed. But according to ET3 and Musk it's all ultimately
cost prohibitive and the difference between an eyesore and just not happening at all.
The real news here aside from hard details provided by Musk and minions from Space X
and Tesla Motors is their officially only going as far as the sketch. According to Musk
last week on a Tesla investor call, he may have "stuck [his] foot in [his] mouth" in
revealing his dream too soon, because it turns out Musk won't be building it - you will.
Fortunately for techies and all of sci-fi geekdom Musk is just too busy building rocket
ships with Space X and amazing electric cars for Tesla Motors. So, his designs for a solor
powered Hyperloop system will be 'open-source.' This philosophy of spontaneous coordination
once used in the bowels of DARPA to create file transfer protocols and the internet itself
has brought us countless innovations in industries as disparate as software and medicine. The
model will open up universal access, a free license if you will, to the hyperloop's design
revealed yesterday and offers the opportunity for universal collaboration and redistribution
of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it, by anyone. Considering
new constructive innovations like adjustable pylons to elevate the vacuum tube, planning
for earthquakes, implementing air bearings rather than expensive maglev technology, addressing
potential security risks, and other technical issues like - I don't know mass transit safety
at Mach speed - perhaps 7 billion heads is better than one Elon Musk and considering
the obstacles both physical and technological they'll need every imagineer they can find
to keep this dream
on track.