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posted by on Sunday January 29 2017, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the pro-you-go-fast,-con-you-are-sealed-in dept.

This is the first weekend for teams to compete at SpaceX's Hyperloop Pod Competition:

Hyperloop, a concept for a high-speed ground transport system, was introduced in 2013 by Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. SpaceX, which designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft, announced the contest in June 2015, inviting university students and independent engineering teams to build functional, scale-model Hyperloop pods. Through the competition, SpaceX hopes to speed up the development of a prototype for a safer, faster, less expensive and more sustainable mode of transportation, according to the company's website.

Most of the teams are comprised of university students, with two notable exceptions:

All but two of the participating teams are affiliated with universities, including USC, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara. Other teams hail from such places as Maryland, New York, Colorado, Oklahoma, Virginia, Japan, Spain, Canada, India, and the Netherlands. The nonuniversity teams are a group from a Texas high school and a team of individuals organized from around the world through Reddit.com. Finalists were chosen based on their design concepts from a field of 1,200 initial applicants.


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday January 30 2017, @05:50PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday January 30 2017, @05:50PM (#460721)

    I have yet to read a good explanation of the cost of running hyperloop.

    Imagine that you built a 600km tube network. Imagine that you don't pay interest on the ensuing debt (billions).
    Let's talk about just the running cost of maintaining vacuum in the tubes, including both the active pumping and the maintenance of seals on all the moving parts (doors to the stations, emergency exits...), plus the cost of propelling and monitoring all the pods, taking some out or in based on traffic, fixing others, recharging air supplies and emergency kits for passengers, training the passengers to use the system, emptying the toilets and cleaning the other degradation...
    Many of those costs seem higher per passenger than the train equivalent...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @06:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @06:23PM (#460732)

    If you design one to be as big as a wall, you could probably get the Government to build one from Brownsville to San Diego. Two birds with one stone, and it would have the added benefit of alleviating the Brownsville-San Diego traffic bottleneck.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday January 30 2017, @07:13PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday January 30 2017, @07:13PM (#460748)

      Here's my vote for an off-thread mod.
      It's not off-topic per se, but why was this a reply?
      Ideally, we could signal our favorite overlords to move this kind of posts to the root of the comment tree to be discussed on its own merit. That would improve the quality of the discussion.
      It's not epidemic, but it happens occasionally. Might also be a way to treat some light trolls.