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On Monday, SpaceX announced that it would be holding a Hyperloop pod competition, inviting universities and private companies to build passenger pods based on SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's open sourced Hyperloop design. The company said it would build a one-mile test track for the pods on a lot adjacent to its Hawthorne, California headquarters.
The Hyperloop has been described as high speed rail combined with an air hockey table: in the system, human-sized pods are propelled by linear induction, with magnets on the outside of the pod repelling the magnets lining the track, which is enclosed in a low-pressure tube (to reduce drag on the pods). The system is supposed to move humans and cargo at a rate of 760 miles per hour.
The impetus for the idea was Musk's disapproval of California's attempts to build a high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Musk detailed this in a 58-page document in 2013 (PDF), claiming that his Hyperloop idea could be built over the same stretch of land as California High Speed rail but for just $6 billion. (California's train system was estimated to cost around $68 billion as of this January.) But Musk decided to step back from the Hyperloop idea as soon as he put it forward. He made his designs open source and publicly said that neither SpaceX nor Tesla Motors, his electric vehicle company, would be building a Hyperloop.
Is a 1 mile long track long enough to test a train that goes 760 miles per hour?
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @03:47PM
Is a 1 mile long track long enough to test a train that goes 760 miles per hour?
Probably not at that speed. But you can test *MANY* other things. Like how does the tube handle pressure. What happens to the tube at say 2 months of low pressure and one section gives out? How do you build such a thing?
You do not build 50 miles of something before you can at least make some small prototypes and have some confidence in the bigger version...
This is not a 'go for the gold' sort of project. You want to go slow and work out some of the material problems...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @08:45PM
Agreed, the original question was dumb. You beat me to explaining why.