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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday June 17 2015, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the zoom-zoom dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by jcross on Wednesday June 17 2015, @04:13PM

    by jcross (4009) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @04:13PM (#197357)

    Curvature could be limited by a bunch of stuff. The length and geometry of the pod would be a major factor, the wall clearance, the maximum load on the air bearings, but especially the maximum amount of sideways force that riders can comfortably experience when making the turns. This is the main thing that makes retrofitting high speed trains so expensive: buying up the extra right-of-way to make the turns wide enough to be gentle on the passengers. It's quite easy to make tracks and trains that handle existing turns at high speed, but passengers are another matter. I would hope the hyperloop design considers this as well, since turning forces would be a major factor at those speeds, but as I understand it the main advantage is that it can be built on pylons over existing highways, which reduces the amount of real-estate needed considerably. You know that's got to be a major part of the cost in California. Still, I think being stuck in a me-sized capsule with no windows and unpredictable g-forces sounds fairly hellish no matter how you slice it.

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