DailyDirt: Getting From Point A To B... Really Really Quickly

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Wed, Aug 26th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Transportation has evolved from simply walking to riding to flying to sailing and orbiting and all kinds of modes of travel. We've grown accustomed to speeds of 100-600 mph or so, but it's possible to go a lot faster. A Concorde jet could go over 1,000 mph, but those planes aren't in service anymore. Traveling to space might not appeal to that many people, but getting from NYC to LA in an hour might. Check out a few concept vehicles that could accomplish supersonic (or hypersonic) travel.

Elon Musk's Hyperloop project isn't totally crazy. It's still somewhat crazy, but there are some people building a prototype now -- so a working version might exist someday. [url]
SpaceLiner is a suborbital, hypersonic, winged passenger transport concept that could take people from Europe to the US in about an hour. Flying on what is essentially an intercontinental missile probably has some additional security issues, but there are plenty of other practical problems for this transportation idea. [url]
Other evacuated tube transport systems (aka vactrains) could travel 5,000 mph all over the globe. That is, if anyone wants to build the tubes across oceans.... And maybe China will do it. (Or maybe not.) [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

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Filed Under: concept vehicles, concorde, elon musk, evacuated tube transport, hyperloop, hypersonic, spaceliner, supersonic, transportation, travel, vactrain

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Anonymous Coward, 26 Aug 2015 @ 5:04pm

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Glenn, 27 Aug 2015 @ 1:39am

It's also possible to replace most travel (business, esp.) with "telepresence" (video conferencing being one example). Way more convenient with none of the hassle.
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Mason Wheeler (profile), 27 Aug 2015 @ 7:23am

Technically, the Hyperloop won't be going at supersonic speeds; it'll max out at just a little bit below the speed of sound, because the capsule will be traveling through a tube that's not quite hard vacuum, and so you still have to stay below sonic speeds to avoid generating sonic booms and all sorts of nasty shockwaves that that brings with it.
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Derek Kerton (profile), 27 Aug 2015 @ 9:04am

Snowpiercer
What, no mention of the Snowpiercer train?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
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Anonymous Coward, 27 Aug 2015 @ 9:38am

China
[M]aybe China will [build tubes across oceans]. (Or maybe not.)
Probably in one direction only, to get people into the country, like the moving walkways at Las Vegas casinos.
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Anonymous Coward, 27 Aug 2015 @ 10:17am

Re:
Since it is enclosed, they could adjust the temperature in order to travel faster without breaking the sound barrier.
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Mason Wheeler (profile), 27 Aug 2015 @ 11:00am

Re: Re:
Theoretically, yes. In practice, over a range of temperatures that humans are comfortable in, that doesn't gain you very much. Plus, raising the speed of sound requires raising the temperature, and heat dissipation is already a non-trivial engineering issue for the project.
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Andrew D. Todd, 27 Aug 2015 @ 12:24pm

Pretty Pictures, No Substance.
Elon Musk's pretty pictures look pretty much like those produced by various government agencies and contractors, circa 1965.

Tomorrow's Transportation: New Systems for the Urban Future, U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Metropolitan Development, Urban Transportation Administration, Washington D.C., 1968 (Library of Congress catalog number 68-61300)

Metrotran-2000: A Study of Future Concepts in Metropolitan Transportation for the Year 2000, Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories, Inc., by: Robert A. Wolf, Transportation Research Department, CAL No. 150, October 1967
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Mason Wheeler (profile), 27 Aug 2015 @ 12:40pm

Re: Pretty Pictures, No Substance.
Oh, the substance is certainly there. Sure, the idea's been around for a long time, but we're just now getting the technology to make it practical.

Just consider recent history. Betting against Elon Musk and his ideas doesn't tend to work out so well.
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Andrew D. Todd, 27 Aug 2015 @ 7:45pm

Re: Re: Pretty Pictures, No Substance.
Well, if you just want to build a short track which goes around in a circle in an amusement park, that is one thing. If you want to build a national network, that is something else again. Say, 40,000 miles at $100 million per mile, that would be four trillion dollars. We would be talking about a major government commitment. The United States Department of Transportation found, in effect, that it could not afford to turn _its_ pretty pictures into reality.

Read about the BNSF Railroad's double-tracking project in Abo Canyon in New Mexico, a matter of eight miles, four of which are "difficult." See Ken Fitzgerald, "Fixing The Weakest Link," Trains Magazine, Nov. 2011. It took three years, and involved 1.8 million cubic yards of earthwork, and I don't know how much dynamite they used. Note the picture of the supremely smug bighorn sheep standing there and watching the trains go by. It's his country, human, and don't you forget it!
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Mason Wheeler (profile), 28 Aug 2015 @ 6:54am

Re: Re: Re: Pretty Pictures, No Substance.
So the government doesn't have the resources or the engineering expertise to support a major transportation project, and people think it would be foolish for the private sector to try and help out? Sounds familiar.
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Andrew D. Todd, 29 Aug 2015 @ 9:46am

Re: Re: Re: Re: Pretty Pictures, No Substance.
The same business. Musk's pretty pictures relating to Mars are not even as good as Gerrard O'Neil's pretty pictures of space colonies, from the 1970's, which called for establishing factories on the moon to provide inexpensive building materials for the space colonies.

What Musk has actually done is to launch rockets of approximately the type which NASA was launching in 1961. NASA has a particular genius for blowing money on things not related to the main goal. Anyone who doesn't do that can compete with NASA on launching satellites into earth orbit. I understand that Elon Musk complains about the Russians, because they are better at saving money than he is, and they use military surplus rocket equipment. The Soviet Union once had more than a thousand Inter-Continental-Ballistic-Missiles pointing at the United States, plus the usual quantity of spare parts, and that stuff is, in the last analysis, available, like any other military surplus, at scrap-metal prices.

There's this whole cult of personality about Elon Musk. People say that Musk is like Steve Jobs, ergo he must be a genius, and he's going to do all these things. What you forget is that Steve Jobs had Moore's Law running in his favor. Jobs did a lot of dumb things, but he was bailed out by the fact that computers were getting better and cheaper so fast. That is not happening in the underlying materials of aerospace (fuel, structural aluminum, titanium, and magnesium, etc.), or those of large-scale construction. There has been no real improvement on dynamite as a means of blasting rock since the 1860's, the decade of the Civil War. The Ancient Romans knew how to make concrete-- and its limitations. So they used stone blocks to build structures like the Pont Du Gard in France, which could stay up for a couple of thousand years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard
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