I'm always surprised that more billionaires don't try interesting off the wall projects when they have so much money. What's the fun of having it, if you can't have the occasional mad scientist moment.
As Musk has stated, he was one more failed SpaceX launch from pretty much being bankrupt. As a "mad scientist", it's pretty easy to blow your money on ideas that don't quite pan out.
Science fiction author David Brin has some interesting suggestions for philanthropists looking to create a legacy, such as building a third-world university system, financing a freelance manned mission to Mars, or funding whistleblowers.
In Australia we have Clive Palmer. He's building a replica Titanic and a mechatronic Jurassic Park. And now has his own Political party named after himself with candidates in every seat in the country.
It's rare that the creative types end up being billionaires. Note that even Steve Jobs was kicked out of his own company, and then later only barely squeaked into the CEO slot, and only because the company was about dead anyway. He'd never have gotten the job if Skulley hadn't screwed things up quite so bad.
Yeah, if anything Steve Jobs was exactly the "business type" your parent is speaking about.
“I was so close to Steve Jobs I could never really see the transition,” Wozniak said. “I just wanted to be in engineering only – I never wanted to run a company, never wanted to run things, step on other people – Steve very clearly did, and wanted to be a top executive and a really important thinker in the world.”[1]
I think Jobs is definitely a creative type, he had a clear and distinct vision that went beyond what most CEO's would ever dream of let alone approve to drive resources into.
Being a creative type does not necessarily mean being an engineer.
Absolutely, but his vision (the Lisa) was the wrong vision at the time. He refined his vision at next (taking in a lot of other people's good ideas along the way) and returned to Apple at just the right time: when the average consumer was ready to pay a bit more for a refined product.
Every startup entrepreneur should learn image making and PR from Musk.
For someone who is not very eloquent and a bit tongue-tied he has done an amazing job to become known as the premier visionaries of our time.
This also includes making changes to his physical appearance by looking at his old images [1], [2] as well his name brand.
Wow, those "old" seem as if they were taken 10-15 years in the future.
I wonder if in fact, as you're suggesting, his changes in appearance were intended as a means of improving his public figure, rather than his health and subjective appearance.
Slightly O/T. A buddy of mine was saying last night that his lady suggested looking at a hair regrowth product, on inspecting the packaging and marketing material he found the wonderful claim:
"Up-to 4 times more effective than a placebo in clinical testing"
You would be surprised at how many medicines on the market compare effectivity to placebo. It's mostly done in instances where there is a chance that the drug may not even work. By comparing it to a placebo, you're as close to as you can be to leveling the playing field to show it is more effective than doing nothing.
There are hair loss products, such as Propecia, that are effective. Unfortunately the side effects can be severe: low testosterone, loss of libido, infertility, erectile dysfunction.
Anyone considering hair loss medication should do some concerted research.
Anybody considering Propecia should SERIOUSLY consider the consequences. Losing your hair, especially as a young man, might be stressful. But consider the possible alternative of never again being able to achieve an erection. Multiple case studies have indicated that Propecia can cause indefinite sexual dysfunction, even after you quit taking the drug. The anecdotal evidence online is much worse.
So tread carefully. The set of women who are sexually attracted to bald men is much, much larger than the set of women who are sexually attracted to men who are unable to have sex.
Just try out Rogaine/Regaine (whatever it's called there). The active ingredients are minoxidil and cutane.
They're off-the-counter products, but you still might want to talk to your doctor about it, not because there are any significant side effects, but because it's a good habit.
There's a drug on the market that's taken by patients who had prostate cancer. It grows back your hair and is being bought off - label for it.
I forgot the name.
When (real) clinical trials are constructed against placebo, the statistical testing is constructed accordingly. If you were comparing against an existing drug, for instance, you might be testing to show it's equal-to or equal-or-better-than (perhaps your new drug is cheaper, or works on a different metabolic pathway, or has fewer side effects, that make it worth adding to the formulary if it otherwise has equal effectiveness). If an existing treatment doesn't exist, you'd compare against placebo, but now the stats testing would be specifically for superiority.
You know, upon thinking about it, I'm not sure that many (or even most) clinical trials use one-sided testing. It makes sense to do so, and would increase power for the particular side chosen, but I can't recall ever seeing it in a paper.
I've seen it in a couple of low-key (read: Non-FDA) trials, but for anything FDA-scale I think most people are wary about submitting studies that presume their subject can't possibly have -worse- results. If it's one of the early Phase 3's, it's just an unwarranted assumption, and people will be all over you for picking a more lenient study design without damn good reason to.
"Sometimes patients given a placebo treatment will have a perceived or actual improvement in a medical condition, a phenomenon commonly called the placebo effect."
A double blind study observing the placebo effect showed no statistical difference between those receiving the placebo and the control group receiving a sugar pill.
If you set up your experiment the 'right' way, there is a good chance it has.
Here is one way that I think has a good chance of working: have your subjects pay a fairly steep amount for the trial, the evaluate it by having them fill in a questionnaire.
The "pay to take part" selects for gullibility, and also makes the subjects feel stupid if they don't report improvement. The "self-reporting", of course, helps get rid of such things as objective measurements that would spoil the party.
Finally, pick a small test group. That's cheaper, and will give positive results if only a few subjects report actual improvement. And if your first test fails, run a second, this, etc. identical test.
I think there is more "secret sauce" in Tesla than in SpaceX. SpaceX is doing great implementations of pretty conservative designs. In any case, both are "product" companies and benefit from patents less than "design" companies. Contrast SpaceX with Mojave Aerospace Ventures (the investment vehicle that owns the Spaceship One IP developed by Scaled Composites).
So far their designs have been fairly conservative, but they've made some pretty significant advances in manufacturing process and in materials as compared to their rivals, despite their designs being relatively similar. Heavy use of friction-stir welding would be an example of the former, and the PICA-X heat shield material would be an example of the latter, and details of the former (if you watch SpaceX factory tours on youtube, etc.) are considered trade secrets that aren't shown to the public, even though they're not patented.
> SpaceX is doing great implementations of pretty conservative designs.
Like the other reply mentioned, they are certainly working on some technologies that are starkly less conservative. One example is the Grasshopper [1], a reusable first stage that is capable of returning to the launchpad under controlled burn.
It's worth mentioning that their "less conservative" VTVL rocket is currently hitting about 10% of the DC-X's ~3100m record.
While the grasshopper is very cool, the concept of a VTVL rocket is not new. Hell, the Apollo Lunar Module technically landed and took off afterwards, as well!
In particular the rocket system that landed was discarded and a new rocket system took off, so I don't think it's even "technical". It's like calling a car that rolls off a ferry an "amphibious" vehicle.
Eh, if you could make a DUKW that, upon reaching land, could (or had to) shed its hull and become a proper vehicle of some sort, I'd still call it amphibious.
I remember reading the arguments for reusability etc 1990 on usenet's sci.space (and later sci.space.tech). Henry Spencer et al made good points.
You have to wonder how large a role is played by NASA not having a shuttle now -- and hence no motivation to use its political clout to stop competition?
Let us just hope delaying the real space age capabilities a few decades won't result in the death of humanity... (But if we go extinct because of a bureaucracy's need for job security, we arguably deserve what we get.)
It's long been argued by Jerry Pournelle and others that a fully reusable spacecraft could be built by being "starkly conservative" in materials and technology, but using modern construction techniques.
Everyone has criticized you based on how great SpaceX is. I'll go the other way.
Tesla at its heart is "put a ton of batteries which were developed by other companies into an electric motor that drives a car." People have been trying this formula for over a century. Tesla happened to do it when battery technology was just good enough to work, with really good styling.
Looking at the spectacular flop of the Fisker, packaging is far too often understated. Most people don't understand how complicated automotive systems are and how difficult it is to integrate them all together without numerous bugs and annoyances. Most big name automakers use off the shelf systems from third parties. Tesla did not.
Tesla won the highest score ever achieved from Consumer Reports while Fisker perished with a similar formula. That isn't simply luck.
Indeed. Their factory alone is a marvel, not to mention the Model S itself. Check it out on Megafactories, some great details on how they attain very high levels of quality for every vehicle that rolls out the door:
To say this is highly disingenuous, and disregards the massive amount of work into the energy management system researched by Tesla.
Put a ton of batteries into a car? Yeah, that's how they get 265 miles to a charge. Clearly all other EV cars just need a ton of batteries to solve the range issue.
In fact, Tesla's approach to battery packs is revolutionary - it goes completely against the status quo in the same way that Google's use of commodity hardware went against the status quo in the late 90s. Tesla packs use about 7000 commodity li-ion cells which are arranged in a pack with individual software-controlled charge management.
A user on the Tesla Motors forum pointed out that if Tesla actually implements their battery patents, the battery pack which was displayed in a National Geographic documentary (pixelated, of course) was in fact a fake.
Think about gasoline cars. People have been building those for ages, and it's not exactly difficult to make a car: you just put a frame, an internal combustion engine, and a steering system together, right? And yet it's still not that easy to make a well selling automobile.
The number of new automakers who enter the market over time and do very well is very small.
The thing about Tesla is not that they managed to make an electric car, the important thing is they managed to make one with all of the right tradeoffs and design choices to be a car that people actually wanted to buy. That's a big deal even for conventional automobiles.
Moreover, Tesla has done the most important thing possible with electric cars: they've made them no longer a joke. That will make a much bigger difference in the future decades regardless of whether Tesla continues to succeed or not. Now that electric cars are in many people's eyes a legitimate, and even perhaps enviable, vehicle to own people will start evaluating them on the merits and increasingly choosing to buy them. Which will lead to more and more successful electric car models and companies and a snowball effect in terms of the amount of cumulative profits from electric car sales which will get plowed back into R&D for electric car development. All of which is an absurdly huge win for electric vehicles.
Now, it's not as though Musk did something absurdly special with Tesla (heck, he didn't even found the company), but there's a strong argument he didn't do so with SpaceX either. The Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 are not technological marvels, they're simply, practical sensible designs well-executed. The same could be said of the Tesla vehicles. However, today it seems like simple practicality well-executed is hard to come by in most industries, and he deserves a lot of credit for putting his money and time on the line and staying the course.
Before the Model S, purchasing an electric car would mean that you are sacrificing performance, luxury, styling, and range for a clean, efficient, electric car. With the Model S, the only sacrifice you make is the range. Everything else is on par, or better, than other vehicles in it's class. People aren't only buying it because it's electric, they're buying it because it's a great car.
Of course, the range issue is only due to an already existing fuel-distribution network in place built over decades.
It could well be that Tesla's goal would be to disrupt that fuel-distribution network, first by selling great client devices (i.e., cars) and then implementing and selling access to the network that provides current petroleum cars with "near-infinite range"
It is obviously not just that. You just simply don't put together four wheels with motors and a battery pack and call it a car. Forgetting about everything inside (interior design, user interaction, fancy touchscreens, etc) and looking at it from a point of systems integration, it is really hard to design good suspension systems, optimize the aerodynamics and tune the dynamics of the system to have good handling on a broad set of road conditions. Tesla got it right and the big auto makers will eventually get it right too, but by no means is an easy task.
My understanding is that although kerosene burning rocket engines are nothing exotic or unfamiliar to the Chinese (or really anybody), the devil is in the details. For example, the details of the explosive forming of the regeneratively cooled Merlin 1D combustion chambers is allegedly pretty damn "secret sauce".
> SpaceX is doing great implementations of pretty conservative designs.
Mostly. So far. But very quickly SpaceX will start building things that have never been built before, and I would assume small teams are already working on the designs. Ships like human-rated Mars landers, colony buildings, fuel-creating reactors for Mars, etc.
Certainly not. There are many different arguments for patents, most of which just boil down to "I deserve to be compensated for the work I put in to inventing this."
In this case he has promised: "Will publish Hyperloop as open source." I didn't see a catch here.
In the same context, SpaceX have not applied for many patents when compared to the work they are doing. However in this case the prime motive could be keep the tech secret.
Elon Musk is the only man alive who could promise the moon and make me want to believe that he means it. I hope he follows through, I want to believe that he will, and I have no reason to doubt; if anyone will do it, it will be him. Open source FTW.
I hate most patents as well, but given that we've recently switched to a "first to file" system here in the US, if this has patentable components (which it seems like it would) it would probably be prudent for him to file patents on it (at least within the one year grace period after disclosing the system in public), even if just to turn around and do some sort of public promise not to enforce.
Of course, I'm sure he's well aware of these issues.
It is classy and awesome, but don't forget that he can afford to be classy and awesome. (Everyone knows he's the inventor, and he's got the people and capital to make it happen before anyone else... not that that is necessarily his goal.)
What I gathered from this is that the magnitude of this project is BIG. This will mean that it will involve more than one entity to participate and hence the need to keep it open.
Rather than maintain a vacuum hundreds of miles wide, why not just ride along the vacuum that occurs along a very low frequency soundwave (low frequency enough that the wavelength is larger than the vehicle).
Since this wave would be going the speed of sound, that could be what he meant by comparing it to a Concord.
And since a pressure wave isn't exactly like wind (it would just pass through the vehicle), there would need to be some kind of propulsion that could get the thing going fast and occasionally maintain speed (e.g. the railgun and PV solar part of his idea).
I can see many ways to work in the air-hockey portion from his hints which would avoid the cost of mag-lev.. but who knows exactly what approach he will take there...
That's really interesting. I wonder if the vehicle could effectively "surf" the back wave for propulsion -- higher pressure behind, lower pressure in front pushes the vehicle forward enough to overcome whatever low friction is involved. With an external system both for getting up to speed and in case it "falls off the wave."
The air-hockey element is most likely implemented as a cushion of air around all sides of a vehicle inside a tube - this would explain the "crash-proof" assertion. It would provide near-frictionless travel as well as preventing vehicle-tube collisions.
That looks like a more elaborate version of something I thought of as a kid, which was basically a vacuum tube going all around the world (one big torus if you will) with carts on super conductive magnets. I was thinking mainly of connecting Tokyo and New York and some place or other in Europe. Cart drives into the station, station gets sealed off and air pumped into it, then passengers leave and board, the doors get closed and the station sealed, then the thing speeds off at a gazillion miles per hour. Yay! Of course you'd have to start braking long before arrival, but the idea wasn't really about saving time (I could not possibly have anticipated how pampered and stupid grown ups are), it was mostly about saving energy, the idea of near zero friction just fascinated me. Though I was never sure if cooling the magnets and keeping the vacuum up wouldn't be more expensive than the energy saved.
But all that aside: bleh to passengers, think freight! If it's too complicated for people, because they won't use it if it takes as long as taking a plane... even though being a passenger on just one airplane ride is like riding a fat car for a whole year (give or take, it's nuts either way)... then automate it and use it for cargo. Especially since in that case and for a lot of products the vacuum wouldn't matter, the cargo could just ride in open carts and get picked up by robotic arms. Heck, you might even just throw it on while it's moving, and even use hooks to get cargo off without stopping the cart at all. This might seem too tricky... until you realize what marvels are going on in a bog standard HD these days, right? (though I remember a similar invention for passenger buses from MAD Magazine: something about spring-loaded seats haha)
From the image, there doesn't appear to be any vacuum. The tunnel is filled with air, which blows around the loop like a circular wind tunnel.
I don't know anything about fluid mechanics, but wouldn't there be some serious friction between the fast moving air and the tunnel wall? I'd be surprised if that resulted in less energy loss than a fast moving vehicle through static air, but perhaps someone with expertise about such things could chime in...
If you really want a fast transport system you need not only speed, but low latency. If you need to queue for 15 minutes while you wait for other people to get in, then it's gonna feel like boarding a plane : time wasted.
What's really needed here is parallel loading of passengers into individual pods. But then you need a tube switch and multiple tubes and doors and throughways.
I agree -- I don't think that any kind of tunnel or tube approach can be done more cheaply than HSR. And I venture to predict that if it is a tunnel or tube concept, it won't succeed in linking LA and SF.
That said, if we take Musk at something close to face value, it has a major advantage that the HSR doesn't: it would be faster than the air route. That would give it at least a fighting chance to draw extremely high ridership and make up for high costs with high revenue.
And if the idea is basically sound, but the implementation is impractical on the SF-LA corridor, then it could be put into use in some other intercity connection with more favorable terrain and lower land costs.
My only guess on this is max capacity. Theoretically if the tube were large enough you could run a few of these a day and carry thousands of people on each one. If you can get the energy consumed per passenger way down, then costs may decrease and a ticket could be much less expensive.
If you could travel hundreds of miles in a half hour, you might make a lot more trips. Changing the cost structure and timing dramatically would change the way people think about long distance travel from something you do once in a while to being as common as going across town for an afternoon.
Obviously this is all far-fetched given today's technology, but I'm just letting myself daydream.
This is essentially a vac-train, except instead of a vacuum, the air in the tube is propelled along with the pod.
There will be friction, but only between the air and the inside of the tube. I imagine there'll need to be some kind of "repeaters" to counter-act energy loss, but with so little loss, they could probably be solar-powered; which I think Elon alluded to.
Only between the air and the inside of the tube? Instead of a 100m train with air flowing around it, you get air at length of the track moving along the inside of the tube at the same speed.
I know as good as nothing of aerodynamics, but even if you get the latter flow perfectly laminar, I doubt it is a net win, as the contact area is 1000 times as large or so. But educate me.
Also, when you move cars into and out of the tunnel with the rotating air, you must take care not to 'plug' that air flow. Even if you do that only partly, there will be a pressure front (read: noise, vibrations, energy loss); each car will, for a moment get a sidewind at the speed of the train.
Here is a variant that, to me, makes more sense: it is not a vacuum, but they use the motion of the cars to push air out of the tunnel, so that air pressure drops. I don't have the vaguest idea how that would work, but if you can get it to work, it would be a nice trick.
I know next to nothing as well, but I think that perfectly laminar flow would be worst case. However if the inside of the tube had divots like a golf ball, the slower-moving turbulent vortices would push the faster-moving laminar stream away from the walls, so that the boundary layer doesn't impact the velocity of the central air column nearly as much.
Again: "I think..." I'd be happy if someone who knows more would chime in to tell me why I'm wrong. :-)
Turbulent flow would increase the overall drag in this situation. You're essentially taking energy from the free-flowing middle of the pipe and using it to drag more air along the wall. The reason why turbulence helps a golf ball is because it decreases flow separation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_separation. Separated flow makes a ridiculous amount of drag, and it's worth the extra skin drag to keep the flow attached.
"The power required to run a supersonic wind tunnel is enormous, of the order of 50 MW per square meter of test section cross-sectional area."
A train would be, say, 20 square meters in cross section. That would be a GW of power to operate this. And that likely is a severe underestimate. I am sure one cannot lengthen a wind tunnel to kilometers without lots of power loss, but for now, let's ignore that.
If this is, as it sounds, a new public transport system, it surprises me a little that he would prefer to develop it in the US.
Attitudes towards public transport in general seem more favourable in the EU, Japan, China and South Korea.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I imagine getting such a system built in the EU (for example) would be easier than the US. Then again, Musk has been building a reputation with law-makers in the US for some time, so that might count for a lot.
I would think a big motivation is that he personally wants to be able to go from LA to SF in 30mins. He probably spends a lot of his time flying around the US
I think US's opinions about public transportation is based on rational comparison. Taking the bus takes more time than taking a car, and is a less desirable environment. Our train system is optimized for freight, and has no cost or time benefit over just driving.
Countries which have high amounts of public transportation tend to have higher gas prices and population density. It becomes more cost and time effective in that case to take public transportation.
If this hyper-tube system takes off, it could really be a game changer. Even with a high cost, the transportation speed is really desirable, especially if you don't need to go through the routine that you need to go through at airports before you even get on the plane. If the cost becomes comparable or cheaper than airplanes, then it becomes cheaper and more convenient to take the hyper tube than driving or flying. Americans understand the language of time and money, and that would change their opinion very quickly.
Rational comparison or desirability of environments would take into account the likelihood of an hour on a decent bus allowing you to get more done (or more sleep) than 45 minutes of focusing attention on the car in front of you...
Hmm, then I've never been on a "decent" bus (used buses in LA and a little in Boston). They never seemed like good environments for work. In LA particularly, even if it weren't for all the idiots playing music on their earphones that's clearly audible from over a yard away, there's these stupid TV programs running. And for most of the trips I needed them for (before I could drive), they took 3 times as long as driving. We make decisions based on the actual options, not what "decent" options would be. Driving is definitely a better deal.
I was speaking more about longer distances than just 45 minutes. The initial proposal seems to be more about longer distance traveling over daily commutes. My experience with bus trips is them being 30% to 60% longer travel times for more money than it would cost in gas if driving a car.
I feel like Musk is positioning not as an alternative to HSR. He's positioning this to shoot even one level higher - this can unseat air travel.
After all, at a reported 1000km/h speed, it would be faster than a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320, the typical modern transcontinental aircrafts around the world.
Why tackle a meager market of medium-distance routes (realistic for HSR) when you can kill off airlines entirely?
The talk about LA-SF in half an hour sounds only like phase 1 of a much more ambitious plan.
I think he specifically wants California to build this instead of wasting $100bn on the HSR project. I'm sure he'll be open to building hyperloops elsewhere as well.
If he can stop California from lighting that $100bn on fire chasing HSR from Bakersfield to Fresno, then this will all be worth it. I voted against all of those propositions, but I'd have reconsidered if you told me Musk would be the one playing with the money.
> If he can stop California from lighting that $100bn on fire chasing HSR from Bakersfield to Fresno,
$100 billion is an approximation of an old estimate of the total system cost (which includes HSR with terminii in the San Diego, LA, Sacramento, and San Francisco, and a upgrades to a number of existing intercity and commuter rail systems that would connect to HSR) -- the most recent estimate is much lower at $68.4 billion. The Bakersfield to Fresno line is a ~$3 billion first construction segment which will initially be used to improve exisiting Central Valley heavy rail passenger service and which will eventually be part of the HSR initial operating segment from Merced to Palmdale.
No one is lighting $100 billion on fire chasing HSR from Bakersfield to Fresno.
Lighting 3 billion on fire is still pretty bad no?!?
I started having doubts about this project when I found out technicals were skeptical, but when the bombshell dropped that it would have cost half if SNCF built it on the I-5 corridor[1] I decided there's no way I could continue to support it. It's just a device for politicians to bring pork to their districts, and anyway at this point it seems doubtful that it will ever actually exist.
> Lighting 3 billion on fire is still pretty bad no?!?
Building something with immediate utility to improving existing service is lighting money on fire. The initial construction segment was chosen, among other segments considered for that role, because it provides considerable short-term return in terms of improvements in service on an already heavily traveled intercity rail route, as well as providing a good foundation for the initial operating segment for HSR.
> but when the bombshell dropped that it would have cost half if SNCF built it on the I-5 corridor
The SNCF proposal -- as those criticizing the High-Speed Rail Authority for rejecting it always fail to mention -- would have both used an alignment with lower ridership projections (and, thus, substantially less expected revenues) and required the State to provide SNCF with a revenue guarantee, both of which violate the laws governing the HSR project, and have the open-ended potential to cost the State far more in the long run.
European attitudes to public transport are certainly more receptive than those in the US. However, European attitudes to big infrastructure projects are a lot more NIMBYish. Asia could be good but then they are quite advanced with high-speed public transport anyways.
Plus, Elon doesn't live in Europe or Asia, so why would he?
Europeans have problems with NIMBY, but not nearly to the extent that the US does. It takes about 1/5 as much money to construct a mile of track in France as in the US, and 1/10 in Spain. My guess is that part of the point of the Hyperloop is to get around land use restrictions by going over them, and the largest payoff for that would be in the US where conventional land-based transport is hardest.
With regards to NIMBY I'd be very interested in how much external noise would be generated. If it's silent from the outside and all it takes is a nice line of trees to conceal it completely I can't imagine people would have that much of an issue with it.
When I read PG's essay earlier today, I thought of hyperloop when I read this footnote:
"There may even be an inverse correlation between launch magnitude and success. The only launches I remember are famous flops like the Segway and Google Wave. Wave is a particularly alarming example, because I think it was actually a great idea that was killed partly by its overdone launch."
I can actually recall the launch of some things that succeeded (ipad & iphone, for example). Still, this reminds me in some way of Wave. When wave was launching there was a lot of hyperbolic explanations by people who didn't seem to understand what they were describing. realtime collaboration-communication hybrid that's really more of a cloud based protocol than a app. The app itself is just a proof of concept People either didn't get it or made unlikely assumptions about what it was.
Something about all this excitement pre-reveal feels wrong to me. Especially since this sounds like such a big, long term project.
Though I think pg's advice is exactly right for things that don't need to be started with a big bang, I don't think it applies universally. I can't imagine, for example, the Apollo Program being successful without rallying a huge number of people behind the idea beforehand.
There was that recent PR article that made the rounds here last week from some company allegedly developing an evacuated tube based system that was written in a way to imply they were working on Musk's idea. I would not at all be surprised if he's a little miffed about that and has decided to just get everything out there.
Given that they may not actually be working on what he specifically has in mind, there is a risk that his idea gets a bad connotation if someone implements something similar (but not identical) and does it poorly. There is a whole political dimension to this in terms of getting zoning, approvals, etc... and the last thing he needs is for it to be stillborn because a bunch of politicians hear it "was tried and failed".
It'll work like the water system... efficiency from using gigantic pumps, safety from having so much distributed force that a problem in any point can't bleed off enough power to endanger the system.
It'll be a closed loop where the pumps take air from holes in the top of one end and push it through holes in the bottom of the other end. The holes will be spaced so that the upward-pushing force decreases over the loop as the upward-pulling force increases. This creates a slow acceleration at the beginning of the loop and a slow deceleration at the end of the loop. Some mechanical system will move cars from the end of the loop to the beginning (since there is no air force there). The speed at any given point is determined by how many of the up/down holes are behind/before the car, so speed in the center is incredibly fast.
The idea is pretty simple, it's just a matter of getting enough funding for the execution since the entire system must be constructed before any returns. Patents are a non-issue since you need government involvement to do it (even Musk isn't going to get a $6 billion loan on an unproved idea with unknown liability, need to get land rights, etc).
Things like this are what happen when you get someone who knows how to make things happen, but also has the intelligence training and experience of a senior engineer.
A launch loop doesn't make sense, it's too risky (from a business sense) for this sort of project and too expensive too.
Also, the obvious use of a launch loop is for launch, of course. Why serve a market where prices are cents per kilogram when you can serve a market where prices are hundreds of dollars per kilo? And with less capital investment too.
I don't know about California in specific, but in the United States as a whole there is plenty of existing and unused/lightly used railroad right of way. Cut a deal with the railroads (most of whom are very, very hungry for cash/investment) and you've got transcontinental capability without needing any eminent domain proceedings or similar obstacles.
Musk is the modern day inventor/businessman of old.
This project has to be the most impactful thing on my life he has proposed and I welcome it with open arms. Paypal was smart, Tesla is cool, Space X is plain bad a^^, but this could change everything. Coast to coast in hours, half hour from NY to DC. And it could make it much cheaper than air travel due to less energy usage overall.
An electric hovercraft design without tires and without a fan, but driven by one large/many small linear or stepper motors that build-up and fire Electromagnetic pulses or compressed Air to build thrust.
When he said hyperloop I pictured a normal road with large Metal loops (induction) every mile with smart-meters tracking how much energy you consumed and charging your bank for that amount. Do you remember the games where you have to drive over the yellow arrows to speed up? The same principle.
..still inefficient, even though it's pretty creative and more efficient than all current implementation of car and infrastructure design.
before you ask, yes I know a much more efficient way, but it's useless to explain here, because nobody will listen anyway.
I love that you just made up all the details to his idea, and then discredited it... and then said you know a better way, but assumed no one would listen.
