Does Elon Musk's Hyperloop Make More Sense On Mars? 143
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk's Hyperloop project has its challenges in places that have air. But in places with little air and no fossil fuels, where you can't fly and there's little drag, it makes a lot more sense. Post-doc researcher Leon Vanstone thinks the Hyperloop may have more of a future on Mars than here on Earth. He says, "Conservative cost estimates for building a single Hyperloop track from Los Angeles to San Francisco come in at US$6 billion. Taking the technology nationwide would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more. When you consider that normal, boring airplanes already travel at about 500-600 mph – about two-thirds as fast as the Hyperloop’s predicted speed – you might begin to wonder if an extra 200 mph is enough of a payoff for those hundreds of billions of dollars. ... Well, Elon Musk is no idiot, and he certainly has the money to hire some of the best and the brightest. ... A high-speed, safe, self-powered transportation system will be vital to connect Martian settlements – likely to be few in number and separated by large distances."
Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't say.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Also... because every single sci-fi movie *ever* has shown domed cities with tube-based vehicles shuttling people between them. It's not exactly the biggest mental leap to make.
Re: Wow (Score:1)
One must note: The question of "does it make more sense" is mildly hilarious when one is discussing mass transportation on a lifeless world.
It makes about as much sense as a petting zoo.
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One must note: The question of "does it make more sense" is mildly hilarious when one is discussing mass transportation on a lifeless world.
I dunno - if you could get a government grant and tax breaks, turn the debts into complex derivatives and sell them on, do an IPO then dump your stock at the peak of the market it could be profitable. Plus, unlike transport systems on earth, you wouldn't have those pesky paying customers turning up and forcing you to incur all sorts of ongoing fuel and maintenance costs.
Where do I send my money?
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Well, there is nothing for it to compete with there, so you can say that " There is no passenger service on Mars with more users"
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Re: Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
There's also no passengers either.
So, in the same way a roller coaster at the bottom of the Marianas Trench would be novel and have no competition ... debating how effective the hyper loop would be on Mars is kind of pointless.
We've never put a human on Mars. Let's not start planning the transportation grid.
Sorry, this is someone doing their post-doc work on science fiction, so I'm afraid I fail to see the point.
Re: Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
A train in a vacuum is called a 'train', not a hyperloop. Nobody outside of journalism students thinks Musk was the first to have the idea, but perhaps he has the methodology to get it built.
Air pollution. (Score:3)
A train system designed to reduce friction has better metrics in a vacuum environment?
Mars is NOT without atmosphere. It's about 1/100th as dens as that of Earth, but that's still not trivial.
The moon has an atmosphere, too. It's density is 13 orders of magnitude down from that of Earth, which makes it a pretty good vacuum. But that's because it loses air more quickly - on GEOLOGICAL time scales - compared with Earth. On HUMAN time scales, on the other hand, things like oxygen, nitrogen, water, and carb
I'm willing to risk it! (Score:1)
Let's shoot him up there...
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Perhaps to study different geological formations.
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Why would we place settlements on Mars far apart?
So we could build a hyperloop linking them.
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Why would we place settlements on Mars far apart?
For some of the same reasons that settlements on Earth are far apart. Settlements will probably be based on natural resources, and it's doubtful you'll find them all close together. On Mars, it will probably be based on different mineral and ore mines, and they'll have to be mined where they can be found.
The cost of a single Airport. (Score:4, Insightful)
Its easy to throw around big numbers to scare away people, US$6 Billion is the average price of an airport.
You have to put things in perspective.
Furthermore, how long is that of Iraq war? A few days? Hours? What's more important, to invest in our infrastructure or to wage illegal wars halfway across the globe?
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Re: The cost of a single Airport. (Score:2)
Re: The cost of a single Airport. (Score:1)
Sauce?
Re:The cost of a single Airport. (Score:5, Interesting)
A small airport hub's actual cost is $5.8 billion and a large one can be as much as $55 billion. Source: http://www.aci-na.org/static/e... [aci-na.org]
In short, AC is right. We've spent hundreds of billions on airline travel, why would its replacement be significantly cheaper? Why are we more worried about the approximately equivalent financial cost, and less worried about the significant positive impact on the environment that this would have?
Re:The cost of a single Airport. (Score:4, Interesting)
For SFO to LAX we'd probably fly in a 737 not a 777 because it's more optimized for short haul. Published fuel economy for a 737 is 2.31 liters/100 km/passenger or about 102 mpg.
We'll ignore the fact that airplanes are not always 100% full. We'll ignore the fact that an LAX to SFO trip won't realize that fuel economy--need a longer haul flight for that. We'll ignore all the other inefficiencies, like taxiing, routing, traffic, missed approaches, etc. We will also round up the distance from LAX to SFO from 543 km to 550.
At 2.31 l/100 km x 180 pax x 550 km we get a minimum fuel burn of 990 liters for one flight or 267 gallons. While this is certainly better than us all driving there in our SUVs, it's already half the efficiency of us all getting in Prius's and making the trip (fully loaded Prius at 50 MPG/vehicle = 200 mpg with 4 pax).
Hyperloop would almost certainly exceed the efficiency of our fully laden Prius. So if the infrastructure cost is the same, why wouldn't we want to build the more efficient choice? Hyperloop will have the advantage of dispatching in much smaller batches, so the occupancy factor should be higher than air travel. The convenience factor should be higher too. It's easy to imagine hyperloop sending a 'train' every 5 minutes. And since we don't need a massive airport with 2 mile long runways, hyperloop stations could be built in or near downtowns and main streets. Bury the last few miles of each line and you get the convenience of a subway, but it takes you directly to the downtown of another city. It's like European train travel, but better.
Bring the future brother Elon.
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If the tube were big enough to allow intermodal containers, the customers would swarm you, demanding that you take their money. Aircraft style ULDs would probably be the more realistic option, and better suited to the tu
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You know, $6 billion to go from LA to SFO is only about 12X the cost of a four lane, interstate-grade road. It's not utterly bananas.
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US$6 Billion is the average price of an airport
Airports pay for themselves after a while with fees from the airlines, etc. Passenger train service (in the US) is a never ending taxpayer subsidy.
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Infrastructure is only part of the equation. (Score:2)
(This might beneath lots of other reasons also be one of the main causes why we don't have flying cars yet in every garage.)
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If you want to take a train an extra 200 miles, you need to lay track AND fuel it. With the plane you only need the fuel..
Unless you want to land?
Or, at least, land intact, then take off again after landing?
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If you want to take a train an extra 200 miles, you need to lay track AND fuel it. With the plane you only need the fuel..
Unless you want to land? Or, at least, land intact, then take off again after landing?
Yeah, but isn't a runway a fraction of the cost of a 200 mile railroad track?
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Last I heard the price per foot of track is $125 so it's going to be around $132m lay the track. Grading, earthwork, tunneling, and anything else that needs to be done to prepare for laying the track would cost extra.
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Last I heard the price per foot of track is $125 so it's going to be around $132m lay the track. Grading, earthwork, tunneling, and anything else that needs to be done to prepare for laying the track would cost extra.
I find it very difficult to believe that a large tube capable of holding a near vacuum is going to be 1/3 cheaper than traditional rail. If anything, I would think it would be 10 to 100 times as expensive as traditional rail. Traditional rail can be from $250-$500 per foot not including land acquisition, crossings, bridges, signalling, sidings, etc.
Pylons. (Score:2)
Pylons. No grading necessary.
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You must construct additional Pylons!
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Traditional rail is also built to support several tons of weight per foot, because it's primarily used for freight transport in the US. The hyperloop plans don't aim to replace freight rail; their target is passenger transport, which means they don't have to support as much weight. When the weight per unit area you need to support is smaller, things get cheaper.
I'm sure the cost savings over having to not carry as much weight is offset by the cost increase of having to deal with increased speed.
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In a tunnel, air friction becomes really important. Trains (or hyperloops) fit close in the tunnel, and there's a lot of air has to move from in front of the train to behind the train, squeezing through that narrow space. Evacuating the tunnel (ie, hyperloop) is a huge benefit. So is running your train on Mars, where the atmosphere is already a -14.6 psi/ -0.994 bar vacuum.
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Non-foiling boats are ploughing through the water. They get a huge benefit by leaving as little of themselves as possible to do that, and fly the rest through the air. A train riding on rails is much more efficient. At high speed, IIRC it's air resistance that limits the speed of both aircraft and land vehicles.
Why would Martian cities be far apart? (Score:1)
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Mining and transportation of mined materials?
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It seems like they'd want to be close together. Unless they hate each other for terrestrial nationalist reasons. But once you're on Mars, you're a Martian. You're not coming back to Earth. So why not make friends?
If the colonists want to be close to each other, they'd just build one single city. Assuming there's more than once city at all, I'd say they are likely to be far apart, because you'd locate them convenient for the resources on the planet, not convenient for the other cities.
My guess is you'll have one city near a deposit of volcanic material, where they can mine for heavy metals (there be gold in them thar hills!), another near the pole to tap into the frozen water reserves, maybe another at the equator wi
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You'd stick the habitation where there are resources you need. If you can't find all the resources you need in one place then you will have to have habitats spread out and sharing those resources between bases.
For Example, Water collection near the poles, but Solar power collection and orbital launch pads near the equator.
That doesn't necessarily mean the other habitats are were someone would live permanently, especially not if you have good transport links. I
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Maybe some are near water, another one is near high-grade ore, there are stations to service travelers between them, another one is in a better launch point to orbit, etc.
This is going nowhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Hyperloop is too expensive on earth and we will not be on Mars for at least 30 years. Before we have two cities on Mars which are that far away that a Hyperloop would be needed to reduce travel time, it will most likely need 100 or more years.
Unless you sell the idea to... (Score:3, Funny)
the Mars One people. They'll have it up and running in 2017. Heck, they may event skip the rockets, why not build this thing from Los Angeles to the first city on mars?
Thake the tube to mars. How difficult can it be?
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Why not? The tubing wouldn't even be needed for most of the distance.
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Before we have two cities on Mars which are that far away that a Hyperloop would be needed to reduce travel time, it will most likely need 100 or more years.
Many, many, more years...
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This. Maglev is proven and can carry hundreds of people in comfort. The Hyperloop, while faster, carries only a small number of people at a time and looks rather cramped.
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Notably it is also too expensive on Mars. It may cost $6B here, but it'll cost $6 trillion on Mars (my quick thumbnail estimate).
It won't cost $6 billion here. Land aquisition alone will be in the billions. Terminals will cost multiple millions for small stations and hundreds of millions to billions for the LA and San Francisco terminals. Building the elevated tube system will cost easily 100 times what traditional rail cost, so figure about $80 billion for the tubes. The train capsules will cost millions each.
Compare this to the 40 mile proposed Baltimore to DC maglev route, which at 40 miles is estimated to cost far more than $10
The cart is so far in front of the horse... (Score:4, Insightful)
... I think the cart is in the f'ing future...
This is like asking if maybe telepathy would work better on Uranus. Lets build the stupid hyperloop and see if it works anywhere... or build something on mars that you'd need high speed transit between... and then we can ask these questions.
As of now... the question baffles me.
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This is like asking if maybe telepathy would work better on Uranus.
Keep your dirty mental fingers out of my...!!!
oh.. wait..
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This is like asking if maybe telepathy would work better on Uranus
Well, all I can say is, it hasn't worked on mine.
But... (Score:2)
But surely we need a way to move soil samples around!
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So you assume there is absolutely nothing of value in examining Hyperloop? Comparing it to telepathy is strange, as telepathy requires a complete rewriting of the sciences in order to exist, whereas Hyperloop is not doing anything particularly novel, it's a combination of well-tested techniques and technologies.
You don't sound very rational.
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Quote where I said there was nothing of value or even implied there was nothing of value.
Dave, I've clearly gotten to you because you're not even trying to make sense anymore. You're writing little hit pieces. Its sad.
Look, my post was that talking about the hyperloop on MARS was premature. I think the hyperloop is a neat idea and I think it is superior to most high speed train concepts.
But don't talk to me about how it will be useful on mars when it can't be useful on mars because we have no need of high
Eh... (Score:2)
Considering how much the US invested in a fighter plane that's barely usable, how much they invested in fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq... I don't know, seems 6 billion is a sum Obama regularly finds stuck between his couch cushions.
Also, my bicycle is less expensive than a Mercedes... but how the hell do I travel from one coast to the other without dying on the ruddy thing (be it of exhaustion or old age, I'll leave that for you to decide)? Seems to me there is a lot more to feasibility calculations besid
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Trains on Mars. (Score:2)
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There's nothing we care about on the Surface of Mars, it's just a bunch of rock, so we can put rail lines wherever we want. And it's a smaller ball, so traversing large portions of the distance around it won't provide as much energy savings as on Earth. So yeah, rail.
Why are the British spending so much? (Score:1)
Only $6 billion to construct 380 miles of sci-fi-technology high speed rail using entirely new technology? Really?
When the UK government is prepared to spunk $45 billion on constructing 335 miles of bog standard railway track for HS2?
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As it happens, no one owns the right-of-ways on Mars; I imagine you could buy them up cheaply. Not too many road crossings to worry about, either.
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My initial reaction was that someone forgot a couple of zeros on that figure. A single airliner costs a few hundred million. If that's the real price it seems like a no brainer to give this thing a try somewhere. Maybe the Japanese will build one.
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I imagine that the magnetics and reasonably gas-tight tube would still be more exp
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Only $6 billion to construct 380 miles of sci-fi-technology high speed rail using entirely new technology? Really?
When the UK government is prepared to spunk $45 billion on constructing 335 miles of bog standard railway track for HS2?
I think you have the question backwards. It should be "how can $6 billion be a realistic estimate by Elon Musk"?
The answer is that it's not.
Not the first person to have this idea (Score:2)
Worth it? (Score:3)
I think it may be a while (Score:2)
Babylon 5 (Score:2)
Martian Atmosphere (Score:2)
Mars is already a giant partially evacuated tube. Why would you want to use a Hyperloop system? You could just use a regular maglev system and avoid all the issues of having to pump away the pressure wave that builds in front of the train due to it being stuck in a pointless tube. The novel part of Hyperloop is not the maglev propulsion it is the use of a tube.
More likely you would just use a sub-orbital rocket plane system to blast your way to the next town anyway. Any early mars colony is going to have a
Uh, no... (Score:2)
Any transportation system makes a lot more sense in the place where there are lots more people and lots more stuff to move around.
There's also a much easier and cheaper solution to the few and widely scattered martian settlements problem. Don't put them so far apart.
Must obey Betteridge's law (Score:1)
Since the title to this article is a question Betteridge's law states that the answer to the question must be no. So I have to come up with reasons:
1) There's nobody on Mars to ride on a Hyperloop system.
2) There's no manufacturing infrastructure on Mars to make one.
3) The whole point of the Hyperloop is to cut drag by running a train in a tube under a low pressure. Since Mars has a thin atmosphere already there is no need for the tube and hyperloop = train.
Laugh (Score:1)
"Post-doc researcher Leon Vanstone thinks the Hyperloop may have more of a future on Mars than here on Earth."
Or no future at all.
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No future is almost consistent with more of a future.
Settlements on Mars (Score:2)
Settlements on Mars are not cost effective in the first place. Even having one is a stretch of the imagination, and they'd be too busy just trying to survive to be concerned with how quick and comfortable their visit to the next hellhole settlement over.
What about on the moon? (Score:2)
The moon would certainly have the negligible atmospheric friction thing going for it, better than Mars, even... plus the moon is a whole lot closer, cheaper to get to, and has merits of its own for having a permanent base there at some point in the future anyways (such as a lower gravity well for spaceship launches to locations much further in space), so I cannot help but think it absurd to imagine that we would develop an infrastructure sufficiently complex on Mars that could accommodate something like t
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^ this 100 times.
I don't understand why we aren't talking about colonizing the moon at all. It doesn't make any sense to go straight to Mars. Robots sure; but humans, why send people there to die? At least on the moon, if something bad happens, there's a slight possibility of recovery. If something happens on the way to, or on Mars, the team is pretty much screwed.
What am I missing here?
Can't fly? W.T.F? (Score:2)
But in places with little air and no fossil fuels, where you can't fly and there's little drag,
Wait, what?
I'm aware of several designs for heavier than air aircraft for flight on Mars. You can most certainly fly on Mars, you need a lot lower wing loading, so a much larger surface area, but other than that, theres not really any difference. Its just like flight high up in our own atmosphere.
Its not the moon or Pluto, it has an atmosphere. And by treating it as such, you've already show you're idea probably isn't worth discussing for the reasons your bringing it up.
$6 Billion? Peanuts... (Score:2)
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Only a few hundred billion? (Score:3)
Whomever thinks this is a lot of money for a nationwide transportation network should definitely not look into what it cost to building interstate highway system (About $500B in todays dollars) or the US airport system (we spend $20 Billion *every year* on airports in the US - 80% of that on the 67 largest - just in capital costs).
Could they actually do it for that little money? That's the bigger question.
Ok, and? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Conservative cost estimates for building a single Hyperloop track from Los Angeles to San Francisco come in at US$6 billion."
Is that supposed to sound expensive?
SFO's two terminals cost well over $1 billion each in inflation adjusted dollars. The new tower was $350 million. I can't find numbers on the physical plants, like the runways, but I suspect they're similar. I think $5 billion for the entire airport is not unreasonable. LAX is significantly larger and more expensive; they're spending $270 on elevator repairs alone.
A six-lane highway costs between $10 and $26 million per mile. It's 380 miles from LA to SF, so that's $3.8 to $9 billion.
The F-35 program is one trillion and counting.
Sorry, but this number seems fine to me.
Slashdot dream team posting (Score:2)
All that's missing is the news that the whole lot will be 3D printed.
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* funded with Bitcoins
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And we'll be paying for it in bitcoins, don't forget.
Suddenly it all makes sense (Score:2)
1. Hyperloop uses electricty and can work fine without fossil fuels.
2. Because hyperloop cars can be made an arbitrary size, security demands are much less of an issue for a vehicle carrying, say, 10 people.
3. Because the cars travel in a tube as the technology advances they can travel at artbitrary speeds like 2k, 3k, 4k? M.P.H. With no noise impact.
So what if it costs 6 billion per route? The cars will probably be way cheaper t
6 billion or "hundreds of billions"? (Score:2)
Last time I took a maths class, 6 was not "hundreds". If 6 billion isn't a typo, then the article is way out of whack, and the economics are actually heavily stacked in the hyperloop's favour, as 2 airports with terminals and a dozen 747s to shuttle between them would end up costing more than 6 billion.
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economics (Score:1)
Pffft! (Score:2)
No. (Score:2)
There's no way to manufacture it.
$6B is too much for doing it on earth. How much do you think it would cost to do it on Mars?
Pipe dream (Score:1)
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"Martian settlements – likely to be few in number and separated by large distances". One is also "few in number." The problem with these two edge cases (the above poster's zero, and my one) is the "separated by large distances" part.