Hello! Following up from the critically acclaimed (by my
Nan) blog A Welshman in America
and inspired by a few friends who are making much better use of social media
than me, I have decided to start filling up the internet with ramblings again.
This blog will try focus on science and technology, with inevitable diversions
as I start my astronomy PhD in September. I’ll talk a bit more about some of
the wide themes I want to cover, but it will basically be “what do I find
interesting today?”
And today has seen the release of something very interesting
indeed: The Hyperloop.
Described by inventor Elon Musk as “a fifth form of
transportation” (The other four being road, rail, water and air travel) this
design promises journeys between cites at almost the speed of sound. It will
cost less than driving by car and have almost no environmental impact.
Best of all, the whole thing has been given away for free.
The details are all on the websites of SpaceX
and Tesla, two of
Musk’s current ventures, so you can just download them, have a read, then go
and try and build one yourself. (And check out the rest of those websites while
you’re at it, I’ll almost certainly becoming back to both those companies at
some point.)
For those of you who don’t want to read the paper, a journey
on the hyperloop is roughly as follows. You and 23 other passengers would climb
into a roughly 1.5m diameter pod or capsule, sitting in reclined seats with on
board entertainment screens in front of you. Your luggage, roughly as much as
you can take on a plane, is stowed in a separate compartment behind you.
Once everyone is in, the Back to the Future style gull-wing
doors close and the capsule moves through a large airlock. The airlock quickly
pumps out most of the air around the capsule, bringing the atmospheric pressure
down to 100Pa, or about 1/6th
that of Mars. (Musk uses the comparison with the Martian atmosphere, rather
than that of Earth, throughout the paper: His ambitions regarding the fourth
planet from the Sun are well
known).
From the airlock the capsule moves into the main element of
the system: A tube connecting you and your destination, held 30m above the ground
on a series of pylons and covered in solar panels. The hyperloop generates much
more power than it needs, so your transport is also a power station.
The capsule then passes over a series of impellers, which
use electromagnets to accelerate the capsule up to speed. In an identical tube
next to you those same impellers are being used to slow down a capsule coming the
other way. The remaining air in the tube is sucked into the front of the
capsule and forced out of the sides, allowing the capsule to float in a similar
way to a hovercraft. With almost no friction, the capsule can then be accelerated
to up to 1120 kilometres per hour, or 760 miles per hour.
The case study route, a 350 mile route joining Los Angeles
with San Francisco, would take roughly 35 minutes.
That’s over twice as fast as a plane making the same journey.
Nearly 5 times faster than high speed rail. And ten times faster than a car.
(All of these comparisons are for actual day to day journey
times, not a “if a train, a plane, a car and a hyperloop had a race, which
would get there first?” sort of thing. Which incidentally would make a very
good episode of Top Gear.)
Although it sounds very science-fictiony, there’s actually
no new technology involved. All of the basic elements- vacuum pumps, air
cushions, and magnetic impellers- are already around. And anyway, criticising
something for being “too futuristic” is a bit silly now that one
in seven of us are carrying supercomputers around in our pockets.
And as the BBC says, no one is betting
against it. Elon Musk has a track record of taking things that sound years
away and dragging them into the present. He made his fortune with PayPal, then revolutionised
spaceflight with rocket company SpaceX. Another company, Tesla Motors, is doing
rather well in the electric
car business.
With Musk’s track record, the use of proven technology and
the fact that anyone can have a go, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least someone,
somewhere has a go at building one. In fact, I suggest we build one here in
Britain.
Musk says that his interest in the hyperloop was sparked
when he saw the plans for the high speed rail link
between San Francisco and Los Angeles. This plan has the dubious honour of
being both one of the slowest and, at estimated costs of over $60 billion, one
of the most expensive high speed rail links in the world. According to Musk and
his engineers at SpaceX and Tesla, the hyperloop would cost a tenth of that
price and have a journey time five times as fast.
This raises the obvious question about whether a hyperloop
could replace Britain’s very own uninspiring high speed rail project, HS2.
Although it’s not quite the same situation as California, as there isn’t a convenient
long, straight road to put the thing next too, I’m sure that I can make some
rough comparisons. (One of the advantages of a hyperloop is that you can site
it alongside existing infrastructure instead of having to build railways. As it’s
up on towers it’s pretty much just like putting another set of electricity
pylons in.)
First let’s have a look at the competition. HS2 will be 192km long
(the first phase to Birmingham, as the second phase is so far in the future it’s
probably not worth talking about), and will take roughly 50 minutes to get from
London to Birmingham, a saving of about 30 minutes on current times (wow). The projected
costs are roughly £16 billion.
Now let’s see if a hyperloop can do better. This will be a
rough estimate as no one is paying me to do it properly (Hi, people who pay
people to do it properly…). Let’s put our hyperloop along the side of the M40,
which is vaguely straight from London to Birmingham. That makes it about 150km,
rounding up a bit for any extra length needed to go round corners less quickly
than the motorway. The West Coast Main Line would be another option, but it’s
not as straight so I’ll stick with the motorway. Perhaps the solar panels on the
hyperloop could be used to run charging stations for electric cars along the
way.
As most of the cost of the hyperloop is in the tube, I can
estimate the cost by comparing the length of this tube to the Californian one.
This makes it about a 3rd of the length of the Californian one, so
it’ll be roughly a third of the cost (all of these are overestimates to account
for the fact it might be more expensive per mile due to the difference in
location.) The more expensive version of the hyperloop (carrying cars as well as
passengers), costs $7.5 billion. A third of that is $2.5billion, or roughly
£1.7 billion rounding up. Let’s call it £2 billion, or an eighth the cost of
HS2. So far so good.
Journey time won’t be quite as straightforward, as a greater
portion of the distance will be spent speeding up and slowing down at each end.
So let’s say we only get about 2/3rds of the journey time of the California
system rather than the third our distance suggests. The California route takes
35 minutes, so I’ll say roughly 20 minutes. That’s 2.5 times faster than HS2
and saves over an hour on current journey times.
That’s much cheaper, much faster, better for the
environment, generating free electricity, not digging up farmland, and not making
a new eyesore. In fact as it’s next to the motorway it would be making a
current eyesore better. Better then in every way than HS2.
I think we should build a hyperloop. Not just because my
simple calculations show it’s better (someone please do a more in-depth
analysis), but also because what it represents.
It’s a twenty-first century form of transport, something
that makes use of all the developments over the past few decades to build the
best possible way of getting people around, not relying on technology that’s
been around for fifty years. The plans are open source so anyone can have a go
designing one, and all the technology already exists. Giving the county a project
like this would help to inspire a new generation of scientist and engineers,
who would be able to see the future not hidden away in a phone in a pocket, but
stretched across the landscape. Why shouldn’t we build one?
Neil
Degrasse Tyson has said that “Doing what’s never been done before is intellectually
seductive, whether or not we deem it practical”. The hyper loop certainly looks
practical and it’s definitely never been done before. Let’s have some intellectual
seduction.
Of course the most important question has yet to be
answered: Could a hyperloop do a loop?
Hope you've enjoyed the first post of my new blog. Next time I'll talk a bit more about what I want to talk about (that makes sense). The blog's name was inspired by this xkcd post.
New posts will be posted on my shiny new Twitter page.
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