The fastest Falcon 9 turnaround time was still 54 days, the same as the fastest Space Shuttle refurbishment. Gwyne Shotwell herself said that it needs to come down to a few hours.
The economics of Falcon 9 do suggest that it currently is a lot worse than space shuttle on cost per unit of mass to orbit, and that the promise of cheaper launches due to reusability has not happened. Sure, the rockets are somewhat reusable (with a lot of reconditioning, it seems), but that definitely hasn't translated to lower costs to orbit.
Ah yes, the one NASA paper that Musk fans love to cite, including all of Space shuttle's R&D costs and a very low estimate of the Falcon 9 cost. Falcon 9 launches currently sell for about $80k per kg to LEO.
Yup, they're not comparable. The Shuttle values are cost, the Falcon9 values are price. Which makes the comparison even worse, because we know that Falcon9 flies with a very healthy profit, meaning their costs are significantly below the price that NASA pays.
Exactly. They don't need to sell at cost, they just need to slightly underbid the competition. Which they've executed perfectly.
EU has no flying rockets right now and Ariane6 is basically DOA if it ever gets over the finish line.
ULA has launched only 3 rockets this year.
SpaceX has eaten the entire western launch market by simply pricing their launches slightly below legacy prices. And at the same time they give themselves (starlink) the at-cost price so no one can compete with them there either.
Maybe Jeffery Bezos and his deep pocket book will eventually present some competition, but Blue will be fighting headwinds the entire way down to the bottom price. SpaceX has this down pat and BO will be learning on the go. Any price improvement BO makes for years to come can be matched effortlessly by SpX.
The only other plausible challenger is China, but those launches are not really available to the west.
RL's current offering is a smaller rocket. There are a handful of small launcher companies out there, but I was talking about the launching of big payloads. Rocket Lab has plans to enter that category too, but hasn't flown anything yet.
I don't think that includes all of the Space Shuttle's R&D costs - those are more like $50 billion in 2023 money. The actual paper says "Total cost per launch".
Besides, Nasa doesn't uses SpaceX because they are secretly a bunch of Musk fanboi's... I suspect they are actually cheaper!
That's absolutely ridiculous, their costs are nowhere near that. Their rideshare price is $5500/kg, and every kg they sell is displacing their own payloads so there's simply no way they're pricing it at 7% of their costs. Even excluding R&D Shuttle was far more costly.
All rocket ridesharing is really cheap, because it's essentially free once the rocket has been paid for by the main payload. The only real cost to the rocket provider is ensuring that you don't interfere with the main payload.
That would be true if the main payload left the rocket with spare capacity but that just isn't the case. SpaceX's main payload can use every last kilogram of capacity. Every kilogram they sell as rideshare is a kilogram they lose for Starlink. They'll still have to pay the cost to launch that kilogram later so there's nothing free here. As I already pointed out...
There are two types of Starlink rideshare. Transporter goes to SSO and is dedicated to rideshare. But the other is Starlink adjacent LEO which bumps a Starlink or 3 for your payload. There haven't been many of those but there have been a few.
Yeah even if there's an order of magnitude error in those calculations Falcon 9 still comes out on top. Plus, the proof is in the pudding, SpaceX is launching more frequently and putting more mass into orbit than anyone else. They could never afford it if Falcon 9 was more expensive than the Shuttle. It's crazy the mental gymnastics people will do once they've decided to hate someone.
I really appreciated thunderf00t for a long time and liked his debunking videos. There came a point where he had such a hard-on for hating Musk that he seemed to lose a lot of objectivity, particularly when it comes to SpaceX.
That seems to be a pretty big and weird theme of his. For a long time he was focused on creationists (first VenomFangX, then Ray Comfort), and at the time that didn't seem to be a big deal, because creationism deserves mockery. Then he did a hard pivot and obsessed over Anita Sarkeesian for years, and that started to make it clear that it he was more interested in hosting a 2 Minutes Hate, and didn't care as much about the subject his targets cared about.
Got to do what sells. There’s more than one subreddit dedicated to hating on everything he does up to the minute. I’d imagine there’s a large market for it on YouTube. View counts push creators to certain niches as much as personal beliefs.
None of the stuff that worked was his idea. The difference between Musk's companies and more tradition one is professional managers as Steve Jobs said are bozo's.
When I visited China's city Chengdu back in 2015, there was a single subway line, and it was about less than 5 miles long. 8 years later, including 3 years in Covid, this is what Chengdu's subway network looks like: http://m.cd.bendibao.com/news/123545.shtm#&gid=1&pid=1
It looks to me the problem is not engineering or technical but political. It's a shame that the US can't build any more, no matter what excuses we produce.
I don't buy this theory that what Musk primarily wanted with the hyperloop was to undermine the high-speed train. Yes I've read TFA and I'm aware of that indirect quote, and its retraction for that matter. Nevertheless, it seems to me much easier to believe that what Musk actually wanted was publicity. This is a pattern that you can see over and over: hyperloop, boring company, saving kids in caves, colonising Mars, self driving cars, X will be a financial app, etc etc etc. All empty promises that grab headlines and inflate his importance at the time. Public attention span is very low so when these promises are later not fulfilled or even revealed to be complete fabrications, it doesn't really matter because the billions in stock value do not melt so easily.
FTA - "The technology was never really meant to go anywhere."
What an excellent pun!
Meanwhile, out here in the real world, we know it costs 5x more, on average, to build passenger trains underground than above ground. Hyperloop was always a means for developing mining technologies - specifically, lithium mining. That sounds boring (see what I did there?!) so you frame the discussion as passenger transport to lure in investors. Technology was developed, knowledge was learned, investors were duped, and we move on.
> Hyperloop was always a means for developing mining technologies - specifically, lithium mining. That sounds boring (see what I did there?!)
I think you're thinking about "The Boring Company" which is entirely separate from Hyperloop One.
Hyperloop was always a transportation fantasy. They didn't even hire people with civil engineering or mining experience, as some early employees are starting to explain on Twitter now that the company is gone.
> Technology was developed, knowledge was learned, investors were duped, and we move on.
Again, I think you're confusing different companies. Hyperloop specifically worked on transportation, not mining/digging/tunneling.
The Boring Company is the Elon Company supposedly targeted at digging tunnels.
This is an oversimplification like saying the Iraq war was just about oil. Competing interests with one offering a clearer economic gain doesn’t mean it’s the only motivation. Elon getting annoyed at traffic in LA and then trying to figure out some fantastical solution, like a kid daydreaming while he sits in a Tesla doing 5km/hr, then later adding mining to help make it more practical as an IRL R&D project sounds more likely.
You're making assumptions here.
As far as I know there is no requirement
that hyperloop has to be above ground.
While I imagine it would reduce cost to build one at ground level,
I think it makes sense to go underground or high up on pillars at least where it intersects roads, rivers, or things like that.
Also there's boring company that seems to fit perfectly with hyperloop.
> You're making assumptions here. As far as I know there is no requirement that hyperloop has to be above ground.
I don't think reading a proposal to build a tube on pylons which it stated would mostly be located on highway medians to [theoretically] be cheaper than an intercity rail line and concluding it isn't intended to generate demand for a later startup developing tools to drill through rock is making a particularly wild assumption, especially not compared with taking the opposite position...
The original designs had the hyperloop above ground. The later ”loop” (no hyper, drive a car onto a skate that then shunts around under the city) were underground; there might have been an early iteration of that urban design that contemplated vacuum though.
Of course you _can_ go underground but that doesn’t make sense economically for long-range (nobody is digging a tunnel SF-LA). And the hyper bit (vacuum pump and acceleration at each stop) makes less sense for short-range transport in urban environments.
I've wondered if something like Hyperloop could make sense for high speed package transport, say between Fedex hubs. Smaller tubes, no need for life support, easier safety case, and packages could be designed to withstand higher accelerations (for sharper turns).
Oh, yeah, scaled down this could totally work! What about for small packages and documents in office situations - pop a signed document into a tube and it could whoosh to the recipient. Or at banks, customers could put their deposits into a pod — from their car, maybe! — and get the money straight to the teller.
Packages tend to be more patient than passengers. I'd expect that if someone builds a medium range (or long range) goods transport it will focus on cheap throughput, not on latency. Low latency at any cost use cases would remain the realm of couriers (and/or drones). Short range, things might look different. Urban-scale pneumatic pipe systems had been a thing before fax machines took over. But a last mile package delivery network would likely have more in common with an airport luggage conveyor graph than with hyperloop fantasies.
There is huge demand for hourly package delivery. I’d imagine Amazon would spend quite a bit on it like they tried to with drones. But as you said it’s more likely medium range stuff (warehouse->automated truck bays closer to customer or something). I’m sure they explored the idea, economics probably don’t make sense in most cases, anything to dude with municipal land dev alone would be a deterrent. Although there’s been plenty of obvious ideas that just took a bold person to try it and figure out the details.
It's true that Amazon built their empire on the strategy of considering fulfillment speed their primary distinction metric, but they are long past the point where cost could be ignored. Where I live (Germany), most web shops are at least on par with Amazon in terms of fulfillment, and that's before considering "Amazon, but without Prime subscription".
> There is huge demand for hourly package delivery
The market is huge, because what little demands there is, it's very inelastic. You either need super low latency delivery and are willing to pay almost any price (pizza gets cold, deliverator to the rescue!), or you don't. If someone could magically offer the service at lower cost they could own that market, but that market would hardly grow.
Hmm here in Southern Ontario Canada Amazon has 2 delivery blocks a day so I’ve gotten deliveries at either the morning or afternoon depending on when I’m ordering (I know both sets of drivers now as they work different shifts) and I’ve yet to find a retailer or system that’s as fast as Amazon. Canadapost is the only alternative and it’s never as reliable delivery wise. Shopify is the closest 2nd at being most consistently & honest in terms of data. If Amazon could go same day that would be a major innovation here and further eat into Walmart/Best Buy type retail, instant gratification being the only reason I use them.
I think that, in general, speed is much less important for the transport of goods. You care little if your purchase has to travel at snail speed for 24 hours straight, yet that would be unacceptable for yourself. Not to mention the fact that goods travel one way, humans generally travel both ways (so travel times also need to be multiplied by 2).
"life support", you would still need pressurized pods. Most goods cannot survive being in a vacuum, heck guaranteed to cause fires in some cases when you cause lithium cell pouches to burst.
As I understand it, the concept allows for smaller vehicles with frequent departures and arrivals. It makes some sense to send shipments of packages between delivery hubs often rather than waiting to fill a whole train enough to make it economical, while not being subject to a vehicle propelled by pressure in the tube.
I can't say whether it would be effective (or even beneficial enough to justify the construction cost) but it sounds more plausible than high speed mass transit for passengers.
The entire thesis hinges on this quote from Ashlee Vance, who corrected/retracted said quote years later:
>>Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city. At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
I have no divine insight into Musk's or any tech billionaire's minds, but if this article's thesis is that the billionaires' are conspiring to put down viable public transit, I would like to see more evidence.
I do not disagree, however, that Hyperloop was an infeasible project from the get-go.
When a person retracts a statement about a wealthy individual, one may reasonably wonder whether it was done under legal pressure. In this case, however, it seems that Ashlee Vance feels it is his words that are being taken out of context to see an attempt to quash high-speed rail:
“The Boring Company is one of [Musk’s] ventures that I’ve never understood, really,” Vance replied. “I totally get your point. In general, though, there’s no part of me that believes Elon was trying to kill public transport so people would stay in cars. I just don’t believe that.... Elon didn’t even need to bemoan the high-speed rail project for it to undermine itself.”
"Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is a whimsical retelling of the destruction of LA's public transit system on behalf of the car industry, who were considering to get highways built and lock people into car ownership.
It seems quite clear that Musk dislikes public transport. He's publicly stated that he thinks it sucks and is inconvenient. If you think public transport is a bad idea and you have the means to kill the project, it stands to reason you'd give it a shot.
I don't disagree entirely. Public transport is kind of rubbish and, all else being equal (travel times, cost, availability, etc.), I'd prefer to be in my own car as it drives itself directly to my destination. However, it's a question of whether it's possible to build a city around cars without it turning into a horrible traffic-filled hellscape, and so far Musk doesn't seem to have found an alternative solution. Certainly, there's nothing better on the table that works with current technology.
SV's ideas have probably done more to worsen the hellscape of car-dependent cities. Think of how many single-occupancy cars are on the road right now simply delivering someone's lunch. Robo-taxies don't eliminate cars, only the driver. Now that your car drives itself you don't mind the extra 20 minute commute if you can use that time to churn through emails.
Tell me you're an American without telling me you're an American[0].
If travel times, cost, and availability were actually equal, you'd pick public transit every time, because you don't have to focus on the cognitively stressful task of operating a motor vehicle. The reason why you care about being driven directly to your destination is specifically because the availability is so poor and gaps in the network get papered over with shittons of walking.
The car has an analogous 'last mile' problem - i.e. finding a place to legally park it at your destination. We fixed that by mandating free parking everywhere. This pushes buildings away from one another, which means walking is even less viable, which exacerbates the traffic issue with lots of short trips. It also disaggregates traffic flows, which makes availability more expensive to produce, et cetera.
I’m British and live in London so I live almost exclusively by public transport, walking and cycling. Driving here is also hard work. Most people I know in the UK, particularly anyone with a family, prefer driving, which is why the “anti-car” policies have been so controversial. Also, by availability I didn’t mean goes directly to your destination as that’s really just a fundamental limitation of public transport. Frankly, I would probably always drive over taking the tube/train/bus if it wasn’t for the cost of congestion charge and parking.
However, I recognise that driving is a selfish action with significant externalities, and I prefer to live somewhere that prioritises alternative forms of transportation. I vote for anyone who prioritises public transport and to restrict cars, because cars make cities ugly, noisy, dirty, unwalkable, and dangerous.
Other than commutes and peak hours in zone 1, driving normally takes less time, end-to-end. Really the only trips that take less time on the train in zone 2 and beyond are if each end of the trip is right next to the station. That's not a surprise, since around the world, most public transport is highly optimised at commuting and trips within the central zone.
I'll give you an example trips I take quite frequently (not exact so that I don't dox myself completely): Homebase Catford to Grove Park Cemetery: public transport 25 mins excluding waiting, driving 10 mins; Anytime Fitness Hither Green to Manor House Gardens: 22 mins vs 9 mins; Voodoo Rays Peckham to Mountsfield Park: 15 mins vs 55 mins. It's also often cheaper to drive, especially if it's more than one person, and I usually have my partner with me.
Even in zone 1 at peak times, driving is usually about the same as public transport once you factor in the time for connections, waiting, getting down into the stations and back, etc. It's just expensive as hell with the congestion charge and parking costs.
The surprising thing about London's traffic is it really flows quite well, even compared to much smaller and less densely populated towns in the UK. I've driven across quite literally the length and breadth of the UK, and I've experienced much worse traffic elsewhere. I'm not sure if it's the fancy "smart" traffic light system we have or some other aspect of urban planning, but I find that I quite rarely get stuck in frustrating traffic jams. That is, except for if there's a bad crash in the Blackwall Tunnel. That can cause gridlock all the way back to Blackheath.
London and the UK in general have some of the best public transport in the world. It’s not the best for sure, and places like Switzerland, Japan and the Netherlands are better, but it’s the top 10 - and probably higher if you only consider countries with a large population.
I agree it sucks, but the fact that it sucks and is also one of the best does suggest that good public transport is difficult. Note how all the places with half decent public transport tend to be rich.
However even Switzerland (which I have been to) if I had to pick which form of transport has the most utility, I’d still choose the car. Public transport usually takes longer door-to-door and involves changes in modes or doesn’t quite get you to your destination. Also it isn’t 24/7. It’s great for commuting, not so great for other things. I guess nightlife though isn’t a huge concern in Zurich :)
About a week, but in the modern day it definitely doesn't take a month to get used to a city's public transport system. Phones now tell you all you need to know in most developed countries. Perhaps with the exception of particularly terrible ticketing systems such as the UK train system and, I can't remember why now as it's been a few years, but I hate the train ticketing in Germany too. But even in those cases, you still get where you're going, just with the chance that you'll get told off by a ticket inspector because your train isn't valid for the super ultra full moon off-peak ticket you booked.
And London really does have some of the best in the world. There are a lot of rough edges, for sure, but nearly all rankings I can find have it around 10th best city public transportation system in the world which is pretty up there. Maybe now that they've finally fixed Bank station, it could even go up a few points ;). Zurich is probably the best I've experienced, and Stockholm, Tokyo and Singapore are also very good. Paris, Moscow, Madrid, New York City and Amsterdam are probably all roughly on par with London; better in some ways, worse in others, and which one you prefer probably depends on your individual preferences.
Eh. London has pretty good public transport _coverage_, but it doesn’t _work_ very well. Like, it’s a lot better than anything you’d find in the US, but many continental systems are more reliable, better organised, and cleaner.
Some are better, many are not. There are not many other systems of the same scale as London's in the continent, and those that are aren't really much better. The Paris Metro for example is very dirty and smelly in my experience, although the trains are frequent which is nice. Generally, across the world, I find larger cities have dirtier public transport, with the exception of Tokyo which is spotless. There are lots of cute and beautiful tiny systems across Europe, like Prague, but it's obviously easier to make a small system that works well than something at the scale of London, Paris or NYC.
Where London really struggles, as the whole of the UK does, is the awful ticketing system. That said if you don't care too much about the cost and stick to the Oyster zone, you can just tap your phone and not think about it beyond that. Oh, also the lack of AC for the few weeks of hot temperatures we get, but that at least is apparently being fixed soon.
Functionality wise, I've never had any issues in London. The open data is accurate and comprehensive, so the app of your choice has accurate route planning, you pay by tapping your phone and follow the instructions. Other systems have mostly caught up now, but for a long time London did better than 90% of other systems in that area.
I'd say the city I found most surprisingly good was Stockholm. Very comprehensive for the relatively small population size, and all the stations were beautiful and clean. If anything, it seemed overbuilt and almost desolate a lot of the time. I'm not sure how they afford or justify the upkeep on it given that most other systems in the world seem to be struggling.
> Some public transport absolutely is 24/7.
It may well be, but Zurich's isn't, which is what I was talking about! Very few places have 24/7 trains, but Zurich doesn't even have 24 hour busses except at the weekend.
If travel times, cost, and availability were actually equal, you'd pick public transit every time, because you don't have to focus on the cognitively stressful task of operating a motor vehicle.
Sounds like a case of projection. Most people aren't especially intimidated by driving, and quite a few actually enjoy it. Far fewer people enjoy being packed onto a crowded bus or train with strangers (and those are the ones who inevitably sit next to me.)
When people have the option to drive, and the money to do so, they usually prefer to.
The problem with California High Speed Rail is that they literally have no plans for the section that goes through the mountains. There are huge elevation changes in a seismically active area and its not clear that they'll ever figure it out.
No I'm saying parcel maps and data sheets are not an approachable high level description of how these challenges are getting resolved. It's possible it has been. I'm not disputing that. But I don't have the necessary technical background to read the data sheets and make that determination & go from low level technical info to high level description of how these problems are getting tackled.
That being said, the biggest hurdle is with the HSR is not technical but the political disfunction within the US that cripples large projects:
> “There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.” Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
The original route that was supposed to service SF <-> LA now has detours that have added substantially to the costs and slowed down the rail (no longer a straight line). Similarly, they started building it out in the easiest possible point (in the middle of the country in the flat lands) rather than in places where they could start operating it and providing value (Bay Area/LA). It was clearly hijacked as a way to steal funds earmarked for transit and now is such a large project that has begun, that funding will probably continue indefinitely to help save face.
What "original route"? The route is quite literally encoded into the state law, passed by plebiscite. The route is required to serve Fresno, Bakersfield, and Palmdale. The fact that SNCF thought it would be easier to build a TGV in a depopulated colony is immaterial.
Seriously look at the cover of the 2005 EIR that was published before Prop. 1A was passed. This is the original route! There was never another one!
> It was clearly hijacked as a way to steal funds earmarked for transit
More ignorance here. It's the opposite. Prop 1A funds are funding local transit projects, in the billions of dollars. HSR funds paid to electrify Caltrain.
Look, it's perfectly obvious that you do not have a factual grounding for your beliefs. Instead of posting, why don't you research?
Those are just proposed parcel maps, and the other document you linked says "See Tunnel Plans for more details". They very much haven't gotten into the details on how to make this segment work.
> There are huge elevation changes in a seismically active area and its not clear that they'll ever figure it out.
That same issue applies to any high-speed project that's not air travel, regardless of if it moves along asphalt or rails and if it runs on or below the ground.
California sure hasn't. They're billions over budget, and years behind schedule and keep putting off the part of the project that is the most challenging which is a hallmark of failed endeavors.
Seems far-fetched that Musk would try to derail one single railway construction project to benefit his cars and industry- the impact of that project on his economic interests seems too small and indirect.
But I can imagine Musk being outraged at the idea of spending an enormous amount of money to build a project that is already old and uninspiring by the current standards. And it's not like Musk's perception of how public administrations waste money by applying the same old schemes again and again is entirely naive and wrong- he revolutionised the world's space industry based on those perceptions. He probably wanted to say "hey, with some imagination and research you can build something new and better for less".
Everything I've seen from Musk makes me believe that he wants to win, on his terms, full stop. The undermining of public will to invest in public transportation is real. A functioning subway and rail system in LA would dramatically cut down on the number of cars on the roads, which would be reflected in fewer cars sold. This fairly straightforward and logical: Musk loses if there are more trains built.
He also didn't try to build something better; he floated an idea for something worse. Transportation doesn't need some "new technology" to solve the problems of moving people around; trains have existed for a very long time now.
He wants full control over transportation and communication infrastructure. It's really just that simple. Doesn't matter what it cost, profit (for shareholders at least) has never been the primary goal.
> A functioning subway and rail system in LA would dramatically cut down on the number of cars on the roads, which would be reflected in fewer cars sold. This fairly straightforward and logical: Musk loses if there are more trains built.
You're honestly saying that reduced cars, and therefore Tesla sales in one city in one country is going to hurt Tesla/Musk?
Do you realize the Tesla Model Y is now the second best selling vehicle across the entire US, and the best selling car in the entire world? [1]
As soon as traffic becomes reasonable because of extensive public transportation...people will go back to using cars.
Really the only perk of public transport is not having to deal with traffic and parking. But as soon as traffic and parking are not an issue, people will always prefer cars.
I mean, I'd love it if everyone took the train to work. Then I could zip right in using my own comfy car and park right next to my job.
Have you ever lived in a city or country with a well-functioning public transportation network? It doesn't sound like it. In such a context, the only reasons 99% of people prefer cars / vans is: 1) cost, 2) if you need to transport big stuff, 3) if you need the flexibility
2) and 3) are only true for a small subset of people, e.g. for handymen or people who transport stuff regularly
1) cost is the big one, and currently a big reason that trains are sometimes more expensive than cars, at least in Germany, is subsidies and external costs. Also, that people underestimate what owning and operating a car costs, and just compare the train ticket price to the gas price for a specific trip.
> As soon as traffic becomes reasonable because of extensive public transportation...
City councils can start doing the inverse of what they’ve been doing. Traffic increases, so roads are widened, more parking is created, leading to more cars, and traffic increases.
As traffic decreases, roads can be changed to reduce the focus on cars, and increase the focus on other forms of transport / pedestrians / additional commerce, which then serves to discourage further traffic because … there’s nowhere to create more space for cars anymore.
See various European major cities (e.g. London, or less so, Madrid) for examples of this happening in real time.
You can’t zip in and park next to work if there’s only a single lane of one way traffic permitted on each road, and there’s only 100 parking spaces within a 5 min walk of your office (and about 10,000 people working in that area)
Exactly this. In London they have even reduced the number of car parks new apartment buildings are allocated. One place I looked at only had ~20 parks for ~80 flats. They can only do this because there’s a great public transport system in place.
What is more farfetches: 1) trying to derail a project that might hurt your interests 2) getting into an argument with some cave divers that are trying to rescue some kids and call them pedophiles 3) jeopardizing everyone's safety by testing experimental tech on the public roads. I could go on
1) seems perfectly reasonable to me and it's not unique to Musk. Happens all the time.
Car companies most certainly have a history of killing public transit. They convinced cities to rip up street car networks so they could sell buses and tires, cheapening the experience and ultimately resulting in more private cars.
>Seems far-fetched that Musk would try to derail one single railway construction project to benefit his cars and industry- the impact of that project on his economic interests seems too small and indirect.
> But I can imagine Musk being outraged at the idea of spending an enormous amount of money to build a project that is already old and uninspiring by the current standards.
The thing about the current standards is they demonstrably work, whereas vactrains have been the epitome of “nice idea, won’t work” for over a century (there were quite serious engineering studies in the 70s and they did not end well). And the US probably shouldn’t be trying to run before it can walk here; its first real high-speed line (Accela hardly counts) should probably use proven tech.
> Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city. At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
Yeah. He proposed an alternative idea that would cost ten times less and would be much faster. And said from the start he would not build it himself. I don't see where it contradicts what I wrote.
The nuance about "Elon making Hyperloop just to oppose high speed rail" is that he isn't intrinsically opposed to high speed rail itself. He's just opposed to the fact that California high speed rail is way more expensive and way slower than high speed rail elsewhere.
If we could build high speed rail that's as fast as the ones in China, Japan, and Europe and cost the same amount, then that would truly be amazing and there would be no need for hyperloops.
Anyway, a lot of these "hyperloops are scams" articles just talk about how Elon hates high speed rail and never delve into the technical details of why hyperloops don't work (so far, anyway).
The main idea of hyperloop is to use a compressor in the front of the pod to send air to the back, avoiding the inefficiency of pushing a lot of air in front of it like a syringe. This would allow the tube to contain some air, making it cheaper to maintain than a truly vacuum tube. The idea was explored in the 1990s for the similarly ill-fated SwissMetro project. However, aerodynamic simulations showed that the Hyperloop pod design would need to be redesigned to avoid supersonic flow, and the tube would need to be much bigger. I'm not sure if anyone has actually managed to make an active bypass pod that uses a compressor in front to improve efficiency in a tunnel and would be very curious to learn more.
Then why go with Hyperloop and not a innovative rail company to show how high speed rail can be done for cheaper? If he managed space rockets I'd put a good bet that he's a high probability to find good people to work on a private high speed rail company.
* San Francisco–San Jose: 30 minutes; this would require about 100 mph (160 km/h) on average
* San Jose–Los Angeles: 2 hours, 10 minutes; this would require about 200 mph (320 km/h) on average
Which is rather uninspiring compared to traveling by air, and somewhat worse than the Nozomi Shinkansen travelling between Tokyo and Osaka.
The slow leg between SF-SJ reminds me of taking the TGV from Paris to Nice. The part between Marseille and Nice took just as long as from Paris to Marseille.
With all that said though, I would still take the CA HSR once it is built and I am looking forward to its completion.
Heaven forbid someone has a radical new idea for fusion power or to reduce carbon in the atmosphere or to cure cancer. They may just keep it to themselves knowing the reaction they'll get.
I think it's a sad state of affairs when someone simply puts an idea out into the world and says "We think it will work, but needs more input" and people get extremely angry and spew vitriol and hatred towards them simply for sharing an idea.
Back in the day Musk and SpaceX engineers put out a white paper about Hyperloop. In it they laid out as much of the work and calculations they had done, and they said "We're pretty sure this can work, but it's a first draft, and it needs more input and refinement and testing and all the rest. We're not going to do that. But hopefully others will pick it up and run with it."
Then some test tracks were built to foster student input/learning/ideas (Great!), then everyone called Musk a scam artist and says it was a crock of shit from the start.
I wish we lived in a world where new ideas were encouraged and discussed in a productive manner so that we can all learn and improve the world around us. Of course not all of them will "work out", but that is the whole point of learning and trying new experimental things.
> I think it's a sad state of affairs when someone simply puts an idea out into the world and says "We think it will work, but needs more input" and people get extremely angry and spew vitriol and hatred towards them simply for sharing an idea.
The way you characterize it, Musk came out with an itty bitty idea, said “hey I think this might work but I need some help figuring things out” and the whole world hated him for it.
This is a very generous characterization of Musk, but it has little to do with reality.
What actually happened was that Musk has a history of floating ideas around by presenting them as the best thing since sliced bread.
Shitting all over conventional wisdom, going as far as to say that it’s all BS in an effort to add credence to his own snake oil because conventional wisdom happens to debunk his claims.
All while promising the moon on timelines that would put the Lord Almighty to shame with his 7 days and then, when there’s a big enough wake of unfulfilled promises and exposed BS that could sink an entire continent, that’s when people started to get suspicious en masse.
Maybe if he was more focused on improving his plan instead of “faking it till he made it” by claiming he had approval to start building[0], people would take him more seriously.
And that’s not even touching on the question of if we actually should entertain every random piece of science fiction, which you seem to imply. Because I don’t know if you’ve read the alpha paper, but we’re dealing with “the laws of physics don’t exist” levels of fiction here.
In this case he hasn't done anything except release an idea. As the saying goes, Buyer Beware. Musk gives out a free idea and people are mad at him for it? If anything they should be mad at themselves for investing in it when Musk literally said he won't invest in it himself.
> Heaven forbid someone has a radical new idea for fusion power or to reduce carbon in the atmosphere or to cure cancer. They may just keep it to themselves knowing the reaction they'll get.
Or, y'know, they might put the idea as an idea rather than an argument about why the government should stop funding wind farms or chemotherapy...
Elon can trash and actively try to stop infrastructure projects actually due to be built all he likes, but as soon as someone suggests his vaporware alternative might not be proposed in the best of faith, we have to worry about about how hurting his feelings might set back infrastructure growth?
The biggest problem Musk has is that he is a nerdy engineer who thought it would be a good idea to interface directly with a general public. I think his biggest failing was not hiring a top-shelf PR team to handle his communications.
There is a good reason companies keep engineers in the back room away from customers. They are masters of machines, not people.
How is that his biggest problem? He has no impulse control, or no desire for it; he lies incessantly to further his interests; he's a horrible manager; etc.
He lies incessantly because he is a nerd with fantastical ideas and enormous resources. But regular folks won't see this because they put their regular self in his shoes to decide what his motivations must be.
If he used a proper PR team, they would filter most of this out, and shape his communications into a form meant for regular people.
The things you mention may be the problems he thinks he has, but none of them are a problem from our point of view. From our perspective, his problem is that he doesn't hide out in the server closet like a nerdy engineer should.
>I think it's a sad state of affairs when someone simply puts an idea out into the world and says "We think it will work, but needs more input" and people get extremely angry and spew vitriol and hatred towards them simply for sharing an idea.
> I was open minded, until I read the white paper.
OK, so your feedback is "I don't think this will work for reasons x, y and z."
We can learn from that and either modify the design until it does work, or move on with other projects that do work (i.e. High Speed Rail).
In either case, anger, hatred and vitriol are not required for a productive outcome. We should not shoot down people for sharing information about possibly new and better ways of doing things, lest we discourage everyone from doing so.
It is not even a matter of disagreeing with the proposal. If we take all of the numbers in the hyperloop whitepaper at face value—and I want to be clear that all of the numbers in that whitepaper are bullshit—even on those terms it doesn't solve a problem that anyone faces. Hyperloop under its own assumptions has a fraction of the transportation capacity of a railroad.
OK. In your assessment it's not a good thing to build. Evidently the rest of the world agrees.
Again, that is perfectly fine and someone putting an idea out there that doesn't work should not result in attacks and name calling. It's just petty high school garbage that doesn't help anything, and in fact hinders future discussions about important topics.
If you think people are calling Musk and his ideas names purely because of his company's "whitepaper", then you really aren't paying attention. Any negative press happening to Musk is purely his own doing.
Very interesting article. Given that most of Elon's fortune comes from owning a big share of a car company, I think it's understandable (but unethical) if he uses his huge media influence to sabotage a public transport project.
IMHO currently a Hyperloop will require much more investments than what is reasonable to expect, but in 20 or 30 or 50 years if the human progress continues new technologies will make it viable.
I don't see why. The post is well written and makes a very compelling point. Plenty of evidence is given that the hyperloop idea was entirely unserious and was more about billionaires placing their enormous weight on the scales in order to kill a change in public transit that would threaten their profits and lifestyles.
I mean sure, it challenges the narrative that billionaires aren't selfish parasites that shouldn't exist, so right, not very pro Y combinator of me.
The next obvious conclusion once it is established that the hyperloop concept was a con is that the person proposing it and other ideas is a con artist.
Believing he built two of the most important companies of the 21st century is part of the con. The first being that they are the most important and that he built them.
You have to be pretty dimwitted to think that either SpaceX or Tesla 1) are unimportant, or 2) would have reached anything close to their current level of success without Musk behind them.
Which makes his descent into erratic flimflammery all the more tragic.
I'm not disputing that he has faults, it's just amazing how his real accomplishments get magnified or erased by dumb tweets in 2023, 10-15 years later. How many people fall for this stuff?
And here are many of us saying the same about the people who fall for the cult of personality that surrounds this serial liar. To be fair, many of us are speaking with hindsight, as we too fell for it years ago, before his penchant for lying was laid bare.
Sure but Tesla and SpaceX objectively exist in the real world. Landing a freaking rocket booster is now routine.
It would be "cult of personality" to pretend the Musk did everything personally, obviously a lot of dedicated people contributed.. but it's just as dumb to act like he wasn't involved.
The cars produced by Tesla were not already built before his time, but the company Tesla was. You do realize that companies and cars are different things, right?
There was no intent to say anything about innovation. That would be wildly off-topic. Can you point to where I spoke of it so that I can correct the comment for future readers?
4, if you count his early influence and, I believe, founding of OpenAI. Albeit, he was not instrumental in the OpenAI as we know it today, but he set it in motion by hiring Sam Altman as the CEO, among other things.
You have to count OpenAI. It is the only other company he has built alongside SpaceX (unless you count the unimportant ones like The Boring Company; the original comment implies we are not counting them).
He has certainly helped maintain Twitter, Tesla, and PayPal at different points, but they were already built before he arrived.
If that were what it means to build a company, an operating company can never be built. There is no end to defining the product, the path to profitability and executing on that vision. You would always be building, never reaching a point where it can be spoken of in the past tense.
That's fine if we want to hold that definition, but then your insistence that Musk built Tesla does not logically follow.
Dumping a bunch of 18650s and an electric motor into a Lotus as a one-off demo is less than what the Cybertruck team did in 90 days. I'm not very impressed with the initial team to be honest.
How big do you think it was exactly when he joined? And at what level of product maturity?
1%. It is at 2% now. Which isn't a knock on what Tesla is doing today, but to tell how it pales in comparison to what the company will be doing 1,000 years from now. We are still in very early days.
If that is how you want to measure it, Tesla hasn't been built yet. It is still under construction. No matter how you slice it, it is impossible for Musk to have built Tesla.
Musk not doing it himself should have been a clear sign. "I have no time so you can become a billionaire with it" - sure, then buy X and spend all the time fighting "for free speech" on X.
Low quality/trash article. I wasted a few minutes of my time so you can save yours.
>Ten years after Elon Musk unveiled the white paper for the vacuum-tube transport system he dubbed the Hyperloop, it’s time to drive the final nail into its coffin.
Opens with Elon Musk jab for the clicks, meanwhile a few paragraphs down
>To be clear, Hyperloop One is not associated with Musk himself.
Nice, top quality post.
>The technology was never really meant to go anywhere. Its main goal was always to stop a better transport future from being realized.
Conspiracy theory take, I'm probably going to get a lecture about how shitty city buses and 100 year old metro trains are better
>In the early 2010s, there was a big debate around California’s plan to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with further extensions to San Diego and Sacramento to follow. Naturally, conservative, automotive, and airline interests were vehemently opposed to a technology that Japan and Europe had been living with for decades arriving on American shores because it threatened their commercial interests.
More conspiracy theories, meanwhile californias (not-high) speed rail system is insanely over-budget and behind schedule.
>Elon Musk, as an automaker and (let’s be honest) somewhat of a conservative himself, eagerly adopted the arguments against the bullet train with his own spin
Yes, because a slow train for tens of billions of dollars is going to magically transform the world into a carless bike-transit utopia
>with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in 2013, calling it, “the slowest bullet train in the world and the most expensive bullet train per mile in the world” — and that meant it not only had to be opposed, but that the geniuses in Silicon Valley could surely do better than people who actually had a clue about trains and transportation.
All of this is true, note that he has zero rebuttal to these facts. Instead he resorts to deflection.
>hat figure was immediately debunked by people who actually understood what went into building that kind of infrastructure, with the real cost estimated around at least $100 billion, even though it would have far less capacity than a high-speed train.
Zero sourcing for this claim, meanwhile california's low-speed train project is going to deliver inferior results for $88-$128B
Seems like the tunnel + hyperloop would have been a steal at "just" $100B
>And that was the point. Musk never had any intention of building the Hyperloop. He only needed it to help kill or substantially delay the high-speed rail project and the alternate vision of sustainable collective transportation it offered.
What a complete joke of an article, nothing was killed. Nothing was "substantially delayed" due to Musk or anyone else speaking about hyperloop. This article is a pathetically transparent attempt to rewrite history and transfer the blame of californias systemic failures on... some news articles?
And what is this author’s motivation for writing an entire series of vitriolic articles about bad man Elon Musk? I’ve noticed lately that such articles get upvoted a lot on HN.
Well, he did remove the current administration's tight collaboration with Twitter's censorship system. He also fired the majority of Twitter's engineers. Between these I can imagine a lot of people in the San Francisco don't particularly like him, regardless of anything else.
He's done a lot of bad things? Things that are bad for the public? In a very public way? Feels like the sort of thing that a series of articles was invented exactly to address.
I don't see anyone "worshiping", I see neutrals and haters. Haters spend a lot of time talking about these supposed worshipers, but I don't see them in comment sections.
Calling Democrats the party of "division and hate" (not suggesting they are perfect), encouraging people to vote Republican, moving out of state to dodge regulations, defending Scott Adams, opposing unions (sometimes using illegal tactics), allowing Alex Jones to return to Twitter, agreeing with antisemitisic tweets, advocating for absolute free speech (except where people criticize him / his interests).
the author's motivation is likely to expose bad man Elon Musk
I remember like six or seven? years ago when I used to be active on reddit I was on a sub called r/enoughMuskSpam. At the time this was kind of a fringe view. It is less so now, partially due to work like this (and partially due to Musk's own, very public stunts)
I don't understand the point of this question in that you could ask it of almost anything.
Just a Musk hate porn article with zero substance behind it trying to get clicks by naming one of the richest and smartest people in the world. These are popping up more and more since he purchased Twitter. Somehow the $400M Hyperloop One project that Musk didn't fund, operate, or touch fails and he's being blamed for it. Don't blame the cities that make a simple train cost $10B, don't blame the investors who spent $400M on the problem, blame Musk, the guy who released a free open source design, how rude of him.
I am judging the author on this article alone and it is not credible. Maybe he just got emotionally charged for some reason or is looking to build an audience by getting the clicks that come with hating on a popular person. I think objectively it is glossing over the fact that Musk has nothing to do with the current Hyperloop project. Musk has done nothing but put free research into the world then this author makes a very grande assumption that he released free research out of some evil conspiracy that releasing free research would make governments stop building trains. Not only that but its been less than 10 years since that was idea was released and the author speaks as if its been tried and failed everywhere. I don't see how much less credible the author could be.
Might I add the other articles suggested by this author you call credible are titled "Elon Musk is a Racist" and "Elon Musk wants to relive his start-up days. He's repeating the same mistakes"
Vacuum super-high-speed trains make sense over long distances, but building something like that is beyond current levels of technology. Maybe in a century or later, it could be a better alternative to flying between continents or big cities.
I remember during my lifetime people also said electric cars and self-landing reusable rockets were impossible.
Contrasting that with Branson biting off more than his collection of Virgin brands could chew (which are all failing/reorganizing) is not really the hit piece this author thinks it is.
Electric cars have been around for over a century. The space shuttle re-used the solid rocket boosters and its own engines. I don't know anyone could possibly consider those "impossible". Not to diminish to achievements of Tesla and Space X, but they were not entirely novel systems invented out of whole cloth.
This is mostly Musk mythmaking. Both vertical launch, reusable rockets and electric cars predate the current era. Unless you are 100+ years old electric cars were demonstrated possible before you were born.
Does your lifetime extend to before 1970? We had reusable launch vehicles at that time. We had propulsive rocket landings in the 80's. Electric cars have existed for longer than gas-powered cars.
By contrast, no analog for the "hyperloop" has ever existed outside of sci-fi novels.
Didn't the Apollo project use propulsive rocket landings to land on the moon (which was kind of necessary due to the moon's lack of a dense enough atmosphere)? IIRC, that was much earlier than the 1980s.
We have had pneumatic tubes as well since 1799 and they've been used by many companies in the past. The only thing novel about the idea was the scale and technology behind scaling it.
Those are for Elon's; Virgin also has a hyperloop which he's covered too: https://youtu.be/VrbstnzbhZA and https://youtu.be/EeWcQf9QCmg