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jlf1961 -> RE: Can we say DUH? (9/26/2017 8:16:43 AM)
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Awareness, for someone using the nick you are fairly unaware of the criticisms from within the scientific circles concerning some of Mr. Musk's projects.
On his proposed high speed transit system:
1: If Anything Goes Wrong, Everybody Dies
Musk’s Hyperloop project “might be better described as all the problems of space travel while traveling in a gun barrel at the speed of sound,” Dr. Phil Mason states in the video. “Any failure whatsoever will rip though that 2 centimeter outer tube like candy. Now sure, anybody in the capsule would die pretty much instantly in the event of a crash…but a single breach in the Hyperloop would probably kill everybody else in the Hyperloop because air would rush into the tube at about the speed of sound.”
2: Its Probably Physically Impossible To Build The Hyperloop
For the Hyperloop to work, it would need a way to pump out roughly 2 million cubic meters of air from its tubes and make sure that the air stays out of a 373 mile-long pipe with walls less than an inch thick. In comparison, the world’s largest vacuum chamber only pumps out about 1.5 percent as much air and requires enormous amounts of structural reinforcement.
3: Heat Would Destroy The Hyperloop’s Track
The proposed Hyperloop would be built in the heat of a California desert out of steel, which can greatly expand and change its shape as the temperature changes. Mason calculated that between the coldest and hottest days in that location, the Hyperloop would expand by about the length of three football fields, which would utterly wreck the tube.
The kind of expansion joints used to solve similar problems with bridges wouldn’t be suitable for a vacuum tube. The Hyperloop would require roughly 6,000 expansion joints that could simultaneously help maintain the tube’s vacuum. If any one of these 6,000 or so moving parts broke, the entire system would collapse as air flooded into it.
4: Hyperloop Would Be Incredibly Vulnerable To Terrorism
Merely shooting a few holes in the thin tubing surrounding the Hyperloop’s vacuum would create air pockets which would trigger the same kind of cascading failure caused by a crash.
Incredibly tiny holes created by modest rifle grade weaponry could trigger the kind of cascading failure that would kill everybody in the system. To make matters worse, the 373 mile length of the Hyperloop and the fact that it would run down the middle of the freeway would make it effectively impossible to defend from terrorists.
5: The Hyperloop Will Probably Cost WAY More Than Its Formal Estimates
Musk’s other critics have also cast doubt on the alleged speed and low cost of the Hyperloop, which are the most important elements of Musk’s plan. Michael Anderson, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California Berkeley, predicted that construction costs of the system would reach $100 billion — almost 20 times more than Musk’s cost estimates of $6 billion. The extra cost would make the economics of the Hyperloop totally nonviable.
source
As it stands now, all his hyperloop project amounts to is one lasciviously big tax deduction.
As for his mars colony plan?
His plan is basically a one way, build a colony and put people there, with zero contingency for catastrophic failures.
1) One way, meaning that IF the colony does not become self sufficient extremely fast, he is going to be sending resupply missions at a very high rate, which eventually will mean bankruptcy.
2) As Dr. Tyson pointed out a few years ago, there are some inherent problems such as, a) no air. b) no edible food, c) and contrary to the movie "the Martian" the soil on Mars is toxic, so basically, you cant grow crops in Mars dirt, c) there is no ready material for building something to live in.
Now of course, if the governments that have been actively involved in Space Exploration for the last 56 years since the first manned space flight, had done more than concentrate on low earth orbit applications after the moon, going to Mars would have probably happened by 2000.
So, what happened?
The Soviet space program did a lot with long duration manned missions with their Soyuz program, and NASA spent over a trillion on a space truck that basically got abandoned.
We built an orbital permanent manned station at high cost, with the help of the international space community, with the idea that it would allow us to learn how to build large projects in space, i.e long range manned space craft, and once finished we did what?
Well, Russia abandoned its space shuttle program, and NASA took a giant step backwards and side ways to build a reusable space craft that looks like an oversized Apollo module.
Over a trillion tax dollars spent over the life time of the space shuttle on R&D for the next generation of shuttles went down the toilet, no research into long range manned space craft was done, and when President Bush announced his incentive for going to Mars, he did so without a real challenge, or congressional support.
Of course, Hollywood sort of, in a tongue in cheek way, pointed out the obvious solution to funding manned missions to mars. In a few of the latest Mars based movies produced, there were corporate logos on the space craft, rovers, etc. Kind of like the sponsorship decals on race cars.
As a forward to a later edition of 2001 printed before his death, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that everything, with few exceptions, he envisioned in the book could have been built and operating by the early 1990's had the world's superpowers concentrated on something other than military spending or what looked good in the papers and on the news.
As far as what looked good, he was referring to the space shuttle.
While an obvious developmental step toward the space plane that Dr. Floyd took from earth to the space station, there was no incentive to go further. NASA had a truck that could haul stuff into orbit, leave it there, come back, and then be turned around for another trip,. with a turn around time measured in months.
In the sixties and seventies, NASA was working on new ideas for jet engines, with the idea of leaving the old rockets behind. The spent millions on an engine design that worked as a jet engine in low atmosphere, but, took atmospheric gases, super cooled and separated them and then, at the right altitude, used them as rocket fuel that would boost a craft into orbit, with the result being the same compounds that they started with.
You know, separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, then to make water again, you add heat and through a basic chemical reaction, you get what you started with.
There was also the "advanced rocket engine development program" during the same time, trying to come up with more efficient rocket engines, with more power, less fuel requirements to increase payloads.
When congress approved funding for the shuttle, these projects were abandoned as a stipulation by congress in order for NASA to save money.
Its kind of like what happened with the American version of the SST. The Concorde got into the air first, and Boeing and Lockheed looked at how much that plane cost to operate and decided, collectively 'NOPE!' when congress killed federal assistance in SST research.
And of course, the British and French after getting the Concorde in the air, basically sat back and said "It works, lets leave it alone."
Yep, it worked, and was so expensive to operate that the price of a ticket was 4 times that of a standard flight.
Boeing built the 747, and while they continued to make big jets, never really looked at improving their design. In fact no one did until Airbus decided to.
Funny thing, when you stop and think about it, the American drive to build bigger and better in areas outside the military, was driven more on one upping the Soviet Union than anything else.
The Soviets beat us into space, so Kennedy came up with his great challenge for the US to land men on the moon first. And the whole driving force was to beat the Soviets to the moon.
The soviet program stalled with Soyuz, with the Soviets putting more money into military applications, and their economy could only support one or the other. The US could, sort of anyway, do both. So we got the shuttle.
Then we got everyone on board with the ISS.
Then we stayed in low earth orbit for 30 years.
For the public, space got boring. The shuttle went up, orbited, deployed a satellite and came home. The shuttle went up, went to the space station, delivered cargo and crew and came home.
Space became as exciting to the public as watching grass grow, or watching hair cuts.
So, some people got together and came up with the xprize. The idea was to award the prize to the first non government entity to build a reusable space craft.
It worked, sort of.
So now we have Elon Musk who, while he may have good intentions, is not being altogether realistic. He is footing the entire bill himself, and there is no one willing to invest a lot in a Mars colony, because no one can give an ROI estimate.
So all the money he is spending on the hyperloop and his mars plan amounts to nothing more than a large business tax deduction.
Which makes smart business sense, but in reality is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, or a dog and pony show.
Which brings us back to my original point.
Everyone, government and private enterprise is spending billions on things that, when you break it down, wont fucking work. They are too small, cannot guarantee crew safety, i.e radiation exposure, and every scientific expert in the field is telling them, it wont fucking work.
What is even more insane, is that both NASA and Musk (who you would think would jump on new materials for building the damn thing) are depending on older material technology.
Jesus, Airbus proved that composites work great, IF you do a bit of research in how to use them. Some of the carbon fiber materials presently being researched at MIT and other institutions show promise as being more than enough for radiation shielding, heat shielding, and be a shit ton cheaper in the long run.
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