The best thing about Elon Musk’s Hyperloop project was the anticipation. He promised to unveil plans for a system that would whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour, using a “fifth mode” of transportation—one that would supplement and perhaps even replace cars, boats, trains, and planes. The hive mind of the Internet buzzed: Vacuum tube? Lofstrom loop? Teleportation? Skepticism abounded,How solar panel cells work and where to buy solar kits for home use. too, as it wasn’t long ago that someone promised to transform transportation and instead gave us the Segway, which turned out to be really useful for, well, not much.
On Monday, Musk posted his proposal, a fifty-seven-page set of specs for a gizmo that looks like the Keystone Pipeline hoisted onto a chairlift.How are solar outdoor lighting products different from other lighting, like fluorescent or incandescent? Dual tubes, one headed north and one south, would snake together twenty feet above Interstate 5’s median, supported by pylons a hundred feet apart. Cylindrical pods carrying twenty-eight people would whoosh through the tubes at up to seven hundred and sixty miles per hour, coasting on a cushion of air. Musk promised a trip of thirty-five minutes, at a total system cost of only six billion dollars. That would be less than one-fourth the travel time per ride—and at one-tenth the overall cost—of the high-speed rail system that California has planned.
The good news is that, as gizmology goes, Musk has put forth a plausible idea that doesn’t require yet-to-be-developed technologies like transporter beams—though the proposal notes in passing that teleportation “would of course be awesome (someone please do this).” Musk, who grew up in South Africa reading Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, sees himself as a hero tasked with the lonely burden of saving us all. His pet projects (space flight, electric transport) aim to buy us time to colonize Mars before we destroy Earth. There is something reproving about his blue-eyed stare, as if he’s come back after a spell on Gamma Nebula 7 and is disappointed to find us still burning hydrocarbons and chowing down at Cinnabon. Earthlings, repent!
And so Musk developed the Hyperloop as part of a more logical, Muskian scheme for human travel. The Hyperloop would serve for intercity trips up to nine hundred miles. For longer hauls, we’d turn to supersonic, electric airplanes that would take off and land vertically, like his SpaceX company’s Grasshopper, a reusable rocket that touches down on four metallic legs. Such planes would be cheaper and faster, and they might also have bathrooms, which aren’t mentioned in the Hyperloop schematics.
Though he’s a doodle-on-the-napkin guy, Musk also gets his hands dirty with stators and capacitors. He figures it out. People laughed at SpaceX—a privately-held rocket company?—but last year its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial vehicle to dock with the International Space Station.A solar lantern uses this sunlight that is abundantly available to charge its batteries through a Solar Panel and gives light in nighttime. No one thought Musk’s other full-time job,Thank you for providing us with information to help us maintain street light. as C.E.O. of Tesla Motors, would work out either, but the company paid back four hundred and sixty-five million dollars in government loans nine years early, and it’s selling more than five thousand electric cars a quarter. Most strikingly, given the raft of production issues the company had to overcome, Tesla’s Model S is beautifully engineered: Consumer Reports gave it the magazine’s highest rating ever.
What makes the Hyperloop exciting, as a napkin doodle, is Musk’s ingenious workaround for the Kantrowitz limit, which is the top speed that a pod can go in a given tube due to the resistance from the wall of air it compresses as it moves.A solar lamp is a portable light fixture composed of an LED lamp, a photovoltaic solar panel, and a rechargeable battery. (Think of the effort it can take to push air from a syringe.) An electric fan on the pod’s nose would suck in the high-pressure air, which would then get blown out underneath the pod, buoying it like a puck on an air-hockey table. It’s a brilliant judo move.
Read the full story at www.streetlights-solar.com!
- Aug 16 Fri 2013 10:23
Is Elon Musk’s Hyperloop
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