Elon Musk takes what he calls a “first principles” approach to everything he does. He boils arguments down to their fundamental principles and reasons things out from there as opposed to reasoning based on analogy. This, along with his degrees in economics and physics, helps him carve out possibilities that the rest of us are dismissive about.
The Hyperloop is a $6 billion project that would make a 35-minute transit time between San Francisco and Los Angeles possible. If Elon Musk has his way, there will be one large tube that will carry 40 capsules running at speeds of about 700 mph. This tube would be raised above ground to cause minimal disruption to farms, highways and other land structures. To amortize the costs over a two-year period, according to Musk’s calculations, the Hyperloop’s operators could charge $20 for a one-way trip from either end.
As the world speculates about the Hyperloop plan that Musk unveiled Aug. 12, I yearn to understand this man and his endeavors better.
Robert Downey Jr., who plays billionaire and genius Tony Stark in Iron Man, studied Musk in preparation for his role. By that time, Musk had already founded at the least three companies. In 1998 he helped set up PayPal, which gives Internet merchants of all sizes a secure payment gateways. In 2002 we saw him create SpaceX, a company that makes reusable rockets that can carry payloads into space. And in 2003, Musk founded Tesla Motors, which produces cars that run entirely on electricity.
His Aug. 12 blog on the Tesla Motors website is a 56-page document that reveals the details of Hyperloop and gives key insights into the way he functions. The first section gives his thoughts and rationale behind proposing the Hyperloop as a personal answer to California’s “disappoint[ing]” multi-trillion dollar high-speed rail line, which, he says, is “one of the most expensive [bullet trains] per mile and one of the slowest in the world.” The second section goes into technical details of the project and justifies the Hyperloop as a new way of transport.
The Hyperloop’s capsules would leave the terminals at an average of two-minute intervals, and carry 28 people each. The above-ground tube would provide partial vacuum conditions—the capsule would have air compressors running on a battery that would sift the air from in front of the capsule to the back, allowing the capsule to move at the higher end of the subsonic speed range. There would be solar panels on top of the tube that would store enough energy to power the capsules at night, as well as during extended periods of cloudy weather.
What caught my eye was Musk’s graceful breakdown of what a high-speed transit system covering a moderate distance like that between San Francisco and Los Angeles should look like. He discards plane travel, as the takeoff and landing times are greater than the total time spent at cruise speed. Trains, he said are also not viable because of fuel costs and the fundamental friction that exists so close to the ground that air travel avoids. As a middle option, he proposes going closer to vacuum and constructing it artificially in the form of a tube.
Sometimes I wonder how men who push scientific thought arise periodically throughout history. I am thinking of Galileo, Da Vinci, Tesla, Turing and now Musk. It is curious and it is fascinating.
