WHEN Elon Musk says he has an idea, it’s worth listening. And on Monday, Musk will unveil his thoughts on and plan for super fast travel, 30 minutes from Los Angeles to San Francisco, maybe 45 at some point from LA to New York.
He calls it the hyperloop and says his “alpha design” for a transport system that will move at twice the speed of airplanes is doable.
Musk wants to talk to President Obama and the governor of California about his ideas.
To those who may not have heard of Musk, this is the man who founded the company that is now sending rockets to the international space station and someone who muscled in on the car business — launching a pioneering electric vehicle. He also was involved in PayPal.
He is also said to be the inspiration for the Robert Downey Jr character in Iron Man 2, in which Musk had a small cameo.
And he plans to be sending people to Mars in 20 years.
The familiar refrain from technology and transport commentators is that it sounds crazy but this is Elon Musk and everyone with an interest is going to be listening.
The South African-born 41-year-old, whose private life has been as public as his business ventures, by stepping up with his ideas for a new super high speed transport system, might just become the catalyst for something truly historic.
Or it might be met, in some quarters, with the same deep scepticism — sometimes derision — as his commitment, possibly obsession, to colonising Mars. He even has a price in mind for the trip, $500,000 (€375,000).
But in the meantime he’s being thinking about getting people the 382 miles from LA to San Francisco a lot faster than a planned bullet train — and built for a lot cheaper.
He became interested in the idea when he began researching the $70bn bullet train, which will take three hours and will be slowest of its kind on the planet.
Musk has given a broad ideas of what his planned 600-800mph Hyperloop will do but few details on how it will work.
“This system I have in mind… how would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, it goes three or four times faster than the bullet train, it goes about an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do.
“You would go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. And it would cost you much less than an air ticket or car, much less than any other mode of transport, because the fundamental energy cost is so much lower.
“And I think we could actually make it self-powering if you put solar panels on it, […] you generate more power than you would consume in the system. There’s a way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries. […] Yes, [this is possible] absolutely.”
He has put a build figure of $6bn on the project.
Musk’s pronouncements over the last year have sent technology and other reporters scurrying to find out what he could possibly be talking about.
Some managed to unearth the work of a physicist RM Salter, who wrote a paper in 1972 that detailed a tube system that could send people from LA to New York City in 21 minutes.
He called it the Very High Speed Transit System, or VHST, a tube where the vehicles are propelled along by electromagnetic waves.
“The technical problems associated with the VHST development are manifold and difficult — but no scientific breakthroughs are required,” Salter concluded.
His family and close colleagues believe Elon Musk is a genius, and have said so, but he may in this case simply have stumbled on technology that is out there but, for whatever reason, has never been fully exploited.
Which is really what he did with the electric car and rocket science.
Musk is, according to Forbes, worth $2.7bn. He lives in a $17m 20,000sq foot French Chateau-style mansion in Bel Air, Los Angeles.
He is divorced from his first wife, Justine, but they share custody of their five children, all boys, twins and triplets. The divorce was not amicable and it was not private.
The entrepreneur would rather have a fork in his head than discuss his private life in public, he wrote in an online posting.
Musk married a young British actress, Talulah Riley, but reportedly they divorced last summer after he announced it earlier on Twitter. But it appears they are back together again.
This from recent posts on Twitter. “Oh I laughed,” wrote Riley in a recent affectionate tweet in response to an email from Musk as he detailed how regulators overseeing his rocket launches forced him to strap a seal to a board, with earphones, and play sonic boom sounds.
Would the seal become so distressed that it could not mate?
“How are we supposed to tell if it does not want to mate?” wrote Musk. “Dress up as a seal and put on some Barry White?”
The troubles of being a rocket man.
Elon Musk may have been born in South Africa but he’s very much an American, becoming a citizen some 13 years ago. “It’s where great things happen,” he says of his adopted homeland.
One of three children to a South African father and Canadian mother, he left his native country at 18 to study at Queen’s University in Ontario.
After graduation, he headed for the US and the prestigious Wharton School of business in Pennsylvania. He had already met Justine in Ontario, where she was also a student, later a novelist.
Then it was on to Silicon Valley in California where he eventually founded Zip2, a company providing services to newspapers setting up online presences.
After selling Zip2, Musk put $10m of the proceeds into x.com, an online banking business but one where a customer could securely transfer via email.
That company merged with another to become PayPal, no longer in banking but on the way to becoming the powerhouse payment processing firm of today.
Musk’s take from the 2002 sale of PayPal to eBay was $165m. Now was the time to invest in his great passion, space and Mars.
There is the story Musk tells of how he got involved in the rocket business. Esquire magazine, in an excellent 2012 profile, fleshed out the details.
Musk along with a number of close collaborators, including Adeo Ressi, had been involved in a project imagining life on Mars and had set up an organisation called Life to Mars.
Musk had the idea of establishing a greenhouse on Mars — still does — but wanted to influence public opinion a rocket to the planet.
So he headed to Russia to see if he could pick up some spare Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.
There was a number of trips, including the first where most of those involved in the negotiations, on both sides, became hopelessly drunk.
On the second one of the Russians starting spitting at the US contingent. But a deal was done for three, priced it was thought at $7m each.
On the third and final trip Musk brought the money. But the Russians told him it was $21m each, not for all three.
Aerospace consultant Jim Cantrell, involved in the venture, was on the trip.
He told Esquire: “I said, ‘Well, that’s that.’ I was sitting behind him on the flight back to London when he looked at me over the seat and said, ‘I think we can build a rocket ourselves’.”
When they returned to the US, Musk spoke to his collaborator, Adeo Ressi about turning the company Life to Mars into a company that builds rockets.
“I was like, ‘Whoa dude, let’s use the Socratic method. I got screwed by the Russian doesn’t equal create launch company. We wound up literally having an Alcoholics Anonymous-style intervention where I flew in people to Los Angeles.”
They were not supposed to be getting into the rocket launching business.
That company is now SpaceX, which has a $1.5bn contract with NASA to, among other jobs, sent goods and services, later astronauts, to the international space station.
But it was not always easy and Musk, who ploughed much of his fortune into the company, was almost ruined financially.
There was that time, for example, of the launch of one rocket, with hundreds of millions on the line and NASA and the Department of Defense looking on intently.
It fell into the sea, along with the ashes of James Doohan, Scotty in Star Trek. It was later recovered and successfully fired into outer space, along with the ashes.
Then came Tesla, the all electric car company he founded in 2004 largely in response to the sluggish movement of the behemoths in the industry into the field.
Setting up a car company and selling only electric was again met with disbelief and some derision. It didn’t look good for a long time. In 2008, it was leaked that Tesla had just $9m in its bank account, hardly enough to deliver on the thousands of advance orders.
Musk went public to personally guarantee that every person who booked a Tesla would get their money back if it was not delivered.
It is around this time that the private and professional lives of Elon Musk start to collide – and in a pretty spectacular way.
Elon and Justine Musk met as students. She initially brushed him off but he was persistent.
“He’s never been a man who takes no for an answer. He is a guy who seals the deal in business and in private,” says Justine.
After some back and forth between Canada and the US, they married in 2000. As Justine describes in a fairly devastating article published as they were hammering out a divorce settlement in 2010, at the wedding reception as they danced, “Elon told me ‘I am the alpha in this relationship.’”
Their first child died of sudden death infant syndrome, aged just 10 weeks old. They were determined to have more kids and they did, five of them, twins and triplets.
The couple moved to Bel Air “breathing rarified air.”
She wrote: “The first crowded apartment we’d shared in Mountain View seemed like ancient history from our 6,000sq foot house in the Bel Air hills. Married for seven years, we had a domestic staff of five; during the day our home transformed into a workplace.
“We went to black-tie fundraisers and got the best tables at elite Hollywood nightclubs, with Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio partying next to us.
“When Google co-founder Larry Page got married on Richard Branson’s private Caribbean island, we were there, hanging out in a villa with John Cusack and watching Bono pose with swarms of adoring women outside the reception tent.
“When we travelled, we drove onto the airfield up to Elon’s private jet, where a private flight attendant handed us champagne.”
But Justine says she was not happy. She asked him to go to counselling and he did, three times. “One month and three sessions later, he gave me an ultimatum: Either we fix this marriage today or I will divorce you tomorrow, by which I understood he meant, ‘Our status quo works for me, so it should work for you’. He filed for divorce the next morning. I felt numb, but strangely relieved. ”
She added: “Six weeks later, he texted me to say he was engaged to a gorgeous British actress in her early 20s who had moved to Los Angeles to be with him. Her name is Talulah Riley, and she played one of the sisters in 2005’s Pride and Prejudice. Two of the things that struck me were: a) Pride and Prejudice is a really good movie, and b) My life with this man had devolved to a cliche.”
Justine Musk’s article followed a blog she was writing in which she mentioned the divorce several times, about flashes of hostility from strangers who asked her whether she thought she deserved half, called a gold digger and a “greedy whore.”
Under California law, when a couple divorces it’s half and half. Unless there is a pre or post-nuptial agreement. In this case there was a post-nup.
And that meant the courts and a very public airing of their grievances.
While Justine Musk wanted more than was being offered, Elon Musk pleaded near poverty, claiming he had put all his money into Tesla and his other companies, including a solar energy firm.
In publicly filed court filings, he described how he had been living for months on the generosity of friends, very generous as his outgoings were $200,000 a month.
The case was settled. Justine got the $4.2m, $50,000 in child support and a lump sum of over a million.
Elon Musk’s only public statement was an online letter: “Given the choice, I’d rather stick a fork in my head than write about my personal life. But let me be absolutely clear. I filed for divorce from Justine (for reasons I should not have to justify or make public) before I met Talulah Riley.
“The fact of the matter is that Talulah and I lived on opposite sides of the world and hadn’t even known of each other’s existence before the marriage with Justine ended.”
It was a tale that kept Los Angeles’ gossips enthralled for months if not years. But Elon Musk, at the time in his multi-million Bel Air home, rented at first but which he bought earlier this year, also had his mind on other matters, not least his businesses.
And he was obviously mulling over a transport revolution and asking whether America getting into the bullet train business was just not far sighted enough.
What he has certainly done with his teasing remarks ahead of the big announcement on Monday has got a lot of people talking.
And digging. And finding out the technology and science to do this has been around for a long, long time. The Rand Corporation, a think tank beloved by all American governments, released the Salter paper. It’s been out there but to many to know that this is not science fiction is a revelation.
Many suspect Musk will draw heavily on Salter’s thinking — and others. “The general principles are fairly straightforward: electromagnetically levitated and propelled cars in an evacuated tunnel,” wrote Salter.
“The VHST’s ‘tubecraft’ ride on, and are driven by, electromagnetic waves much as a surfboard rides the ocean’s wave. The EM waves are generated by pulsed, or by oscillating, currents in electrical conductors that form the roadbed structure in the evacuated tube way.
“Opposing magnetic fields in the vehicle are generated means of a loop superconducting cable carrying on the order of a million amperes of current.”
The VHST would accelerate to its maximum speed, then coast for a short while, then decelerate, says Salter. It would use all its kinetic energy to accelerate, and that power would be returned when it decelerates through energy regeneration.
Musk says his plan will involve driving the vehicle with solar power — and at the end of the trip will have generated more than consumed.
SCIENCE FACT OR FICTION?
Elon Musk’s dream of a train that could travel across America in less than an hour seems futuristic at best.
The real question is could it actually work? To travel from Los Angeles to New York in 45 minutes, the train would have to reach speeds of over 600mph. The Japanese bullet train’s top speed is 361mph. In addition, it would have to move without friction between the two cities to avoid noise pollution.
Since Musk’s announcement of the hyperloop train scientists globally have been wondering how such a feat could be achieved.
Jim Powell, co-inventor of the bullet train says: “Air drag becomes too much of a problem after 300mph, just from a power point of view. And then that air drag starts to generate noise. You wouldn’t want an airplane flying past your house at 600mph.”
The main issue for Musk to deal with is this friction problem. Enclosing the train in a tube could allow it to travel at high speeds with as little friction as possible.
Scientists around the world have been speculating about the best design for the project.
Musk has described self-described tinkerer John Gardi’s design as “the best guess so far”.
Gardi envisions sending air-propelled cars through the hyperloop and leaving extra space on either end for departures and arrivals. Although Gardi’s design has been mentioned as the closest to the finished product, it still doesn’t match the frictionless transport Musk describes.
This problem could be solved by sucking all the air out of the tube and leaving the train to travel at high speeds through the vacuum created.
George Maise of Maglev 2000 [developers of the magnetic levitation mode of high-speed transport] says: “If you have a vacuum in a tube, then you have zero drag.” While this would be an adequate solution Musk insists the hyperloop isn’t a vacuum.
How would a high-speed train, travelling at the speed of sound, travel across a continent without a vacuum?
One of the more popular theories suggests that Musk could use levitation to reduce the level of friction completely.
Although it sounds like science fiction, it is possible. Acoustic levitation could be the solution. It involves generating soundwaves which would cause the trains to float above the ground on top of a peaked soundwave. As the sound gets stronger there would be no friction so no energy would be lost to the environment.
With the addition of Musk’s proposed solar panels to power the trains the entire system would be self-sufficient. Instead of batteries the power would be held in the acoustic waves themselves.
The final issue to be addressed is the proposed location of the hyperloop. To successfully maintain high speed the train would need to travel in a straight line. This is problematic since there are cities and other populated areas between the destinations.
The only options that seem to be available to Musk are to raise it above ground on overhead tracks or to put it underground. The most logical solution is to create an underground hyperloop as that wouldn’t disrupt the people who live along the route. The scientific world’s faith in Musk has been summed up appropriately by George Maise: “If somebody other than Musk had proposed this, I would say it’s very suspect.”
Irish Examiner
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