Elon Musk invents bus stop, waits for applause, internet LOLs Elon Musk's audacious plans are usually met with acclaim, and sometimes even awe – but not this time. Fresh details of The Boring Company's urban transport plans have been lambasted on social media. The Tesla and SpaceX founder gushed about "1000s of small stations the size of a single parking space that take you very close to …
Is there anything to his 'we can tunnel cheaper and quicker' stuff? How much money would that save anyway? Suppose you could magically tunnel between stations for essentially free, but not, obviously fit out the stations, build the escalators, find room for and build the surface parts of the station etc. what percentage of the cost of an underground system would this actually save? Not much I wouldn't have thought.
If NASA had had 3GHz onboard computers for Apollo and the shuttles they'd have been able to land a rocket upright too. Fact is, it's still just cheaper to ditch them in the ocean.
Now here you are almost certainly wrong. The computers cost nothing compared to the engines.
@LeeD
I'm pretty certain that you don't need computers to land a booster upright as you can use this snazzy new tecnhology called a parachute along with some entertaining maths to figure out aerodynamic stability and how much parachute area is required to slow the booster sufficiently.
No, the main reason that the US space program dropped stuff in the ocean is that the US isn't big enough from east to west, unlike Russia which did have ground landings.
Me, "If you're unfamiliar with this point, then look it up on YouTube where it is explained."
Notes inexplicable multiple down votes. Sighs...
Drags horses to water, shoves their lengthy faces into it.
Here. This.
YouTube Title = "All Tube Stations Have Fifteen Floors"
LINK = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBTvmrRGlbE
"Inexplicable downvotes"
I watched the video, well some of the very long video you linked. Got bored after him walking up one or two hundred steps at a couple of stations. Couldn't be bothered to watch him do a third. You would have got less downvotes if you Rick Rolled us.
Drags horses to water, shoves their lengthy faces into it.
You can lead a commentard to YouTube, but you can't make him upvote, apparently.
But, hey, you got me to watch that video, just out of curiosity. And then a couple others, damn it. Now I will forever know that the least-used station in London is Angel Road.
(When I were a lad, on my first visit to London, I climbed the stairs in Covent Garden. Because they were there.)
@JeffyPoooh
Sometimes, the commentards around here puzzle me. Why did you get so many downvotes? What you claimed is the truth. A rather bizarre and unbelievable truth, but true nonetheless (for strange values of "truth").
Maybe you were downvoted for not providing a link. Here it is.
Maybe you were downvoted by those who found the video, watched it, and were annoyed because it took a hell of a long time to prove its point and did so in an interminably rambling way. In which case I'll probably get downvoted too.
Who knows? I certainly don't
People, eh? You can't live with them. You can't chop them up with a chainsaw and flush them down the toilet. Well, you can, but eventually you get caught and imprisoned.
@handleoclast
He didn't claim the truth, he claimed all tube stations are equivalent to 15 floors which is clearly not the truth and the video proves it. The *joke* is that all tube stations are 15 floors.
The video didn't need to be so long to show it, and the OP could have indicated that it was a joke rather than bluntly stating it as fact. Twice.
Also it's not "famous".
You can't chop them up with a chainsaw and flush them down the toilet.
This is a really bad idea if you're on a septic system. Even with city sewer you'll just end up contributing to some fatberg. Compost - that's the ticket. (I know pigs are the classic approach, but I already have one relative who was eaten by them, and that seems like enough.)
"If you want to be able to tunnel without care, you need to go at least 300m deep in London ? Maybe 500m ?"
It is pretty wet down there, and that would be a problem. Also, it would be a lot of stairs to climb in the event of an emergency evacuation, equivalent to a 15 floor building with 20m - 33m high ceilings [1].
[1] Note: all tube stations in London, regardless of how deep they are, are equivalent to a 15 floor building - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBTvmrRGlbE
If you want to be able to tunnel without care, you need to go at least 300m deep in London ? Maybe 500m ?
London is a tangle because almost everything goes through a layer of clay about 150m thick. Below that you won't run into anything ... but you will be tunnelling through rock, which is much more difficult. Explosives, rather than TBMs.
There was an item on local news here in the South West a few weeks ago on the plans for the A303 around Stonhenge ... the final section explained that even if the laest scheme got given immediatel go ahead it would take a couple of years for planning permissions etc before construction could start and then it would take "another 5 years to construct the tunnels planned in the scheme" ... and note that these tunnels would be in open countryside and not under cities where there are plenty of existing underground obstacles to have to avoid!
It's a load of nonsense anyway. Actually tunnelling under stuff isn't the expensive / controversial / time-consuming part.
Things like "getting a licence to tunnel underneath thousands of banks, archaeological sites, rivers, sewers, skyscrapers, etc.", not disturbing anything en-route (that you haven't just shoved a drill through, obviously), subsidence and other movement, unknown geography and geology, criss-crossing dozens of other tunnels and services, etc.
The actual BORING part is... well... relatively boring if everything else is planned out and tested beforehand. Getting people to give you a licence to tunnel underneath their city of skyscrapers and ancient ruins is actually rather more difficult. And you DON'T want people shortcutting the process just because they threw money at the problem that you don't have... the first skyscraper that tilts even an inch and causes an evacuation is going to shut your company down with lawsuits permanently (and wasn't Musk only saying the other day that both SpaceX and Tesla almost went bankrupt already?).
Musk is full of bright ideas that though they may work if humans were new and never tried anything before are ridiculous when taken at face value in the modern world. His electric cars are the same as everything else, with bog-standard batteries. His factories don't scale. His production rates are miniature and cost the earth. His rockets are no different - nothing "new", just "current tech". If NASA had had 3GHz onboard computers for Apollo and the shuttles they'd have been able to land a rocket upright too. Fact is, it's still just cheaper to ditch them in the ocean. And even then, every single time one of them fails to land, doesn't it, Elon?
Trains in a vacuum. Buses in a tunnel. Great sci-fi material. But absolutely ridiculous in a real world scenario that involves keeping thousands of miles of tunnel at vacuum pressure, or digging thousands of miles of tunnel underneath a modern city for a bus (if you were going to do that, you'd just add another subway line - hell, you could even automate it ala DLR and save yourself from driver strikes too).
Musk thinks that throwing money at his favourite episode of Star Trek is worthwhile, when almost none of his "business" ventures actually produce a viable product (if you want your own private rocket, fine, but you're supposed to be operating a company) that isn't just bouyed up by his billions and gets almost nothing back in profit.
Hey Musk, they had these things on Star Trek called communicators where you just press a button and say someone's name and you can talk to them if they have a communicator too... why don't you work on that?!
(Don't get me wrong, if you want to invest in teleportation, shields, phasers, warp cores, then go ahead, I'll follow it with interest... but a tunnel under a city isn't new).
LDS suggested, "[Shuttles SRBs] ...being solid fuel, no way to re-ignite them for landing."
Well, you'd install *extra* wee feisty little solid rockets onto the SRBs (well away from the flaming bit at the bottom) to slow them for landing. Kinda like the Soyuz capsule does for landing.
So the actual issue is control. Not simply re-ignition.
So the actual issue is control. Not simply re-ignition.
It's also the large amount of fuel you need to retain for the landing and which you therefore can't use to launch stuff into space and make money. There is a huge opportunity cost to reusing space vehicles.
Landing the first stage of a large rocket takes about 45% more capability (fuel, landing legs, etc) in the rocket than to just let the stage drop into the ocean. If you are planning reuse, you need to build a large number of the components to be useable and reliable for several flights.
Landing a rocket isn't that hard. NASA was landing rockets (Surveyor missions) on the moon in preparation for the Apollo manned landings. Since then, lots of rockets have been launched and landed upright and reused multiple times. Elon was inspired by the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge that finished up in 2009 with a start-up company, Masten Space Systems, winning the million dollar top prize. (Videos on YouTube). John Carrmack's Armadillo Aerospace was second in the money.
Since SpaceX is a private company, it's difficult to know whether it's a financial win to recover the first stage and use it again. The PR is great, but that doesn't fund the payroll account. They've had to fix up their barge a bunch of times when it went from being a landing pad to a bullseye instead.
This post has been deleted by its author
Actually tunnelling under stuff isn't the expensive / controversial / time-consuming part.
No but it's what makes it particularly infeasible in the megacities where you'd hypothetically need this stuff most.
Honestly the best answer to transport in megacities is reducing the number of journeys people have to take which is apparently what has caused TFL to "lose" 20 million journeys a year - people working from home.
"How much money would that save anyway?"
When it comes to ANY kind of public transportation, it's not about the money, it's about the SQANDERED TIME, waiting around to connect to another bus/trolley/train/whatever. If you're lucky, they show up every 30 minutes (or less, in some places). Some busses have hourly schedules. Some even WORSE.
[no wonder people don't like public transportation in way too many places, with notable exceptions ONLY in a very small number of localized areas]
Somewhat recently I pointed out that, with all of the hassles involved in flying between San Diego and Las Vegas, it would have been cheaper (overall) and taken the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME to rent a car and drive there and back, if you share the same car. And you wouldn't have to leave "at a certain time" etc. or hassle with baggage claim.
(other implications are obvious I think)
I like the self-driving car concept instead. You call up for a car, it shows up in under 5 minutes, and takes you to your destination. you subscribe to the service, theoretically being cheaper than car ownership. If properly managed, THAT would work (and it would be PRIVATELY owned, not "public" and therefore NOT subject to governmentium and politics).
In the major cities I've used public transport, the tubes, trams and fast trains have run at 5 or 10 minute intervals. The further out from the centre, the longer the wait, because you don't have multiple vehicles sharing the same track.
I used to drive to work, but have recently changed jobs. I now walk to the station (it is less than 2 miles from the house) and then walk the mile or so the other end to work. The train takes less time that going by car, but with the walk to and from the station, it obviously take longer in total, depending on traffic jams on the way into town... But it is a lot cheaper, a monthly ticket for the train costs about the same as a weeks worth of parking in town, let alone fuel costs (and insurance and depreciation, if we sell the 2nd car).
In inner cities where you have the population density, public transport can work. Outside of that, not so much. Buses either have to run often enough to be useful, in which case they will be largely empty, uneconomical and energy inefficient, or they don't run very often to try and fill them up in which case nobody who needs to be anywhere in a timely manner will want to use them.
Anecdotally enough I live at the End of the Line (heading west) for the Boston Public Transport system. Literally the last stop out of Boston by train & bus. The bus shows up here twice a day, at 5:30am and at 6:30pm, and it's a fight to keep that in service.
There just aren't enough people out here to warrant the expense. From the center of Boston the train will cost you $10 to get out to Worcester and an Uber from that point is $40. The bus from there is cheap but any crimp in your transport timing leaves you out of luck and calling Uber. Train/bus takes three times longer than by car. So much so that when I got my DUI (yes I know but one and only) I paid someone to drive me as it was faster and ultimately cheaper to hand cash to someone on disability to drive me around.
I do live in the boondocks and live here on purpose but just to support your post those are the facts.
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