A company heavily invested in billionaire Elon Musk’s “Hyperloop” idea will require $250 million more than expected, according to new documents obtained by Forbes.
Hyperloop One, a Los Angeles Company which took Musk’s open-sourced idea for the Hyperloop and invested in it, has currently raised a total of $160 million for the project, Forbes reports. While the project is still on track to launch by 2020, it will be much more expensive than Musk originally predicted.
Heavily selling the notion that he could build a Hyperloop across California for a total cost of $6 billion, Musk made claims he could not support with known resources. Hyperloop One’s system would cost between $9 billion and $13 billion to build a much smaller system in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company is plagued by serious legal and corporate problems. Musk originally speculated that Hyperloop technology would cost a mere $11.5 million per mile, while actually building the system would in reality cost $84 million and $121 million per mile respectively.
Experts are very skeptical of the allegedly low cost of the Hyperloop, which is the most important element 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.
Dr. Phil Mason, a chemist from Cornell University who makes science videos on YouTube, jokes that estimates offered by Musk and others behind the Hyperloop concept “seem to have forgotten a zero off the end of their budget.”
Mason demonstrated on YouTube how Musk’s Hyperloop would kill its passengers if even the tiniest problem occurred. Any individual Hyperloop capsule crashing would cause a cascading failure that would prompt a pressure wave to shoot down the tube at the speed of sound, destroying all the other capsules in the tube. The pressure wave caused by a Hyperloop crash would probably be larger than the over-pressure associated with a nuclear weapon, which can kill people and would certainly wreck the rest of the tube.
Additionally, any rupture or crack in the Hyperloop capsule for any reason would expose the passengers to hard vacuum, causing them to die in exactly the same way they would in deep space. Triggering such a rupture would be very easy, as merely shooting a few holes in the thin tubing surrounding the Hyperloop’s vacuum would create air pockets which would trigger a cascading failure. 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.
Mason previously conducted a test simulating a small crack in the tube that would let air in. The resulting pressure change wrecked the tube and accelerated the mini-Hyperloop to levels that would kill passengers.
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