New York to Beijing in two hours without leaving the ground?
March 26, 2012 | Source: Gizmag
An ETT (Evacuated Tube Transport) line in which car-sized passenger/cargo capsules would travel (credit: ET3)
The Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) system (U.S. Patent 5950543, assigned to ET3.com, Inc.) would take passengers from New York to Beijing in just two hours. Advocates of Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) claim it is silent, cheaper than planes, trains, or cars and faster than jets.
How it would work: put a superconducting maglev train in evacuated tubes, then accelerate using linear electric motors until the design velocity is attained. Passive superconductors allow the capsules to float in the tube, while eddy currents induced in conducting materials drive the capsules. Efficiency of such a system would be high, as the electric energy required to accelerate a capsule could largely be recaptured as it slows.
(Credit: ET3)
The maglev tubes are permanently maintained at near vacuum conditions, and the capsules are inserted into and removed from the tubes through airlocks at stations along the route. After the capsules are accelerated to the design velocity (some 4,000 mph or 6,500 km/h), they coast for the remainder of the trip.
While tubes could be networked like freeways, with capsules automatically routed along their trip, local and long-distance trips would require separate maglev tubes to avoid unreasonable scheduling delays.
Members of the ET3 consortium have worked with parties in China, where they say more than a dozen licenses for the company have been sold.
Comments (41)
by Maxwell Tsurumoto
To make this happen https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/#!/petition/implement-and-fund-national-et3-transportation-system/cHXPcrnV
by Tommy
I think this is an amazing way to travel and yes im sure the scientist that have thought this thing up have also thought about all the precautions safety issues and dangers traveling at 4,000 mp/h but i think its way more economic friendly than wasting all that fuel on planes trains cars and any other motor vehicle
by krakh
lol, This has already been created… in Futurama :D
by horizon
The biggest obstacles to a system like this are economic and political. It would be hugely expensive to build a straight tube thousands of miles long and there would be little point in using it over any shorter distance. Just think of all the land that would have to brought (or confiscated by the state), and all the international negotiations over the route. It would also need a wide security zone around it – one bomb on the tube and suddenly it’s a hypersonic shotgun. Putting it underground or underwater would reduce the risk of attack but would increase the cost by orders of magnitude. It’s clever, but it’s not remotely practical.
by bob howell
Brunel did it first
by Steve
One 5 second power grid glitch/failure would ruin your day in a big hurry :-)
by karem
described in Ralph 124c41+ by hugo gernsback in 1911.
by ryan
Thanks you so much for this comment. As someone who prides himself on such knowledge I was shocked that I hadn’t heard of this book before.
by RUBEN MORAN LLANEZA
Well:
And what about people who are claustro-phobic?
by duh
they wont use it.
by batsilver0012
They don’t ride them…or they take a xanax prior to riding them?
by athox
what about people who are afraid of flying? why can’t they fly? they just can’t. it’s called evolution.
by Spikosauropod
Shuttles going 4000 mph in a narrow tube? One earthquake and everyone dies. Then comes the repair bill!
by miocene
you could say exactly the same thing about a high-speed train. How about they make it earthquake resistant – all new structures in vulnerable areas are built to these standards
by Spikosauropod
Good point. Actually, I don’t know why I even raised that issue. Traffic deaths in the U.S. are typically over 30,000 per year. A vacuum tube train would have a hard time keeping up.
At least tube death would be quick. If the train hit the side of the tube at 4000 mph there may not even be DNA to recover.
by IT
Good point. The part that scares me most about flying is not the miniscule chance of death, but the miniscule chance of having a mechanical failure and plunging toward the ground for a nice long 60 or more seconds.
by karl heuer
Why would it hit the sides? the tube/internal rails could be engineered to repel magnetically — even under loss of external power.
A loss of vacuum would just slow the passenger cars– the aerodynamic shape of the cars would determine deceleration magnitudes.
by Spikosauropod
If the ground shifted so that the tube was offset by 10 cm over a distance of 100 m, and assuming that the bend was circular, the train would have a centripetal acceleration of about 4 gravities.
by Editor
So they can promote it as a roller coaster too! Yippee!
by Spikosauropod
Quite true.
However, my point is that the magnets on the sides of the tube would be supporting four times the weight of the train. They would have to be very powerful to prevent the train from hitting the sides.
by I. C. Weiner
Forget superconducting magnets, let’s just do it Futurama style. :D
by Robyn
Ah excellent, someone finally redescovered the subshuttle from Genesis II and Planet Earth. Now, I would like a one way ticket to the Confederacy of Ruth and my own private harem of dinks and I am set for life.
by karl heuer
I read this in a book titled Macroengineering circa 1986, it may be one of these:
http://www.abebooks.com/Macro-Engineering-Frank-P-Davidson/6173519930/bd
by Bennie Beaver
I’ve had an idea much like this on the Internet and in blogs on my personal web site for years….only my ideas was to use EMS (electromagnetic suspension) ecacuated tube running east/west built just beside our Interstate Highways first especially for large trucks, then later cars, etc. Trucks do the greatest damage to highways and only average about 35 mile/per/hour considering stop to rest, eat, road repairs, accidents… Trailers could be redesigned to speed across country to exit at small town along the Interstate to be shuttled north and south to other east/west EMSs.
This would remove large trucks from highways, get truckers home more often while creating many shuttle jobs and small town along Interstates, etc……..
by TheSheriff
Wonder if they got this idea from the nights dawn sci fi trilogy?
by Aezel
Hmm. So first of all, the tubes have to stay in vacuum to work. Good luck with that over thousands of miles. Not saying it can’t be done but it is a major engineering feat.
Also, you’re in vacuum, so if a pod crashes, or looses it’s seal everyone inside pops like a grape as if you had walked out an airlock on the ISS.
We can’t even find the budget in America to build normal mag-lev. How is this souped up, MORE maintenance intensive version suddenly cost effective?
by Marcos Marin
hahaha yes, this thing would need such airlocks every few miles and an amazing traffic control software to slow down all other pods heading to the site BEFORE locking them up. All along loosing the vacuum, as someone mentioned below, which would have to be replenished (kinda ironic word for getting rid of stuff =) but you get the idea) before those pods could move again.. near pods though would inevitably crash at those speeds, which imply huge safe distances between them and consequently much much fewer throughput of passengers which in turn means huge costs for each =)
One solution would be redundant routes, but this means you would need AT LEAST double the initial investment (if you want closer to 100% safety of course, which no transportation company today would dream of having, as long as most passengers dont realize this, which would happen as soon as the first “grape pops” LOL)…
OH, and did I mention re-routing software might not be feasible in polynomial time complexity? =) though maybe distributing computation among the pods might work around this and accomplish a solution similar to internet routers (it works, but it is not optimal)…
so.. yeah… hope they make it =) “pop like a grape” was really funny…
(transporting goods is looking good though, or less grim at least =))
by Brett
You might have bruising and ear and eye problems, but exposure to a vacuum will not “pop” you.
by Chrispium
I think they intend to accelerate to about the halfway point, then turn the seats 180 degrees and decelerate to the destination.
by karl heuer
Edit:
At the same time, you have traversed 1/2 the distance going .5G. To reach the same speed, you have to traverse double the distance.
So at a reasonable .5 G acceleration you actually traverse 626km to get to 2500 m/s — or 1350km just to speed up and slow down.
by Chrispium
The problem with this idea is that it’s eminently targetable by any terrorist. Just strap on a bomb on the outside of the tunnel anywhere along the line and watch as the vacuum helps destroy the tunnel. If it’s guarded and watched you can use a cannon/shell from a distance.
If you blow up a plane, you destroy just 1 plane. If you hit the tunnel… With the vacuum gone the whole transportation system has to reduce speed to a crawl until vacuum can be restored. That could take weeks, weeks wherein the investors get no ROI. Passengers will get very spooked too and seek alternative forms of transport… Like telepresence!
Also the energy to keep the system superconducting cannot be retrieved, so you’d better hope for super cheap energy in the future.
All in all a deader than dead dud of an idea. Like flying cars and delivering mail with rockets (US postmaster circa 1950)
:)
by Really?
Yes, lets not advance at all and stay stagnant just because some terrorist “might” want to use it to kill us one day. If everyone thought like that we would not have cars, planes, pipes, baseball bats, etc and so on…..
by karl heuer
Because of the distance traversed when accelerating to speed. As an example, lets use 10 m/s per sec (1G) as the forward acceleration. That is the same acceleration as a car going zero to 67 mph in 3 seconds – and continuing until speed is reached.
To get to 2500 meters/sec ( 5600 mph) it takes 250 seconds of contant acceleration at 1G — but you have already traversed 313km, making any trip under 625km unreasonable at that speed.
(You still traverse the same distance to get to speed regardless of fraction/multiple of G as long as it is constant – at 1/2 G it would take 500 seconds but you would still have traversed 313km.)
It also takes much less energy to accelerate (and decelerate) to 370mph vs 3700mph.
Perhaps they meant trips under 500 miles distance.
by trakk
More suitable for transporting goods over long ”over land routes” not over oceans.
by karl heuer
You wouldn’t transport over water, suspend the tubes about 100-200 meters underwater, insulating them form storms and surface traffic. Perfect for transport of goods.
by Percival
The construction of such a long and rigid tube underwater sounds like a huge pain in the backside. Do we have technologies to keep un-guyed tubes from moving about? I assumed that with such a technology, precision would be crucial.
by karl heuer
Why rigid? Neutrally buoyant at specific depth, and watertight would be sufficient.
by Andrew
To karl: the earlier posting pointed out that a 10 cm deviation in 100m would give a 4g sideways acceleration: this would be uncomfortable even on a roller coaster. To be competitive with other transport (no sideways lurching of more than say 0.2 g) you would need deviations below 0.5cm per hundred m. That’s easy enough on land, but in a free-floating tube?
by Matt
I think this is another mode of mass transit who’s time has come and is well overdue. I’m personally sick and tired of the TSA and the FAA red tape when I want to fly from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’.
This is truly a revolutionary way to travel and not have to worry about flight delays because of weather conditions etc..
I’ll be the first in line to buy a ticket when I fly from Fla. to Me.as I do on a regular a bases.
by canoga77
“ET3.com, Inc. believes that a reasonable speed for shorter trips is 370 mph (600 km/h).”
This doesn’t make much sense. Why should it go so much slower just because someone is traveling from New York to L.A,, especially if that person wants to get there in the quickest time possible? Might as well take a plane.
by Editor
Not explained; I just deleted that line from the news item.