Is Elon Musk an earthling?

[kandrathe]

We'll probably learn some interesting things from trying this, and so it's probably worthwhile to explore.

Yes. I agree completely. Were it my millions, I'd want to start with scaled research in traversing a vast stretch of flat California desert getting up to the speeds of near 700 mph, and decelerating safely. Then do that many, many thousand of times -- learning about the vehicles / tubes properties and engineering. I'd see thousands of design and material tweaks needed before say we jump in and fund a real world implementation.

If this thing fails going 700mph, penetrating the tube wall, we'd be hard pressed to find any remains of the occupants. It must be pretty fail safe. That is, if power fails, it needs to glide to a safe full stop landing -- and not have the car behind careen into it at 700 mph either. Which then begs the question of what happens if it does stop in the middle, being possibly hundreds of miles from anywhere. So thinking through those worst case "never going to happen" scenarios would be a very important test (and design) consideration.

But, if it is theoretically, a safer, faster, more efficient means of transport, then I'd say we should get into it. I was thinking about how handy it would be to create a series of short hop segments, like for here it would be Minneapolis to Chicago, with a possible intermediate stop in Madison, Wisconsin. Within the US, I'm sure the entire east coast would benefit. When I was consulting, I'd do many trips for just the day, and if you could reduce the unproductive travel time it's well worth it. In any business really, it's all about productivity, so the more hours of productive time you can squeeze into the work week, the better.