It’s time to be honest about Musk’s vacuum tube to nowhere

  • prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If any part of the hundreds of miles of tube suddenly stops being a vacuum chamber, every train all along the tube is going to be hit by air rushing in, at the speed of sound, with all the turbulence that implies, while its already moving at full speed. It might be possible to engineer a capsule that will keep the people inside alive when that happens, but it is not at all the same as e.g. rail, where “stop moving fowards” depletes essentially all the energy in the system.