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German research group completes Europe's first Hyperloop test track

2023-08-04T17:57:00-04:00

Europe’s first certified full-scale Hyperloop test track is now ready for test operations, marking a significant milestone in sustainable and ultra-fast transportation. The 24-metre-long track was developed by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) Hyperloop research group. The first successful test run with a passenger pod in vacuum conditions took place on the 10th of July 2023.

The research and development program TUM Hyperloop at the Technical University of Munich reached a milestone when it successfully conducted the first passenger ride under vacuum conditions on July 10, 2023. As reported by Innovation Origins, the group will now focus on refining their track’s drive system, levitation technology, and behavior when in vacuum conditions.

Image © Andreas Heddergott/TUM

TUM Hyperloop was founded to compete in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, an annual competition from 2015–2019 that called for hyperloop transport vehicle designs and prototypes.

Image © Andreas Heddergott/TUM

TUM’s recent triumph comes following another achievement it has made in hyperloop design, in which a student team won the “Not-A-Boring Competition” with a tunnel boring machine that employs an innovative horizontal digging technique.

Video courtesy TUM Hyperloop/YouTube

Elon Musk is planning a utopian Hoovertown outside of Austin

2023-03-10T11:36:00-05:00

In meetings with landowners and real-estate agents, Musk has reportedly described his idea for the estate — which he envisions building on thousands of acres of property he purchased on the Colorado River — as a utopia, so that his employees can live, work, and play without ever leaving.

The community, named “Snailbrook” after the Boring Company mascot, would be the first new town in Texas since Ellinger was incorporated in 2020. Pre-fab homes are the most likely housing option, with rents as low as $800 and a Montessori school campus to serve employees' children, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Musk, who owns some 3,500 acres in Bastrop County, reportedly gave disgraced antisemite Kanye West and his new architect beau a tour of the site last year as part of a ramp-up that included internal employee discussions as to who among them should be elected mayor. The entrepreneur had previously mentioned his desire to build a “starbase city” in the area.

If it ever gets up and running, it would join the new BIG-planned Telosa in an alarming trend of new billionaire-funded Utopian cities in the American west.

This is just the beginning. America's new oligarchs are focussing on "cities." And are actively seeking to create alternatives to cities which they provide ser...

Elon Musk floats idea of new 'Starbase' city in Texas

2021-03-05T15:37:00-05:00

Musk [...] said on Tuesday he’s aiming to create a city called “Starbase” in Texas, teasing a new idea on Twitter as his space company expands its footprint elsewhere in the state. That footprint, first planted in the Lone Star state over a decade ago, is growing rapidly under Musk’s dogged effort to build a “gateway to Mars.”

Nearly a decade after launching the world's first commercial launchpad in Boca Chica near Brownsville, South Texas, SpaceX/Tesla/Hyperloop/Boring Company entrepreneur Elon Musk has shared a grand, and fashionably vague, announcement of a new urban stepping stone for his ambitious Mars colonization endeavor.

From thence to Mars,
And hence the Stars.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2021

"Moving to Mars" at UK Design Museum highlights multi-sensory space design

2019-10-17T17:00:00-04:00

The exhibition features immersive environments, about 200 objects including contributions from NASA, the European Space Agency and SpaceX; NASA's 3D-Printed Mars Habitat Challenge winners, AI SpaceFactory; robotic builders by Foster & Partners; the first sustainable urban design for Mars, Mars City Design; the first spacesuit designed for the Mars surface; Christopher Raeburn's new fashion collection inspired by the red planet and much more.

The exhibition opens October 18th and will run until February 2020.

3D-printed Mars Habitat by Foster + Partners

Christopher Raeburn spring-summer '20 campaign. Image courtesy of Christopher Raeburn

Tech companies are taking over L.A.

2019-07-19T16:16:00-04:00

The Los Angeles office market has been on the upswing since 2013 and showed no sign of stalling in the second quarter as tech and entertainment firms continue to expand into new space. Developers are responding to the demand by building new offices that are often rented long before they are completed, which was unusual during previous real estate cycles when tenants typically waited to see finished buildings before making commitments.

The tech industry's expansion into the Los Angeles office market continues unabated, The Los Angeles Times reports.

In recent months, Los Angeles has grown to become home to the third-largest tech workforce on the west coast, with San Francisco and Seattle still far in the lead. The expansion, according to The Los Angeles Times, is putting pressure on the city's office market, even as a collection of new office developments and expansions come online.

In 2011, for example, Google moved into the Frank Gehry-designed Binoculars Building in L.A.'s Venice neighborhood.

Satellites could outnumber all visible stars soon

2019-06-03T14:21:00-04:00

Last month, SpaceX successfully launched 60 500-pound satellites into space. Soon amateur skywatchers started sharing images of those satellites in night skies, igniting an uproar among astronomers who fear that the planned orbiting cluster will wreak havoc on scientific research and trash our view of the cosmos.

“This has the potential to change what a natural sky looks like,” Tyler Nordgren, an astronomer who promotes night skies told The New York Times.

Astronomers and night sky-enthusiasts worry because SpaceX is planning to send potentially thousands of satellites into orbit as part of a new business venture aimed at connecting the entire planet to the internet.

Other technology companies, including Amazon, are also making plans for coming space internet ventures, raising the possibility of a night sky filled with more satellites than visible stars in the very near future.

Daniel Libeskind tells the NYT what he would do on the Moon if brought along on SpaceX

2018-09-26T13:22:00-04:00

Last week saw the announcement by Elon Musk that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa would be the first private passenger aboard the Tesla CEO's Big Falcon Rocket. Alongside, it was also suggested that Maezawa would invite a group of artists to come along on his trip to the moon, expected to launch in 2023.

The proposal, which asks the visionary space travelers to create something after they return to Earth, has led to much speculation about whom might be chosen, and what might they create. Curious as well, the New York Times asked eight artists to put together some pitches of their own.

Among the speculative projects is a very bold bid by Daniel Libeskind to transform the moon into a perfect square. The Polish-American architect told the NYT:

I like that this project is about art rather than science. So my proposal is to turn the moon itself into an art project: It’s a sphere and I want to turn it into a perfect square. That’s the dream.

My son Noam is an astrophysicist at the L...

Japanese billionaire to be sent to moon by SpaceX says he'll bring along architects and other artists

2018-09-18T14:08:00-04:00

Elon Musk has revealed Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the potential first passenger to be launched to the moon by Musk's private aerospace company, SpaceX.

Ranked the 18th richest person in Japan, Mr. Maezawa is the founder of the online fashion retail website Zozotown. He is also known for having dropped $110 million on a painting by the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat last year at a Sotheby's auction. The price tag for reserving a spot on Musk's first launch was, reportedly, much more than what he paid for the Basquiat masterpiece.

The Big Falcon Rocket, which will take Maezawa to space—and which Musk says will allow his company to build a base on the moon, colonize Mars, and enable a must faster commercial travel on Earth—has not yet been built. SpaceX's other major venture thus far, the Falcon Heavy, which is a reusable heavy lift launch vehicle, took nearly twice as long to complete than expected.

That said, the tech tycoon, echoed by Musk, said he could board th...

Elon Musk plans to start colonies on Mars in only 5 years

2017-10-02T13:27:00-04:00

Musk's talk — which took place Friday afternoon local Adelaide time — served to update the architecture the billionaire entrepreneur revealed at last year's IAC, in Guadalajara, Mexico. That previous presentation introduced a huge, reusable rocket-spaceship combo called the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), which Musk envisioned helping to establish a million-person city on Mars within the next 50 to 100 years.

SpaceX, aerospace manufacturer and space transport service provider, plans to launch its first Mars cargo missions in 2022 and the first crews in 2024. These first flights are meant to initiate the construction of a permanent, sustainable city on Mars.

Elon Musk unveils his plan to colonize Mars with a million humans

2017-06-22T12:37:00-04:00

“It would be quite fun to be on Mars because you would have gravity that is about 37% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around,” [Elon Musk] adds, predicting that journey times could eventually be cut to 30 days.

Aside from the money, specific technology, and solid timeframe, Elon Musk has figured out a way to get to Mars. The colonization plan, which is designed to place about 1 million people on the planet in 40-100 years using a yet-to-be constructed ship that would carry 100 passengers per trip, needs more financial backers before Musk can definitively settle on a launch date. Many scientists have objected to the plan on various technological grounds, although one brought up the problem of potentially contaminating alien life forms:

Prof Andrew Coates, who works on the ExoMars rover at University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said that the question of whether present or past life existed on Mars needed to be answered before a manned mission, which could contaminate the surface, could be considered. “There’s a moral imperative to keep Mars as it is for the moment. Until we’ve conclusively answered that question we should keep our feet on the ground ... going there wou...

TU Delft wins overall for first phase of SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition

2017-02-02T12:37:00-05:00

TU Delft recently won the overall winning title in the first phase of SpaceX's Hyperloop Pod competition, which the aerospace company launched in 2015. Students and independent engineers worldwide were invited to design a human-scale Hyperloop pod, as a way to help accelerate SpaceX's development of a functional Hyperloop prototype.

This past weekend, SpaceX held the first Competition Weekend at their headquarters in Hawthorne, California. After various performance tests, only three student teams were qualified to test their pods on the 1.2 kilometer test tube: TU Delft, the Technical University of Munich, and MIT.

Delft Hyperloop pod at the SpaceX competition in Hawthorne. Photo via TUDelft/Twitter.

Their pod wasn't the fastest one, but TU Delft achieved the highest overall score and won best innovative design. The Technical University of Munich came in second and won the fastest pod award, while MIT placed in third overall and won best safety and reliability.

Speed wasn't the main pri...

Multitasking Musk: the busy life of Elon Musk

2015-12-16T13:35:00-05:00

Elon Musk has plenty of other ideas. If anyone asks and he has a moment to explain, he'll talk distractedly of as-yet-unrealized concepts—a vertical takeoff-and-landing supersonic electric jet for long-distance travel; an entirely new form of transport that he's named the Hyperloop... He is a man with the rare problem of having more ideas for how to radically change our world than the time to realize them. Still, you do what you can. And so this Monday evening, his mind is on space suits.

Related:

Elon Musk launches Hyperloop Pod Competition to university students and engineers

2015-06-16T14:09:00-04:00

University students and engineers now have a chance to contribute to the ongoing development of Elon Musk's and SpaceX's high-speed ground transit system, the Hyperloop. As SpaceX works toward constructing a one-mile test track near their headquarters in Hawthorne, California, they launched a design-build competition open to university students and independent engineering teams to propose their own Hyperloop human-scale transit pod. Entrants will then be able to operate their pods on the test track during Competition Weekend, currently scheduled for June 2016. And in case you were wondering, no riders will be inside any of the pods during testing.

SpaceX launched the competition in effort to accelerate the development of a functional Hyperloop prototype and, as always, to foster and promote student innovation. In the current design guidelines, entrants will have to address the pod's essential technical design features including navigation sensors, ground-operator communication, and v...

Weekly News Round-Up for August 4, 2014: Musk, Martha and monuments

2014-08-11T15:53:00-04:00

Friday, August 8:

Guggenheim Bullies Journalist: Molly Crabapple reports for Vice on inhumane immigrant labor conditions on Saadiyat island in the UAE, where a new arm of the Guggenheim (and Louvre, and NYU) is being built. The Guggenheim holds its cards close and skirts responsibility when Crabapple pushes for answers.
Controversial new app will keep you away from "sketchy" areas: "SketchFactor" rates an area's "sketchiness" based on crowd-sourced local data. Critics are worried that the app will amplify racial profiling and encourage stereotyping.

Thursday, August 7:

Gentrification and the Persistence of Poor Minority Neighborhoods: Harvard sociologists identify another determinant in the gentrification debate: racial composition. Their report, focusing on Chicago, found that a neighborhood's economic redevelopment depended on certain thresholds of black and white residents.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu called for the suspension of the Israeli Architects’ Association from an intern...

Musk will build SpaceX launchpad in Texas

2014-08-04T15:36:00-04:00

Elon Musk’s Space Exploration and Technologies Corp. plans to build the world’s first commercial launchpad near Brownsville in South Texas [...] The state is providing $2.3 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund to bring an estimated 300 jobs to the launch site, which will bring about $85 million of capital investment into the economy [...] In the region near the proposed launch site, at Boca Chica Beach in the state’s southernmost tip, two of five residents live in poverty.