Ok, so if the 2013 Hyperloop “invention” is actually a 150-year old concept doomed to obvious failure, what about SpaceX playing obnoxious PR with boastful claims since 2011 that it’s the first to figure out reuseable rockets?

SpaceX Makes History With First-Ever Recycled Rocket

Wat. I mean really. Wat.

SpaceX becomes first to re-fly used rocket

Oh FFS. Who writes this stuff?

How spaceX successfully designed the world’s first reusable rocket

No. No. And… Nope. The whole history of SpaceX seems to be littered with ugly disinformation.

SpaceX Unveils Plan for World’s First Fully Reusable Rocket

It’s not even remotely true that SpaceX would be first, yet it still floats around as an unchallenged headline.

Apparently they’ve just been throwing more money at propaganda than anyone before, with more marketing and attention seeking fiction to generate funding, not actually solving much else by comparison.

Boeing’s Reusable Aerodynamic Space Vehicle (RASV) developed in the 1970s would have taken off and landed horizontally, like an aircraft, and would have featured the rapid turnaround, ease of maintenance, economy of operation, and abort capability found in the commercial airplane industry. RASV would launch several dozens (if not hundreds) of times, would be able to fly again shortly after landing (in two weeks or even in 24 hours or less), and would use small flight and operational teams.

What made the Clipper Graham [DC-X] unique was that it combined the development of rocket-powered single-stageto-orbit transport with aircraft-like operations and a program approach that featured a modest budget, an accelerated timetable, a small managerial team, and minimal paperwork. No other single-stage-to-orbit project had been run before in this “faster, cheaper, smaller” fashion. Also, the Graham Clipper was the first rocket-powered vehicle, experimental or not, to demonstrate aircraft-like operations.

A full-scale pre-production orbital prototype was planned (DC-Y), meant to be followed by the production DC-1.

Allegedly when SpaceX was created, Elon Musk told Jess Sponable that it was to continue the prior DC-X project success. Sponable had in fact participated in multiple reusable rocket vehicle projects at USAF, DARPA and elsewhere including the X-33 and X-34, just to be clear about the many priors to SpaceX. The point is that a disinformation tweet from Elon Musk might generate millions of views instantly and headlines in papers, all poisoning history, yet an interview a year ago with Jess about real facts has only 115 views so far…

…[DC-X] did the rotation maneuver that SpaceX did so dramatically in recent years in 1996 or 1995… a lot of [our DC-X reusable rocket] data was provided to Elon Musk at SpaceX…

While DC-X was by far the most famous in the mid 1990s — literally entered into a space hall of fame — somehow SpaceX has been allowed to lie. It constantly spread misleading information, without any corrections or shame, as if it was initiating the same concepts and maneuvers at least two decades late in the 2010s.

The first flight of the DC-X from the “Clipper-Site” was on August 18, 1993, at Northrup Strip, now known as White Sands Space Harbor, on White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The team actually built a mini-spaceport along the edge of the Northrop Strip. It incorporated all the functions of an operational spaceport. It was a breathtaking vertical launch that left the spectators in attendance in awe. “The DC-X launched vertically, hovered in mid-air at 150 feet, and began to move sideways at a dogtrot. After traveling 350 feet, the onboard global-positioning satellite unit indicated that the DC-X was directly over its landing point. The spacecraft stopped mid-air again and, as the engines throttled back, began its successful vertical landing. Just like Buck Rogers,” said an article from the Ada Joint Program Office of the U.S. Government.

Politics killed the DC-X reusable rocket for various reasons. The concept went dormant until after President Bush mistakenly withdrew from the ABMT and then the idea was restarted in a new arms race… driving DoD innovations into a highly unaccountable private company that has become known for its failures: SpaceX.

Awkward.

Apparently everything Musk does turns out a giant origination scam, stealing ideas and public money to fraudulently redirect investors away from real engineering into his political pockets.

It was pointed out to me recently that a paper (written by Tesla and SpaceX engineers) published by Elon Musk in 2013 credited the Hyperloop concept of a vacuum tube train to “The Limit of Rapid Transit” by Robert Goddard in 1909.

That’s a start. Goddard was a prodigious inventor who experimented a lot with vacuum and propulsion.

Some say the next big splashy Hyperloop advocate was in 1950s France.

The idea of the Aérotrain emerged in the mind of Jean Bertin during the 1950s.

He didn’t get very far.

And then MIT worked hard in the 1990s to bring Goddard’s ideas to reality.

Experiments conducted by Frankel and his team in the early 90s showed that it worked. “We built a half mile long tube at the playing fields of MIT, evacuated it, and then shot things through it in order to measure what sort of velocities we could obtain,” says Frankel. “We started with ping pong balls, and then went to mechanical models.” His team found that creating a near vacuum in the pipe would allow speeds of up to 930 km/h (580mph) – twice as fast as in an air filled tube.

The results were enough for the team to propose a rail system between Boston and New York…. Ultimately, the huge cost of building such a system was its downfall along with the fact that the top speed was equivalent to existing bullet trains…

Spoiler alert. Hyperloop concepts have failed miserably for at least 100 years because so complicated, expensive and in reality not much faster than existing trains.

In fact, when Elon Musk claimed to be proposing a competitive new transit idea, MIT slapped it down as a poorly-scoped hybrid of others’ ideas that would fail.

The idea of pushing pods along with air in a pneumatic tube has been around for at least 150 years. […] Unusual approaches to transportation like this one have, of course, had a difficult time getting implemented.

MIT really hinted at the fact that Musk was fraudulently proposing a highly expensive and experimental Hyperloop as the exact opposite: cheap and easy.

[Hansman] says Musk’s cost estimates are too optimistic. “It would be enormously expensive. And I think there are a huge number of technical challenges.” [Sussman says] “…given our inability to put together the package to do high-speed rail, which is proven technology, it’s hard to see how a chancy solution—given that it’s never been implemented—would fare,”

Ouch. Hyperloop has indeed fared terribly and delivered nothing, while trains are at least on track for 2030 (pun not intended).

Why did Musk lie and then deliver nothing? Politics. He wanted at that time to kill public transit funding in California, stop trains, by soaking attention up with a fictional future product that would never be delivered. It was the hydrogen highway tactic but targeted.

Wait, did MIT also say 150 years? Goddard was 1909, so something is off by like 40 years.

Digging around I noticed several people call out George Medhurst, who suggested compressed air to create car propulsion (including a 1799 design patent on a system of iron pipes for “atmospheric rails”).

That’s early!

And then in 1845 a London and Croydon Railway experiment ran a vacuum train, where atmospheric pressure propelled its cars. It ended with a familiar note.

…ultimately a failure due to the difficulty of maintaining a high pressure in the tubes with the ever complex valves requiring unaffordable levels of maintenance…

Wow, that sounds almost exactly like products from Elon Musk 2012-2024, no? Difficult and unaffordable maintenance is surely Tesla’s byline.

All I’m saying is that if you look at the long line of Hyperloop type inventors, someone could and should have predicted that a very old idea with well known problems would suffer the same fate.

[Burning through $300m in six years, by] 2020, Hyperloop One successfully conducted a crewed test run hitting 100 mph.

Pathetic. Hyperloop One squeezed out a pokey 100 mph before shutting down operations without a single buyer. What a waste of time and money. But do you know what’s even more pathetic?

The concept of the hyperloop – ultra high-speed transportation via pods or capsules travelling in near-vacuum tubes – originated in 2013 with a white paper by Elon Musk.

Almost nothing in that Musk glorification sentence is true. And the fact someone could write such nonsense might have something to do with why the Hyperloop was ever allowed to divert attention from actual high speed trains and fail so spectacularly… yet again.