illustration by htt/jumpstartfund/omegabyte
If you know anything about Elon Musk’s ideas, you know he’s a guy dead set on progress and pushing the limits. You probably have heard of the Tesla vehicle and you may have even heard about SpaceX and their plans for launching reusable rockets to avoid costly and harmful byproducts and waste, but have you heard about the Hyperloop?
The Hyperloop is Elon Musk’s concept for a “fifth mode of transportation” that travels at an average speed of 598 miles per hour with a top speed of 760 miles per hour. According to my Google search while writing this, the speed of sound is 767.269 miles per hour, so compared to the speed of the proposed Hyperloop designs, that’s stupendous! This high speed travel would happen in pressurized capsules inside a steel tube with a partial vacuum maintained through the length of the trip. The capsules will ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors, thus eliminating rolling resistance and creating a ride that sounds legendary in theory.
Since Elon Musk has made this one of the largest open source projects in the world, many people have begun to add their own thoughts and design ideas to the growing fascination and race to completion. Currently, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc. is planning to do tests in the Nevada Desert starting as soon as early 2016, so this will all soon be old news. With any hope, we will be able to get from Los Angeles to The Big Apple in a matter of hours if not less after the technology makes advancements and goes public with a full system in the United States, which is Elon’s goal by 2020.
For more info on this, fortune.com has a short video on their website with two of the guys working on the dream here:
http://fortune.com/2015/12/09/elon-musk-hyperloop-nevada/
-Blaze
Wild Knights 