Musk’s Hyperloop transportation system a step closer to reality

Elon Musk's super-fast travel option, named the Hyperloop, could become a reality in the not too distant future, it has been reported, thanks to a company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) formed to design and eventually build the fanciful transportation system.

When Musk mooted the idea of the Hyperloop in August of 2013, none had any idea how to proceed on it further. The Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO dropped a 57-page alpha white paper on them, noting he had no time to build a revolutionary transit system that would shoot pods full of people around the country in above-ground tubes at 800 mph.

However, the Hyperloop challenge was taken up by an El Segundo, California-based startup.

According to HTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn, the technical feasibility study would not be complete until mid-2015, but he decided to show off what his team had done so far on the idea.

The team had made much progress in three main areas: the capsules, the stations, and the route.

Meanwhile, singularityhub.com reported that Musk's revolutionary idea-a levitating, solar-power supersonic train transportation had captured the imagination of no less than 100 people.

According to the report, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is not quite a company in the sense that the workers who are going to build the Hyperloop are not going to get paid until the train turns a profit.

The workers do not actually work for HTT, or many of them work day jobs at companies spread throughout the country-Boeing or SpaceX or NASA or Yahoo! or Salesforce or Airbus, to name but a few. The HTT workforce comprises quasi-moonlighters, lending their cognitive surplus to supersonic train design. Technically speaking, they are a mesh network.

A few weeks ago, the 100 or so engineers in the HTT mesh network got together to get going and penned a 76-page report on their plans, arguing they could complete their first Hyperloop linking Los Angeles to Las Vegas, as against Musk's originally proposed Los Angeles to San Francisco route in about 10 years for a cost of roughly $16 billion.

According to the report, a transportation technology that would allow commuting between Los Angeles and Las Vegas or San Francisco or wherever it ended up, would make neighbours of literally distant strangers unleashing a revolution in business disguised as a revolution in transport.

The Hyperloop (or something similar) is touted as the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1,500 km or 900 miles apart, the Hyperloop could by the best option with a high enough altitude and the right geometry, so as to avoid the sonic boom on the ground.

However, for a sub several hundred mile journey, supersonic transport would be rather pointless, as one would be spend almost all his/her time slowly ascending and descending and very little time at cruise speed.