A transportation system that frisks travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just 30 minutes, with a $20 ticket. Elon Musk, co-founder of SpaceX, Tesla Motors and PayPal, revealed the plans and physics behind the ‘Hyperloop’ in a paper published on Monday.
Developed by engineers from SpaceX and Tesla, the Hyperloop paper talks about electromagnetic tubes mounted on pylons, and is expected to cost around $6 billion to build. People will be traveling through the tubes in ‘pods’ or capsules, at speeds of roughly 800 miles per hour. The capsule moves through an airlock down the vacuum tubes, and is similar to space travel.
How will the hyperloop work?
Hyperloop consists of a low pressure tube with capsules that are transported at both low and high speeds throughout the length of the tube. The capsules are supported on a cushion of air, featuring pressurized air and aerodynamic lift.
The capsules are accelerated via a magnetic linear accelerator affixed atvarious stations on the low pressure tube with rotors contained in each capsule. Passengers may enter and exit Hyperloop at stations located either at the ends of the tube, or branches along the tube length.
Elon Musk: Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment.
However, it may be a while before we can mimic space travel on earth – the Hyperloop will take roughly seven years to be passenger-ready. Besides, Mr. Musk states that the Hyperloop is not exactly a high priority for him right now.
You can read the 57-pages long Hyperloop-Alpha paper on the Tesla website here.
[Images courtesy: Elon Musk/Tesla]