Hyperloop will bring futuristic transportation today

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Relatively Quarky

Hyperloop will bring futuristic transportation today

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

David Miller

Columnist

November 8, 2013

The year is 2015 and you’re in Los Angeles. Annoyed by the overwhelming smog, you decide to make a trip to San Francisco. You buy your $20 ticket and step into a pod situated behind an immense tube extending far into the distance. The pod door closes and thirty minutes later you’re considering filters for your Instagram of the Golden Gate Bridge.

No, this isn’t a dream or a hallucination. This is the future of transportation: the Hyperloop. It begins to make sense when you learn more about the mind behind this incredible machine. Though some consider him the real-life Tony Stark, others just call him Elon Musk.

As a child growing up in South Africa, Musk taught himself computer programming and sold his first video game “Blast Star” for a modest $500 before moving to Canada for college. Shortly thereafter, Musk transferred to The Wharton School of Business at The University of Pennsylvania, to complete degrees in economics and physics. Four days after starting a physics Ph.D. program at Stanford, he dropped out to pursue entrepreneurship in nearby Silicon Valley. A few years later, Musk founded a company that eventually turned into PayPal.

After eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion dollars, Musk focused on what he considered to be two of the most pertinent issues of our time: energy and space. He founded SpaceX, the leading private contract space shuttle company, and Tesla Motors, the revolutionary electric car company that recently unveiled the Model S, a vehicle considered by many to be a landmark in automobile history.

In his spare time, he decided to invent a fifth mode of transportation—the Hyperloop. Although he will probably not be the one to bring the Hyperloop concept to fruition, he recently worked with a team of SpaceX and Tesla engineers to produce a construction plan for the machine. A new company—founded last week—called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies hopes to unveil a prototype system in the first quarter of 2015.

The Hyperloop essentially works as a high speed pod-based transportation system that will take passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under thirty minutes. The pods will travel on a cushion of air through a low pressure tube parallel to the I-5 highway at nearly eight-hundred miles per hour.

In his design, Musk cleverly resolves one of the system’s largest technical issues (overcoming what is known as the Kantrowitz Limit) by placing fans at the front of each pod to transfer air to the back of the pod, preventing a huge limit on the pod’s velocity.

Other more grandiose designs have also been discussed, including a Hyperloop system that could take you from New York to Los Angeles in forty-five minutes and from New York to Beijing in two hours.

Although the Hyperloop sounds more like a fantastical concept from an Isaac Asimov novel rather than a realistic plan of a quirky engineering genius, there are no boundaries for Elon Musk. We’ll just have to wait and see if our smoggy L.A. days can be so easily remedied.

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