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Elon Musk’s Hyperloop high speed transportation

Elon Musk is the man with a plan and that plan is to revolutionise the way we transport things. So far his plans to transport people around town have seen Tesla Motors become a profitable company and his venture SpaceX is now the company NASA is using to transport goods to the International Space Station. So what’s next on Musk’s agenda?

Revolutionising how we travel between 2 relatively close cities.

Meet Hyperloop, a low pressure tube mounted on stilts above the ground that will cannon passengers along in aluminum pods at speeds approaching 800mph (approx 1250 km/h). If it achieves its goals it will reduce a trip from LA to San Francisco, 615 km away, to a 30 minute affair.Musk believes that Hyperloop could be the 5th form of major transportation after planes, trains, cars and boats. His objectives were clear when designing the system:

“If we are to make a massive investment in a new transportation system, then the return should by rights be equally massive. Compared to the alternatives, it should ideally be:

  • Safer
  • Faster
  • Lower cost
  • More convenient
  • Immune to weather
  • Sustainably self-powering
  • Resistant to Earthquakes
  • Not disruptive to those along the route”

Hyperloop brings all of that to the table if Musk can succeed in building it to specification. The current plan fro the LA – San Fran Hyperloop would run  it in parallel to the existing highway, the Interstate 5, which would reduce the lengthy negotiations for zoning rights and would have safety measures in place to reduce the chance of anything going wrong by having many expansion joints to deal with thermal shifts, and tube thickness of nearly a full inch to prevent buckling or warping.

The pods would travel over air bearings, which Musk described as “the same basic principle as an air hockey table”, which would allow them to travel at speeds close to supersonic with extremely low friction. For acceleration, the Hyperloop would use a linear accelerator which would accelerate pods through a traveling electromagnetic pulse, and as the pod approached its destination, the process will be reversed, slowing the pod with the same electromagnets and absorbing the kinetic energy back into the system. The system would have a series of solar panels on top of the tubes which Musk says would be able to generate more power than the system needs to operate.

Musk is encouraging observers to weigh in on the designs, requesting ideas and improvements be sent to hyperloop@teslamotors.com or hyperloop@spacex.com. The documents are available here.

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