The race to get us racing through near-vacuum tubes close to the speed of sound is heating up. Hyperloop Technologies, one of the startups looking to commercialize Elon Musk's futuristic transport concept, has announced plans to commence testing on an open-air track in Nevada next month, with a view to hitting speeds of 700 mph (1,126 km/h) by the end of 2016.
Not to be confused with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, another startup formed in 2013 that is developing its own 5-mile test track in Quay Valley, Hyperloop Technologies is looking to move cargo around in addition to people. It also happens to have some big names at the wheel, notably XPrize Foundation chair Peter Diamandis and former SpaceX engineer Brogan Bambrogan.
To confuse things just a little further, Elon Musk's SpaceX is in the process of building its own 1-mile test track and will host a competition among university and independent engineering teams to build their own transport pod prototypes.
But Hyperloop Technologies is looking to get out ahead of the competition. It has reached an agreement to start testing on a site of around 50 acre (20.2 ha) in Nevada in early 2016. The construction materials for what it calls the Propulsion Open Air Test will start rolling in this month, with operations to begin in January.
The track will stretch over around 1 km (0.62 mi), but rather than actually shuttling along a passenger pod, it will be used with a test vehicle capable of hitting 540 km/h (335 mph) in two seconds in order to put the company's linear electric motor through its paces.
Hyperloop Technologies considers this the first step toward a full-scale 3 km (1.86 mi) test track where pods will be levitated and zipped through low-friction tubes at 700 mph (1,126 km/h). Though the company is anticipating this track to be completed and in use by late 2016 or early 2017, it is yet to decide on a location. Its publicly stated goal is to deliver a fully operational Hyperloop system by 2020.
The video below gives a brief overview of the Propulsion Open Air Test.
Source: Hyperloop Technologies
I see one big problem with any enterprise like this, the threat of terrorism and easy picking of this system. High speed and small bombs would really hurt this.
Besides, cars are the best form of transportation for 95% of the travelling that 95% of people do.
What we should build is autonomous flying cars. Take to the air for long distances and use the road when you get to your destination. That's what we do now, except there's all the hassle of transferring from cars to trains/planes/boats and then back to cars. But yeah, it's a technology problem right now, so Hyperloop it is....
Go Elon!
Along came the raildroads and people had the ability to get from one side of the country to another many times faster than previously available.
But eventually technology came up with the personal automobile. We regained the ability to travel anywhere, not just the set pathways that the trains traveled. The speed of cars often exceeds that of a train and the flexibility of a car is superior to a train and as a result, trains became relegated to moving people locally and freight nationally with nominal passenger service for those that need it.
Fast forward to today and we have a matrix of airplanes making higher speed between distant cities on the planet possible. No car can compete with the speed of an airplane.
Looking forward into tomorrow, two major things may hopefully come to pass... automated guidance of the car and higher speed transit in the form of routable pods. The automated car guidance should allow us to become safer on our roads and allow for faster travel speeds within the limits of rubber wheels and pavement.
But the real advantage comes not from a single hyperloop, but from a nationwide network of evacuated tubes and a capsule/pod that can be injected into the "network" in location A, be switched to appropriate tubes/loops automatically and emerge in location B without having to stop at any place in between.
Computer control of packets/pods will be essential and not impossible. It's a similar problem to the local transit automated car problem but with fewer decisions.
I imagine a day when we have 700+MPH tubes and 4-12 passenger pods able to be inserted into the network and "routed" through the network to come out in whatever location is needed. It will take a while with small disparate loops initially, much the same way that we had small disparate railroads initially. But hopefully we will have the foresight to ensure that our tubes and capsules are all built to the same size standards for interoperability.