The worst part of being a university student is probably the hours spent commuting. But maybein the future, you could wake up late but still be in time for your first early morning lecture.
Anything which Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, PayPal and SpaceX, says sounds like science fiction. Electric cars with instant torque and zero emissions? It took Musk just five years to develop and launch the Tesla Roadster. Batteries for home and commercial use? The Tesla Energy scheme was launched earlier this year and soon attracted great interest. Space exploration? SpaceX is to date the only private company to ever return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit and exchange cargo payload with the International Space Station.
In August 2013, Tesla published a 57-page White Paper detailing plans for a transportation network based on above-ground tubes. The system, called Hyperloop, would enable capsules filled with people to travel through these tubes at supersonic speeds. In theory, the Hyperloop could reduce the journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles to a mere 30 minutes.
Hyperloop will be a cross between an air hockey table, a railgun and Concorde
Musk hasn’t released detailed or technical plans. All he has said is that the Hyperloop will be a cross between an air hockey table, a railgun and Concorde – a form of subsonic transport, if you will. However, around 400 people are already working on Hyperloop. These aren’t exactly employees – rather, they are people with jobs at Nasa, Boeing and SpaceX who dedicate their spare time to the Hyperloop project, in exchange for stock options.
The aim is to have a full-scale, passenger-ready Hyperloop in 2016. This prototype will run a five-mile stretch between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Hyperloop is attracting plenty of interest. In fact, recently Hyperloop announced that it has signed agreements to work with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum, a manufacturer of advanced vacuum solutions that has already worked on projects such as the large hadron collider at the Cern laboratory in Switzerland, and Aecom, a global engineering design firm that is involved in major architecture and infrastructure projects. The two companies will lend their expertise in exchange for stock options in Hyperloop Transportation Technologies.
This endorsement by two publicly traded companies with shareholders to answer to lends validation to what could be a truly revolutionary form of transportation.