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What Is Hyperloop and When Will It Be Ready?

Early tests show that hyperloop technology can work quickly and safely. is it coming to a city near you anytime soon here's everything you need to know about the super speed train..

The two passengers strapped into their seats inside the gleaming white interior of the Pegasus as the pod lifted into the airlock. In the time it takes to finish reading this paragraph, the pod accelerated to 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) down a length of track, before delivering its first passengers to a safe stop. The ride lasted only 15 seconds and was in no danger of breaking any land-speed records, but Virgin Hyperloop One nevertheless made history as the first company that has successfully tested hyperloop technology. 

A hyperloop, as you may have heard, is a super speed ground-level transportation system in which people could travel in a hovering pod inside a vacuum tube at speeds as high as 760 mph (1220 km/h), just shy of the speed of sound. Virgin's system includes magnetic levitation, much like the technology used in advanced high-speed rail projects in Japan and Germany.

As a concept for fast transportation, vacuum tube transit systems have been around for a surprisingly long time. In 1845, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, an engineer in Britain and the Elon Musk of his time, proposed building a tube in southwest England that would propel trains at a then-dizzying speed of 70 mph (110 km/h). The project proved unfeasible due to lack of materials that would sustain it, and Brunel’s concept was abandoned. 

Despite Brunel's efforts, it was more than a century before Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk turned the world’s attention back to tubular transit technology. In 2013, he published a 58-page technical paper that outlined the design of Hyperloop, a solar-powered transportation system, which he described as "a cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table." 

Musk claimed that the vehicle could make the 350-mile (560-kilometer) journey between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 35 minutes for $20 a ticket and estimated the cost of the infrastructure at $6 billion. He also said that the new transit system should be safer than any current mode of transport, immune to weather and resistant to earthquakes. Musk never devoted many resources to making the project a physical reality but released his Hyperloop Alpha as an open-source design for universities and companies to research and develop.

In 2014, Virgin Hyperloop was founded on the premise of making Musk’s vision of a futuristic transportation system a reality. The company has made substantive technical changes to Musk's initial proposal and chose not to pursue the Los Angeles–to–San Francisco route the billionaire envisioned. But Virgin wants to keep the futuristic vehicle environmentally friendly, with vegan leather seats and some of the pod materials made from recycled content.  

How Does a Train-in-a-Tube Work?

At its core, a hyperloop system is all about removing the two things that slow down regular vehicles: friction and air resistance. To do away with the former, the pod needs to hover above its track, making hyperloop a magnetic levitation (maglev) train. 

To put it in the simplest terms, maglev trains use two sets of magnets: one set to repel and push the train up off the track, and another set to move the floating train ahead, taking advantage of the lack of friction. Once two sets of magnetic waves are established, they work in tandem to push the vehicle forward, says Sam Gurol, former director of Maglev Systems at General Atomics, an energy and defense corporation based in San Diego, California.

“The advantage of maglev is that it allows you to go to very high speeds, in addition to having a very nice ride quality,” Gurol says. “It’s like riding on a magic carpet.”

The super speed of hyperloop, however, is achieved through drastically minimizing air resistance. Passenger pods move through a low-pressure sealed tube, which contains vacuums that suck out nearly all of the air. The air pressure inside the chamber is so low that it mimics the conditions of being at about 200,000 feet (61,000 meters) above sea level. By virtue of being in a tube, the system is protected from the weather and can operate in almost any weather conditions.

Examining the Hyper Problems

Although the technology addresses problems of friction and air resistance, hyperloop projects have suffered from a different kind of drag: economics. Financial and transportation experts have expressed the belief that Musk’s $6 billion price tag dramatically understates the cost of designing, developing, constructing, and testing an all-new form of transportation. Leaked financial documents in 2016 suggested that Musk’s Hyperloop would cost as much as $13 billion, or $121 million per mile.

Like any form of transit, hyperloop transport carries inherent risks, and contingencies for any unforeseen disasters still need to be engineered into the system. At high speeds, even a small earthquake or the slightest breakage of a vacuum tube would pose a significant danger to passengers and crew. In addition to safety assurance, a hyperloop system must offer the kind of pricing that would draw paying passengers away from current modes of transportation.

With large-scale projects like this, good engineering needs to co-exist with good politics. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Gurol’s company collaborated with a German firm Transrapid to build a maglev-based high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim. In 2007, former U.S. Senator Harry Reid (Nevada), became the Senate majority leader and decided the state had more important priorities.

“That’s the kind of political change that can just reverse any progress. Hundreds of engineers and fifteen years of work, and the project just died.” Gurol says.

According to Financial Times , in 2018, Saudi Arabia pulled its $1 billion deal with Virgin Hyperloop after the company’s ex-chairman Richard Branson criticized the kingdom over the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Still, as of May 2019, the company had raised $400 million from private investors and plans to begin commercial operations in 2030 (pushed back from early predictions that envisioned a passenger-ready hyperloop in 2021).

Besides Virgin, the companies working out the hurdles of this transportation method include the Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT), a U.S.-based startup that signed an agreement in China to build a test track, Hardt Hyperloop in the Netherlands and TransPod, a Canadian company.

Until these companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, acquire the massive tracts of land needed for a viable system, and prove that the system can be operated safely, hyperloop remains a near-future dream.

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​What is Hyperloop? Everything you need to know about the race for super-fast travel

What is Hyperloop?

Special report

Tech and the future of transportation (free pdf).

This ebook looks at emerging autonomous transport technologies and how they will affect society and the future of business.

Hyperloop is a new form of ground transport currently in development by a number of companies, It could see passengers travelling at over 700 miles an hour in floating pod which races along inside giant low-pressure tubes, either above or below ground.

What makes Hyperloop different?

There are two big differences between Hyperloop and traditional rail. Firstly, the pods carrying passengers travel through tubes or tunnels from which most of the air has been removed to reduce friction. This should allow the pods to travel at up to 750 miles per hour .

Secondly, rather than using wheels like a train or car, the pods are designed to float on air skis, using the same basic idea as an air hockey table, or use magnetic levitation to reduce friction. 

What are the benefits of Hyperloop?

Supporters argue that Hyperloop could be cheaper and faster than train or car travel, and cheaper and less polluting than air travel. They claim that it's also quicker and cheaper to build than traditional high-speed rail. Hyperloop could therefore be used to take the pressure off gridlocked roads, making travel between cities easier, and potentially unlocking major economic benefits as a result.

When are the first Hyperloops going to be available?

A number of different companies are working to turn the idea into  a functioning commercial system .

Hyperloop technology is still in development even though the basic concept has been around for many years. At the moment, the earliest any Hyperloop is likely to be up and running is 2020 but most services are expected to be later, as trials of the technology are still in their early stages.

Where will Hyperloop services run?

It's still not clear where Hyperloops will actually be established but a number of companies have sketched out routes in the US, Europe, and elsewhere . Potential routes include New York to Washington DC, Pune to Mumbai, Kansas City to St Louis, Bratislava to Brno, Vijaywada and Amaravati, and many more.

What is the history of Hyperloop?

Russia taps Hyperloop for domestic transport

A proposed project to bring Musk's Hyperloop to Russia would cost between $12 and $13 billion.

The idea of using low-pressure or vacuum tubes as part of a transport system has a long heritage. The Crystal Palace pneumatic railway used air pressure to push a wagon uphill (and a vacuum to drag it back down) way back in Victorian south London in 1864. Similar systems using pneumatic tubes to send mail and packages between buildings have been in use since the late nineteenth century, and can still be seen in supermarkets and banks to move money around today.

One clear predecessor of the Hyperloop is the 'vactrain' concept developed by Robert Goddard early in the twentieth century; since then, many similar ideas have been proposed without much success.

However, it was entrepreneur Elon Musk who really reignited interest in the concept with his 'Hyperloop Alpha' paper in August 2013, which set out how a modern system would work -- and how much it would cost.

What is Hyperloop Alpha?

In his Hyperloop Alpha paper, Musk set out the case for a service running between Los Angeles and San Francisco, which would be cheaper and faster than a proposed high-speed rail link. He argued that his Hyperloop could be safer, faster, more affordable, weather-proof, self-powering -- and less disruptive to people living along the route.

Musk said that a Hyperloop service could be the answer to travel between cities less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart; beyond that, supersonic air travel would be more efficient, he said.

"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," Musk wrote. Nobody has got very far with the teleportation idea, alas, but a number of companies have seized at the potential of Hyperloop.

How does a Hyperloop tube work?

The basic idea of Hyperloop as envisioned by Musk is that the passenger pods or capsules travel through a tube, either above or below ground. To reduce friction, most -- but not all -- of the air is removed from the tubes by pumps.

Overcoming air resistance is one of the biggest uses of energy in high speed travel. Airliners climb to high altitudes to travel through less dense air; in order to create a similar effect at ground level, Hyperloop encloses the capsules in a reduced-pressure tube, effectively allowing the trains to travel at airplane speeds while still on the ground.

In Musk's model, the pressure of the air inside the Hyperloop tube is about one-sixth the pressure of the atmosphere on Mars (a notable comparison as Mars is another of Musk's interests ). This means an operating pressure of 100 pascals, which reduces the drag force of the air by 1,000 times relative to sea level conditions, and would be equivalent to flying above 150,000 feet.

How do Hyperloop capsules work?

The Hyperloop capsules in Musk's model float above the tube's surface on a set of 28 air-bearing skis, similar to the way that the puck floats just above the table on an air hockey game. One major difference is that it is the pod, not the track, that generates the air cushion in order to keep the tube as simple and cheap as possible. Other versions of Hyperloop use magnetic levitation rather than air skis to keep the passenger pods above the tracks.

The pod would get its initial velocity from an external linear electric motor, which would accelerate it to 'high subsonic velocity' and then give it a boost every 70 miles or so; in between, the pod would coast along in near vacuum. Each capsule could carry 28 passengers (other versions aim to carry up to 40) plus some luggage; another version of the pods could carry cargo and vehicles. Pods would depart every two minutes (or every 30 seconds at peak usage).

How would Hyperloop be powered?

Elon Musk's Hyperloop: Here's the Dutch team with designs on supersonic train concept

Engineers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands are taking tech entrepreneur Elon Musk's Hyperloop travel idea very seriously.

The pods will get their velocity from an external linear electric motor -- effectively a round induction motor (like the one in the Tesla Model S ) rolled flat. Under Musk's model, the Hyperloop would be powered by solar panels placed on the top of the tube which would allow the system to generate more energy than it needs to run.

How is Hyperloop different from high-speed trains?

Supporters argue that Hyperloop is significantly better than high-speed rail. It is lower cost and more energy efficient because, among other things, the track doesn't need to provide power to the pods continuously and, because the pods can leave every 30 seconds, it's more like an on-demand service. It's also potentially two or three times faster than even high-speed rail (and ten times the speed of regular rail services).

How much would a Hyperloop cost to build?

For the LA to San Francisco Hyperloop that Musk envisaged , he came up with a price tag of under $6bn. Musk envisioned an LA to San Francisco journey time of half an hour with pod departures every 30 seconds, each carrying 28 passengers.

Spreading the capital cost over 20 years and adding in operational costs, Musk came up with the figure of $20 plus operating costs for a one-way ticket on the passenger Hyperloop.

The costs of a Hyperloop according to Elon Musk's Hyperloop Alpha paper.

Most of the cost of the system lies in building the tube network: the overall cost of the tube, pillars, vacuum pumps, and stations was calculated at just over $4bn for the passenger version of Hyperloop ($7bn for a slightly larger version that could also take freight). The cost of the capsules was put at around $1.35m a piece; with 40 needed for the service, the cost of these is around $54m (or $70m for a mix of passenger and cargo capsules). That's less than 9% of the cost of the proposed passenger-only high-speed rail system.

What will it feel like to travel in a Hyperloop?

Critics of Hyperloop have warned that travelling in the tube might be an uncomfortable experience, due to nausea-inducing acceleration, plus lateral G-force on bends in the route. However, Virgin Hyperloop One says that a journey via Hyperloop will feel about the same as riding in an elevator or a passenger plane.

Virgin Hyperloop One's XP-1 passenger capsule.

"Although Hyperloop will be fast, the systems we are building will accelerate with the same tolerable G-forces as that of taking off in a Boeing 747," it said. Acceleration and deceleration will be gradual, it added, with no G-forces and turbulence.

Travelling in a concrete pipe in a windowless pod means there isn't going to be much to look at; Musk's original vision said that "beautiful landscape will be displayed in the cabin" and each passenger will have access their own personal entertainment system.

What a Hyperloop Transportation Technologies capsule might look like from inside.

How much will Hyperloop tickets cost?

Musk's LA to San Francisco version offered tickets at just $20 but Virgin Hyperloop One is more vague on its plans: "Difficult to say as it will depend greatly on the route, but the goal is to make it affordable for everyone," it said, while Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) said it expects "a profitable system with low ticket price projections".

Will Hyperloop be a success?

That's the huge, multibillion dollar -- and, as yet, unanswered -- question around Hyperloop. The concept has been around for a long time, but until now the technology has been lacking. This time around, it's possible that the technology may have just caught up with the concept. 

There are well-funded companies racing to be the first to deliver a working service but, despite their optimistic timescales, these projects are still very much in the pilot and experimental stages. Going from short test routes to hundreds of kilometres of track is a big jump that none of these firms has made yet. 

If the technology is still in development, that's also very true of the business models to support it. The success of Hyperloop will vary depending on the destinations, local economics, and geography. Trying to build a new line overland across England, for example, can prove an expensive and complicated business which can take many years (as the ongoing HS2 controversy has shown).  In other countries where land is cheaper or where routes can travel through less populated areas, it may be easier to get services up and running faster.  

Capacity is another issue. It's not clear that Hyperloop can do a better job of moving a large number of people than other mass transit options. Critics argue that lots of pods will be required to achieve the same passenger numbers as more traditional rail, which uses much bigger carriages. And there are many engineering hurdles to overcome, like building the tubes strong enough to deal with the stresses of carrying the high-speed pods, and finding energy- and cost-efficient ways to keep them operating at low pressure. 

Moving from a successful test to a full commercial deployment is a big jump, and passenger trials are still to come. Assuming that consumers are happy being zoomed around in these tubes, finding the right price for the service will be vital, too.

Right now Hyperloop is at an experimental stage, even if the companies involved are very keen to talk about its potential.

Can Hyperloop make a profit?

Why hyperloop is poised to transform commutes, commerce, and communities

Elon Musk may have popularized the concept, but multiple teams are racing to deploy hyperloop routes at key spots across the globe.

The companies building Hyperloop services argue that they are significantly cheaper to build than high-speed rail services. Musk's Hyperloop Alpha paper claimed his LA to San Francisco route could be built for one-tenth of the price of a high-speed rail alternative. Other companies have said their services could be one-third to half the price of rail services and much faster. Being cheaper to build should mean these services can become profitable quickly. 

However, there are plenty of engineering challenges to be tackled which could push the costs up, and how these services will be funded in the first place is not clear; many of the feasibility studies under way are looking at how to finance them, likely through a combination of public and private investment.

How is Hyperloop like Linux?

Rather than keeping the Hyperloop to himself, Musk threw the idea open to anyone who wanted to develop it, comparing it to the Linux operating system: an open-source design built by a community of developers in order to bring it from concept to reality.

Indeed, in his Hyperloop Alpha paper, Musk noted that a number of areas still remained to be resolved including the control mechanism for Hyperloop capsules; station designs with loading and unloading of both passenger and passenger-plus-vehicle versions of the Hyperloop capsules; comparisons of Hyperloop with more conventional magnetic levitation systems; and testing to demonstrate the physics of Hyperloop.

Who is building Hyperloop services?

Despite doing much to lay the groundwork for Hyperloop services, Musk initially said he was too busy to develop his own service. There are now a number of companies working to turn the idea into reality, including startups and others that have been working on the idea for some time already. Among them are Virgin Hyperloop One , HTT, TransPod, Arrivo, and others. Each is developing a slightly different set of technologies, but the fundamental underlying idea remains the same.

Is Elon Musk building a Hyperloop service?

Despite saying he was too busy, it looks like Musk remains intrigued by the idea of Hyperloop: last year he said that he had received 'verbal approval' for a New York to Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington DC Hyperloop, which would cut the New York to Washington DC travel time to just 29 minutes. "Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly," he added.

In February, the Washington Post reported that Musk's Boring Company had received a permit for some preparatory and excavation work in New York.

In October 2017, Maryland's Department of Transportation also gave conditional approval to the construction of a Boring Company tunnel from Baltimore to Washington , allowing it to dig under state roads.

In April 2019, the company provided more details on its plans for the Washington DC to Baltimore section -- it aims to build a high-speed Loop underground transportation system that transports passengers in autonomous electric vehicles, or AEVs, at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour.

It adds that the Loop tunnels could potentially serve as Hyperloop corridors, which could potentially transport passengers at speeds of up to 700 miles per hour. However, it warned: "The potential future use of Hyperloop technology is currently unknown ."

What is the Boring Company?

Musk set up the Boring Company with the aim of making it easier and faster to dig the tunnels under, and between, cities in order to make Hyperloop projects viable. Tunnels can cost as much as $1bn a mile to dig; The Boring Company wants to dig tunnels at one-tenth of the price. The company says it can do this by digging smaller tunnels, making faster and more efficient digging machines, and replacing diesel-powered machines with electric ones.

A Boring Company tunnel.

As well as building more efficient digging machines, the Boring Company also offered a line of caps and more unusually flame throwers, both of which sold out rapidly after they were released.

In May, the Boring Company won a $48.6m contract to design and build the city of Las Vegas' planned loop of underground tunnels for moving people in autonomous electric vehicles. The tunnel is expected to be operational by the end of the year. 

What is Loop?

The Boring Company hopes that one use for these tunnels, as well as Hyperloops, will be Loop. This is a high-speed underground public transportation system which sees passengers carried on autonomous electric 'skates' travelling at 125 to 150 miles per hour. Electric skates will carry between eight and 16 passengers or a single passenger vehicle. Passengers (and vehicles) would enter the pods at street level and then elevators would drop them down to the level of the Loop to continue the journey underground, bypassing street traffic (with pedestrians and cyclists getting priority over cars).

The company is currently working on an initial test tunnel in Hawthorne (near the SpaceX and the Boring Company HQ) and has submitted plans for a 6.5-mile proof-of-process tunnel which would run within the City of Los Angeles and Culver City.

The company said that unlike a subway, there is no practical upper limit to the number of stations that can be built along the tunnel route, as stations can be as small as a single parking space because the service is accessed via lifts.

Each Loop 'station' is made up of a bank of elevators to transport the skates to and from ground level. "Since stations require such a small footprint, they can be easily integrated in busy city-centers, residential communities, or any location along the tunnel route that can accommodate a single parking space," the company said. It has published a map showing a potential set of routes for the service.

What is the Hyperloop Pod Competition?

Musk's SpaceX has its own Hyperloop test track at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California -- about one mile long and with a six-foot outer diameter.

In order to accelerate the development of functional prototypes and encourage student innovation, SpaceX announced the Hyperloop Pod Competition in 2015, which challenges university teams to design and build the best transport pod, judged by different criteria each time. In 2018, the focus was the maximum speed for a self-propelled pod on the test track, or as the competition puts it: "Fastest time without crashing wins!". In 2019 it was judged on maximum speed with successful deceleration .

What is Virgin Hyperloop One?

Virgin Hyperloop One is one of the leading contenders attempting to create a commercially viable Hyperloop system. It was founded in June 2014 and has over 300 staff. It has raised $295m with the aim of building an operational system by 2021. The company currently has projects underway in Missouri, Texas, Colorado, North Carolina, the Midwest, India, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Virgin Hyperloop One's DevLoop in North Las Vegas.

In February, the company announced plans for the Indian state of Maharashtra to build a Hyperloop between Pune and Mumbai beginning with an operational demonstration track. The project will start with a six-month feasibility study looking at the route, environmental impact, the economic and commercial aspects of the route, the regulatory framework, and cost and funding model recommendations.

Assuming all goes well, an operational demonstration track will be built between two points on the route two to three years from the signing of the agreement and serve as a platform for testing. The company said the construction of the full Pune-Mumbai route -- a 25-minute journey -- would take place in five to seven years. It added the high-capacity passenger and cargo Hyperloop route could eventually see 150 million passenger trips annually.

"I believe Virgin Hyperloop One could have the same impact upon India in the 21st century as trains did in the 20th century," said Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin group.

The company is also working on a feasibility study into a Hyperloop route linking Kansas City, Columbia, and St Louis running along the I-70 in Missouri, and is looking at high-level cost estimate and funding model recommendations.

The company has a 500 meter-long DevLoop, which has a diameter of 3.3m and is located 30 minutes from Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. In December, the company said it had completed its third phase of testing, achieving test speeds of 387 kilometers per hour.

"The tests were conducted in a tube depressurized down to the equivalent air pressure experienced at 200,000 feet above sea level. A Virgin Hyperloop One pod quickly lifts above the track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to ultra-low aerodynamic drag," the company said.

It has identified 11 potential routes in the US , from the short -- a Boston-Somerset-Providence route of just 64 miles -- to the epic -- the Cheyenne-Houston route which would run 1,152 miles across four states, potentially reducing to 1 hour and 45 minutes a journey that currently takes 17 hours by car or truck. The company has also identified nine routes across Europe , potentially connecting over 75 million people in 44 cities, and spanning 5,000 kilometers. 

In June 2019, the Indian project took a step forward with the government of Maharashtra giving Hyperloop the green light and preparing to start the public procurement process. This project will be a partnership between the DP World-Virgin Hyperloop One consortia and the state government, with DP World expected to invest $500m to complete the first phase of the project which will certify the new technology for passenger operations.

In July, Virgin Hyperloop One announced a development partnership with Saudi Arabia's Economic City Authority (ECA) to conduct a study to build a 35-kilometer test and certification Hyperloop track -- the longest so far -- as well as a research and development center and Hyperloop manufacturing facility north of Jeddah. In the future, traveling from Riyadh to Jeddah would take 76 minutes (instead of over 10 hours) using Hyperloop technologies, the company said. 

What is Hyperloop Transportation Technologies?

Tech and the future of transportation: From here to there

Transportation is about to get a technology-driven reboot. The details are still taking shape, but future transport systems will certainly be connected, data-driven and highly automated.

Founded in 2013, Hyperloop Transport Technologies (HyperloopTT or HTT) is another company looking to turn Hyperloop into reality. It has a team of 800 engineers and headquartered in Los Angeles. It wants to build a transport system built on a passive magnetic levitation system and says its 30-meter capsules will be able to carry 28 to 40 passengers and travel at a maximum speed of 1,223 kilometers per hour, moving 164,000 passengers a day on one line at full efficiency. The company points to reinsurance company Munich Re deeming its system to be "feasible and insurable" as a reflection of its progress so far.

In September, HyperloopTT said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board to build a Hyperloop between the city centers of Vijaywada and Amaravati, potentially turning a trip of more than one hour into a six-minute ride. The project will use a public-private partnership, with funding primarily coming from private investors and starting with a six-month feasibility study. The company is also working on the development of a route from Bratislava, Slovakia to Brno, Czech Republic .

The company has a 320-meter test track system in Toulouse, France. "With tubes assembled and pumps installed, HyperloopTT is now beginning the process of integrating their full-scale passenger capsule for human trials in 2020," the company said in June this year.

Last year, the company said it also planned a second full-scale system, spanning one kilometer and elevated by pylons at a height of 5.8 meters. It's expected to be completed in 2019 .

Another route identified as having Hyperloop potential would see the 313-mile journey from Chicago to Cleveland completed in 28 minutes -- at a speed of 730 miles an hour. A $1.2m feasibility study for developing a Hyperloop corridor route is due to be completed by the fall of this year.

HTT's first commercial Hyperloop project is a 10-kilometer length of track due to go live next year in the United Arab Emirates. Bibop Gresta, chairman of HyperloopTT said when the deal was announced in April 2018 that "with regulatory support" the first section will be operational in time for Expo 2020, which opens in October of that year . Construction work on the project is due to start in Abu Dhabi in the third quarter of this year.

In February, HyperloopTT told Australian politicians its technology could transport people from Sydney to Canberra in 22 minutes .

Who else is building Hyperloop services?

TransPod is another contender, and released a study that predicted that a TransPod Hyperloop system would cost 30 percent less than high-speed rail lines in Europe -- and be more efficient for passengers and freight, at more than three times the speed. It also said a Hyperloop will cost 50% less and travel four times faster than high-speed rail between Toronto and Windsor in Canada. In November 2016, TransPod announced the closing of a first $15m round of funding from Angelo Investments.

In January this year, TransPod said it was building a new three-kilometer-long test track in Limoges, France. Construction of the test track will begin in 2019, and the company plans to start high-speed testing in 2020. The results of the program will inform the construction of a working prototype of the TransPod's Hyperloop vacuum train , also to be built in Limoges.

Another company looking to build Hyperloop-style systems, Arrivo, shut down at the end of 2018.

What's next for Hyperloop?

Hyperloop is a technology that, for its supporters at least, could have a huge impact. It could reduce air travel between big cities, boost economies and trade, and reduce the pressure on housing in cities by allowing commuters to live further away. But none of this is anywhere near proven -- yet. There are major technical and business hurdles that Hyperloop technologies will need to surmount before they can carry passengers in comfort through a pneumatic tube, let alone change the world.

The next stage for Hyperloop is to move beyond initial testing and feasibility studies, start longer distance trials of the technology and, even more importantly, testing the service with passengers. Another challenge will be to find commercial models that work around the world. Only when all this is done will it become clear whether Hyperloop can really become a success.

Additional resources

• Hyperloop's 240 mph speed record puts us one step closer to sci-fi tube travel (TechRepublic)
• Virgin Hyperloop One hits new top speed (ZDNet)
• Elon Musk's Hyperloop: Here's the Dutch team with designs on supersonic train concept (ZDNet)
• Moscow wants a Hyperloop (CNET)
• Hyperloop could cart ya to Jakarta someday (CNET)

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9 years later, Elon Musk’s biggest pipe dream may finally come true

Nine years since he first had the idea, Musk may finally try to build a Hyperloop.

In 2013, Elon Musk had a singular idea to revolutionize intercity transport — and it had nothing to do with Tesla. Instead of self-driving electric vehicles ferrying people to and from the office, he proposed a system of tubes in which pods would ferry people at incredible speeds of up to 760 miles per hour.

Musk called the system the Hyperloop. And then he… didn’t do anything with it. Flash forward nine years later, and finally, we may be on the verge of seeing what an Elon Musk-built Hyperloop actually looks like and how it might work.

In a tweet posted in April 2022, Musk revealed that tunneling firm The Boring Company would “attempt to build a working Hyperloop”.

So, could we finally be gliding towards a tubular transport future?

HORIZONS is a newsletter on the innovations of today that will shape the world of tomorrow. This is an adapted version of the May 5 edition . Forecast the future by signing up for free .

What is the Hyperloop?

A concept illustration of a Hyperloop.

Musk’s original idea was a response to a planned new high-speed railway line in California. At the time, Musk wrote this attack on the idea:

“How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory] — doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars — would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?”

He believed he could do better: Pods containing passengers would speed through 4 meter-wide, wholly-enclosed metal tubes that would be kept in a near-vacuum. The pods would levitate on the track using magnetism — a technology known as Maglev that essentially nixes friction.

According to Musk’s calculations, the proposed system could propel pods full of people at as much as 760 miles an hour. That speed would reduce the travel time from Los Angeles to San Francisco to just 35 minutes.

“There is a huge difference between demonstrating a technology works and the scalability.”

He proposed Hyperloop as an “open source” transport project, analogous to how multiple companies and groups develop different flavors of the open-source operating system Linux.

Musk’s idea was not new — the Hyperloop has its roots in two hundreds-of-years-old innovations:

• A technology patent filed in 1799 by George Medhurst, to do with using compressed air as a means of propulsion.
• A 20-mile-long “atmospheric railway,” built by legendary Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1844. (Brunel, in fact, is a rather Musk-like figure: He engineered the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship and the Great Western Railway, a major United Kingdom transport line.)

After Musk published his paper, several companies took the idea and ran with it, including Virgin Hyperloop and Hyperloop Transport Technology. In 2020, Virgin Hyperloop even gave a public demonstration of their technology, successfully sending some of their employees along their track.

“It’s difficult to distinguish between the smoke and mirrors and the actual developments that are happening,” says Roberto Palacin , a reader in Transport Futures at Newcastle University’s School of Engineering.

The problem with passengers

It may be inpractical to send passengers in a Hyperloop at speed for safety reasons.

It is important to note that the Hyperloop has made some progress: In 2016, The Boring Company constructed a mile-long test track, and in 2020 Virgin published a video of what it called the “ first Hyperloop passenger test ” in its own 500-meter-long tunnel. But there are still plenty of question-marks hanging over how much progress the secretive technology has actually made.

“There is a huge difference between demonstrating a technology works and the scalability,” says Palacin.

“We can create a near-vacuum in a tube, add a pod, and throw it at a certain speed and brake. That’s great, but that’s not a system. That’s the basic running technology.”

He points to how in addition to the core technology to make the pod move, any functioning Hyperloop would have to develop a control system for managing multiple pods running along the same route at regular intervals. Engineers would also need to figure out how to scale safety systems and operations so they can run safely around the clock.

“Mass transit and transport systems... are very complex socio-technical systems.”

And these issues are every bit as important as engineering.

“Mass transit and transport systems, in general, are very complex socio-technical systems,” explains Palacin.

“There is an element of technology and engineering that still needs to be addressed, but there’s also the interaction of humans with the system.”

There is one particular problem for which none of the companies working on the technology have a solution

“The fundamental problem with Hyperloop as a system is capacity,” says Gareth Dennis , a U.K. railway engineer.

“In all countries that have a reasonably well-regulated railway it is illegal to have trains running within each other’s braking distances,” explains Dennis.

“For a system as fast as Hyperloop that gives you about maybe 36 to 40 seconds minimum between trains. You might think, well, that doesn’t sound like very much, but bearing in mind that the systems that all of these companies — whether it’s Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Virgin Hyperloop, or TransPod — all of them have been proposing pods that seat in some cases [only] up to about 30 or 40 passengers.”

In Dennis’s view, what makes Hyperloop unworkable is that the number of passengers a Hyperloop system would be capable of carrying would be many times fewer than a traditional railway. Hyperloop will only be capable of carrying between two and four thousand passengers per hour in either direction, compared to traditional high-speed rail which can handle as many as 20,000 (and shorter commuter railways can handle many multiples more).

“From a passenger perspective, the capacity of Hyperloop is useless,” says Dennis.

Getting to the Freight of the Problem

It is possible sending freight by Hyperloop is more viable.

Earlier this year, Virgin Hyperloop made a dramatic announcement: The company is pivoting to focus on moving freight.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has also announced a freight project based in the port of Hamburg, which it claims will be able to shuttle 2800 standard shipping containers per day.

“Hyperloop systems would not only support passengers, but also high-priority, on-demand goods, allowing deliveries to be completed in hours versus days with greater reliability and fewer delays,” writes Jay Walder , Virgin Hyperloop CEO in a press release announcing a partnership with Dubai-based supply-chain company DP World .

Hyperloop “can shrink inventory lead times, help reduce finished goods inventory, and cut required warehouse space and cost by 25 [percent],” Walder says.

“By and large freight just needs bulk and it does not need speed. And that’s the opposite of what Hyperloop does.”

On paper, freight makes much more sense than does passenger transportation.

“Freight can put up with greater accelerations,” says Hugh Hunt , a professor of Engineering Dynamics and Vibration at Cambridge University.

“I can only subject humans to a certain amount of distress. Whereas I can subject refrigerators to greater distress,” Hunt says.

“Also, I can pack the refrigerators into one of these pods and leave them there for a few hours until it’s ready to go.”

If they’re full of freight, then pods don’t need to supply oxygen and freight can’t complain about delays disembarking at the end of the journey.

Future transportation expert Palacin argues that Hyperloop could conceivably even improve the existing freight logistics model.

“The movement of cargo and cargo boxes out of ports requires an awful lot of infrastructure,” Palacin says.

Hyperloop could conceivably zip incoming container traffic away from crowded ports to somewhere more centrally located in a given geography, where containers could then be sorted for distribution, he says.

Rail engineer Dennis is more skeptical.

“By and large freight just needs bulk and it does not need speed. And that’s the opposite of what Hyperloop does,” says Dennis.

Dennis argues that the main problem isn’t the Hyperloop technology perse, but how that technology fits into how the world actually functions. He’s particularly bewildered by Virgin’s deal with DP World, a Dubai-based freight company, to build Hyperloops to move cargo from ships inland.

“The lion’s share of the journey is by ship and that’s not changing anytime soon,” says Dennis. He also notes that there isn’t enough steel in the world to build Hyperloops long enough to remove container ships from supply chains. Freight is also just not as lucrative as moving people, he adds.

“It’s very difficult for freight to justify major linear infrastructure investments and Hyperloop is absolutely no different to that,” says Dennis.

On the horizon…

We’re still a little far away from a tube-filled future.

There are no further details on exactly what The Boring Company is planning beyond Musk’s tweet. But if Musk is to be believed something will happen. So is there still hope for a Hyperloop-propelled future?

Palacin believes the reality may be less eye-catching.

“My hypothesis is that this is going to be a testbed for a number of technologies that are going to be really relevant for other transport modes in the coming decade or two,” he says.

Just as NASA’s space program in the 1960s led to the creation of several technologies that are used everywhere today, the real legacy of Hyperloop may be in innovations that feed other industries, he says.

“I think the magnetic levitation or semi-magnetic levitation — all the magnetic propulsion that is being used in there — could be really relevant for next-generation braking systems for railways for instance,” he speculates.

Dennis is unconvinced, saying: “there is no viable positive case for Hyperloop having any application at all, it's just useless.”

Hunt is more optimistic because of the number of companies still involved in the space — however quiet they are in public.

“I think it is very important in the early days of this type of technology that there’s competition because things don't happen quickly or safely or effectively unless there is competition,” he says.

“I’m pretty sure it’ll be somewhere in ten years’ time. Whether it’ll be everywhere in 20 years’ time is a good question.”

HORIZONS is a newsletter on the innovations of today that will shape the world of tomorrow. This is an adapted version of the April 28 edition . Forecast the future by signing up for free .

This article was originally published on May 6, 2022

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Commuting at 700km an hour by hyperloop takes a step closer to reality with successful test run

Hardt says it had a successful first test of its hyperloop prototype at its test centre in the Netherlands.

Imagine commuting in a capsule blasted through a pipe as hurtles along on magnetic fields at speeds of up to 700 km/h.

Dutch company Hardt says it has taken a step towards making that a reality with a successful test of the futuristic mode of travel .

"Today, with the first successful test, we were able to levitate the vehicle, also turn on the guidance system and the propulsion system," Marinus van der Meijs, the technology and engineering director of Hardt, said.

• Paris to Berlin in an hour: Welcome to the future of high-speed rail travel in Europe

"Then we move the vehicle to our launch position about 20 metres into the tube. And then we launched it with an acceleration similar to that of a metro [train], up to a top speed of about 30 km/h, about 100 m in the pipe. And that's when we reached a successful test," van der Meijs added.

The test was conducted at Hardt’s test centre in the Netherlands which consists of a 420-metre tube made up of 34 separate sections.

A vacuum pump sucks out the air to reduce the internal pressure. That reduces drag and allows capsules to travel at high speeds.

Replacing short-haul flights

While the speed has been modest in the limited space offered by the test centre, the Dutch company aims to increase its speed up to 700 km/h.

The idea of the hyperloop was first conceived by tech mogul Elon Musk more than a decade ago, when he suggested it could shuttle passengers the nearly 645 km between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 30 minutes.

The distance between Paris and Amsterdam is approximately 500 km when travelling by road. The travel time by car is typically around 5 to 6 hours.

Teams around the world have been working on the idea since Musk’s suggestion, but there is not yet a commercially viable hyperloop system.

Its backers say it is far more efficient than short-haul flights, high-speed rail and freight trucks, but it will involve significant investment in infrastructure.

• Inside the new Dutch hyperloop test centre that hopes to revolutionise Europe's future transport

"To deliver [the Hardt] Hyperloop as a mobility system, we have a very complicated puzzle which requires technology, which requires policy, which requires public-private collaboration, and that is what is needed most," Roel van de Pas, Commercial director of Hardt, said.

Getting the technology to this point has not been easy, according to the company.

"The most difficult things that we are doing now is to test all of these functions together. Levitation, propulsion, guidance, all of those functions we are now capable of executing as an orchestra, making them work together," said Van de Pas.

Hardt says its hyperloop will be ready for passenger operations by 2030.

For more on this story, watch the video in the media player above.

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Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: This is the future of high-speed transportation. It's 3 1/2 times faster than Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains and even faster than a Boeing 747. It's a hyperloop – magnetic pods levitating inside a tube at more than 1,000 kilometers per hour. In theory, you could go from LA to San Francisco in just 45 minutes with tickets less than $100 one way. This technology could make working and living in two different cities a norm, while also creating a world with less congestion and pollution.

Sara Luchian: Woo!

Josh Giegel: Yes!

Narrator: And with a successful human test ride in November 2020, we could be less than 10 years away from it becoming reality. The concept of the hyperloop became widely popular in 2013 thanks to Elon Musk's 58-page "Hyperloop Alpha" paper that outlined the design, cost, and safety of the concept. But the technology to bring it all together commercially was only recently fine-tuned, namely magnetic levitation, or maglev.

Maglev is basically what allows a hyperloop to go incredibly fast, thanks to the lack of friction between the passenger-carrying pods and the tube-shaped track. The general concept is simple. Magnets lining the bottom of the pod repel the tube material, levitating the pod as it runs.

Giegel: As an engineer, I always get very excited about talking about magnetic levitation, electromagnetic propulsion.

Narrator: That's Josh, a mechanical engineer who previously worked at SpaceX. He's now the cofounder and CTO of Virgin Hyperloop. And this is Chuck. He's the lead engineer at a different hyperloop company, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. They're both currently developing the best combination of magnets to create the smoothest ride possible, using passive or active maglev.

Passive maglev uses permanent magnets in a specific configuration to create a constant magnetic current that levitates the pod, similar to the magnets you might've played with as a kid. Active maglev uses a combination of permanent magnets and electromagnets, the latter which can manipulate the electric current and the strength of that current.

Giegel: Basically, if I get too close, I drive it one way. If I get too far, I add some strength. And so you can kind of think of it as balancing out. And so if there's bumps in the track, if there's all this, I have a system which basically uses an active control system to make that ride smooth.

Narrator: And while you might think this sounds similar to existing maglev trains, the hyperloop concept removes a key element that holds a lot of trains and planes back: air resistance.

Giegel: So, if you ever stick your hand out a window when you're driving in a car, imagine if there's really no air there. You really wouldn't feel that force pushing back your hand. And the same thing can be said for hyperloop.

Narrator: This is where vacuum pumps come in handy. Both companies are installing pumps along the tube. For HyperloopTT...

Chuck Michael: The vacuum pumps in our case are developed by Leybold, which invented the vacuum pumps about 150 years ago. So they have a lot of experience.

Narrator: These pumps, located every 10 kilometers, theoretically would suck out 99.9% of the air between the capsule and the tube. Removing air drag could be the difference of some 800 kilometers per hour.

Michael: Theoretically, you could go even faster than the speed of sound, but that's toying with some fun things that we'll do later on.

Narrator: It's going to take a little bit more time before we go supersonic, though. First, the companies have to prove the tech is safe, which is why this scene is so important.

Luchian: Wow!

Giegel: Yes!

Luchian: I flew!

Giegel: Yes! [both laughing]

Luchian: That was so good!

Giegel: That was awesome!

Narrator: In November 2020, Josh and Sara from Virgin Hyperloop became the first people to ever ride a hyperloop. The two-seat prototype hyperloop traveled 500 meters, reaching 172 kilometers per hour within 6.25 seconds.

Giegel: You felt a bit forced back in your seat. You really couldn't even notice the levitation. Like, you didn't notice it pick up. But what you did notice is there wasn't that kind of jerkiness. The camera didn't do it quite justice, because the camera was bouncing around a bit more than we were. And it was a little bit more of, like, a cushion or, like, a pillowy type of feeling. You could process everything that was going on around you. You're basically coasting, and you're floating on an idea that was nothing more than something on a piece of paper not all that long ago.

Narrator: While the ride proved its safety, the company wants to work more on the experience. And the actual hyperloop will be much bigger too, holding 28 or more passengers with the ability to move 30,000 passengers an hour. But to get to this point, there will be more testing involved for both companies.

Michael: Lots of things have to happen between now and then. The hyperloop construction, the route is one thing. The integration with the stations is another, and that takes a partnership with the communities.

Narrator: And HyperloopTT is currently in the works to build and test a full-sized project in Abu Dhabi. Its first potential US project will run from Chicago to Cleveland. Virgin Hyperloop will be building its new certification testing facility in West Virginia in 2022, including a 9,600-meter track to be used for testing and establishing regulatory and safety guidelines.

Giegel: Around 2025, we're intending to certify a fleet of vehicles, of the 28-passenger vehicles.

Narrator: Virgin Hyperloop has plans in Dubai, India, and more, with stateside plans for the Midwest, North Carolina, and Texas. But both of these US projects won't be complete until around 2030. Which might sound like a long time, but airplanes took about 16 years to really get up and running, and the first high-speed rail in Japan took at least a decade of development. So some 15 years for a hyperloop doesn't seem that far off. After all...

Giegel: How can we be a 22nd-century country when we're built upon the technology of the 19th century, upon the 20th century? A single lane of hyperloop can do in excess of 30,000 passengers an hour. What are you going to invest in? What's the thing that you should invest in that allows you to get the future demand, the future needs that you have? A shift is possible if we choose to embrace it.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published in December 2020.

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Hyperloop: An Overview of the Futuristic Form of Transportation

Hyperloops aren't just hype, but the futuristic mode of blazingly fast ground transport has a long and winding path ahead.

Kristen Hammer grew up in central Ohio, where cars and deer have a long and grisly history on the state’s roadways. That’s also the case, of course, in countless other regions of the country. But a new mode of high-tech transportation she’s helping to develop, called a hyperloop, could be a remedy of sorts. Self-contained, ultra-high-speed and wildlife-free, it’s starting to pick up steam (figuratively speaking) in America and around the world.

As business development manager for Los Angeles-based Virgin Hyperloop One , which has so far garnered nearly half a billion dollars in venture capital (including a recent infusion of $172 million), Hammer works with local governments across the U.S. to forge crucial alliances and establish key routes. The company, which is on much firmer footing after some challenging years in 2016 and 2017, currently has projects under consideration or underway in Missouri, Texas, Colorado, North Carolina, the Midwest, India, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. 

“We spend a ton of time just educating people on what a hyperloop is,” said Hammer, who previously served as manager of materials engineering and a senior welding engineer for the company’s DevLoop test track in Las Vegas. “[Officials] can’t give us intelligent regulation if they don’t know how the system works and what the moving parts are.”

Here in the U.S., hyperloop proponents are making efforts to bring about that regulation sooner than later, so they have official strictures within which to build. But until that happens, commercially viable systems aren’t possible and companies are left to make hypothetical cases for why the technology is worth backing.

Hyperloop Explained

“Politically, or at least ideologically, people tend to frame regulation as the enemy of industry and innovation,” said David Pring-Mill, communications director for the nonprofit Hyperloop Advanced Research Project. “In reality, sometimes certain types of corporations actually want to know what regulators are thinking and want to know what the rules are going to be so they can calculate, innovate and invest accordingly, and get better access to capital markets. The emergence of progress and clarity on the regulatory front actually increases the likelihood of a domestic [hyperloop] route in the near future.”

The technology is already there, he said. It’s largely a matter of proving that hyperloops are viable business-wise in the absence of governmental support, and that they'll have a positive impact in terms of environmental, social and governance (ESG) benefits. None of that is easy, but it’s absolutely necessary. 

“If you’re a company and you have a new technology and people don’t know what it is or what it’s value is, and you tell them that it’s going to cost a tremendous amount of money, then the onus is on you to prove the value and viability.”

Super fast — but your coffee won’t slide

If you’re wondering how these things are supposed to work, here’s the nutshell version: sleek metal pods hurtle through low-pressure, windowless vacuum tubes with the help of magnetic levitation and electromagnetic propulsion — kind of like the pneumatic tubes used in libraries and bank drive-thrus, but not really; they’re far more powerful and sophisticated. Jet-like speeds could exceed 500 mph and top out around 670. (By comparison, a Boeing 747 cruises at 540 mph). And the ride, whether elevated or subterranean, will reportedly be much smoother — or so a company engineer told the New York Times earlier this year.

Hyperloop Speed

“You’ll feel 30 to 40 percent of the acceleration compared to an airplane,” he said, and “coffee won’t slide” even at the highest velocity. Presumably the same holds for adult beverages. But it’s hard to truly know just yet — so far the fastest hyperloop pods have topped out at just  288 mph .

Rather than serving as cross-country transportation, hyperloops will most likely connect cities in the same region. There already are efforts to link Midwest hubs like Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cleveland and Chicago, and the ability to access those places more quickly could allow people to live and work hundreds of miles apart without worrying about a long commute.

Grace Gallucci, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency ( NOACA ) in Cleveland, Ohio, is working with another California-based company, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (aka HyperloopTT) to bring hyperloop travel to her region. While the Midwest might have a “functional pilot” in seven to 10 years, she said, it will be another 25 years before we see a nationwide network. 

“I think [hyperloop travel] is really promising,” Gallucci said, “but we would all be foolish if we thought you could take technology of this magnitude and this scale, develop it today and implement it tomorrow. There’s so much that could still prevent it from happening, or allow it to emerge as an even more transformational form of transportation.”

In 2017, Virgin Hyperloop One had what the company's business strategy director, Josh Raycroft, has described as its “Kitty Hawk moment” — a reference to Orville and Wilbur Wright’s famous 1903 test flight in North Carolina.

“We successfully completed the world’s first full-system, self-powered Hyperloop test-run,” he told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation” during a hearing in Washington, D.C. last September. “This gives us high confidence we can reach our target speed of about 600 mph as we continue to develop the technology.”

A month after Virgin’s announcement, HyperloopTT unveiled its first full-scale capsule, made of composite material, in Spain. It’s the same capsule — 30 meters long with a capacity of 28-40 passengers and sheathed in a proprietary material called Vibranium — that’s now on the company’s test track in Toulouse, France. 

Hyperloop origins

Modern hyperloops were the brainchild of tech titan Elon Musk, who detailed his theoretical invention in a 2013 white paper and whose SpaceX company hosts annual pod-designing competitions.

“The Hyperloop (or something similar) is, in my opinion, the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart,” Musk wrote. “Around that inflection point, I suspect that supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper… [But] for a sub several hundred mile journey, having a supersonic plane is rather pointless, as you would spend almost all your time slowly ascending and descending and very little time at cruise speed… 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.”

Impressive. And derivative. Pressurized tubes are old news. They were used to cart passengers beneath London in the 1860s — though not at high speeds — and New York’s Broadway in the early 1870s. The Rand Corporation even came up with the notion of a tunnel-based, electromagnetic wave-driven “Very High-Speed Transit” system in the early 1970s.

And so-called “maglev” trains, which function via magnetic attraction and repulsion, have been around as a concept for more than a century and in operation since the mid-1980s. Currently the world’s fastest train, the Shanghai Maglev in China, can achieve speeds of up to 267 mph and has ferried folks from the city’s Pudong International Airport to a metro station 19 miles away since 2004. 

Bumpy road ahead

Before they’re ready to roll, er, hover, hyperloops — whether those built by Virgin Hyperloop or several other companies in North America and abroad that are vying to be first at bat — have lots of impediments to overcome. A not-small one is cost. For now, let’s just say it’s definitely in the multi-billions.  

A few years ago, Forbes obtained Hyperloop One documents  revealing details of the hyperloop track between L.A. and California’s Bay Area — Musk’s original route. It was estimated that constructing a 107-mile loop just around the Bay Area alone would cost from $9 billion to $13 billion. (Then-CEO Rob Lloyd confirmed the numbers, calling them “high-level estimates” likely intended for prospective partners). But as a 2018 Vox story noted, even the $9-to-13 billion range is still a bargain (per mile) compared to the $2.5 billion Second Avenue Subway stop in New York City. And it’s far cheaper than New York's ongoing Long Island Rail Road project, which has skyrocketed to $3.5 billion per mile . It’s also way less expensive than California’s now-downgraded plan for a high-speed train, which originally would have covered 520 miles at $123 million per mile. 

“The cost per mile will vary [by] project,” said Sarah Lawson, Virgin Hyperloop’s marketing product manager. “This is exactly what feasibility studies are for — to model the ridership, demand, alignment, etc. for a specific route that will inform the cost to construct the system.”

Also in 2016, HyperloopTT told the Wall Street Journal that estimated costs per mile for its more conventional system were between $5 million and $20 million, which Miller said is low. Generally, he added, the cost is around two-thirds of what it would take to build a high-speed rail route. The company recently completed a feasibility study for its Chicago-Cleveland-Pittsburgh project and plans to announce cost-specific details in mid-November.

“The interesting thing with our system moving forward are not the cost numbers, it’s that we can build a profitable system,” Miller said. “Then it’s not really about cost, it’s about how quickly you can recover the investment.” 

Rick Geddes, a professor at Cornell University’s Department of Policy Analysis & Management, said there’s going to be lots of “learning by doing” as this technology evolves. 

“As you learn how to [build] the hyperloop routes, there’s going to be a cost-lowering effect from that. Just like in any industry, as your output grows, the cost per unit falls.”

There are also several things that could cause costs to rise, Geddes noted, including environmental permitting, stakeholder complaints and political red tape.

On the subject of ROI (return on investment), which hyperloop hypers insist will be significant, he said a host of unknown variables precludes any sort of firm prediction.

“It’s really hard to say. I think there are going to be some routes and projects where the ROI will be high. But that presupposes funding. How is it going to be funded? Not financed, but funded. And by that I mean where did the underlying dollars come from. Are you going to charge each user per mile? Are you going to charge them per minute in the tube? Are you going to charge for freight as well as passengers? So all of that drives your revenue. Before you can talk about an ROI, you have to understand your revenue model.”

There also are issues related to certification and the aforementioned regulation — setting standards and parameters for unproven technology, agreeing on safety measures and more. Right-of-way and permitting concerns are part of the mix, too: Where can hyperloops be located? 

Using a passive magnetic levitation system dubbed Inductrack that was developed by Lawrence Livermore Labs and eliminates the need for a powered a supercooled track, HyperloopTT is exclusively focused on passenger transport. Besides its 105-long prototype capsule in France, it’s working toward constructing a fully functional three-mile-long commercial passenger line in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It’s pitching Australia on the concept, too, and in America — through a public-private partnership with the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) — the company is studying the feasibility of establishing a route between Cleveland and Chicago.

Rob Miller, chief marketing officer for HyperloopTT, said the biggest challenge is “building regulations for a new form of transportation and the partnership that requires with local, municipal, state, regional and federal government. So it’s something we’ve been working on for a number of years and is the thing that will lead us towards getting a hyperloop system approved.”

As Gallucci explained, “You can’t have a feasible system without having a nationwide standard that is adopted and enforced by USDOT.”

Hammer spends most of her time in the U.S. and said there are ongoing efforts to establish domestic routes. So far, though, the country that seems most likely to land Virgin’s (and, perhaps, the world’s) first hyperloop is India, where construction of a Pune-to-Mumbai hyperloop is underway in partnership with the State Government of Maharashtra as part of a public infrastructure project. If completed, it could cut the commute between those cities from more than 3.5 hours to 35 minutes.

However, Hammer adds, “If somebody came forward tomorrow [in the U.S.] and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got financing and we’re ready to sign a contract,’ it’s not unreasonable that the U.S. could jump out in front.” 

Miller said HyperloopTT’s efforts include a 600-page document containing general regulation guidelines that has been passed along to the European Commission, which is responsible for various legislation overseas. In America, it’s forging a relationship with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Non-Traditional and Emerging Transportation Technology (NETT) Council, formed in late 2018 so inventors and investors can discuss plans and proposals with a single entity instead of wasting time with multiple agencies.

But politics can also hamper progress, Pring-Mill said. (The most recent example of that is the scuttling earlier this year of an extremely pricey and comparatively slow high-speed rail system in California that was expected to link several major cities.) So while he’s upbeat about the NETT Council, Pring-Mill thinks hyperloops will happen overseas before they hit the United States — not least of all because there are fewer issues with eminent domain, whereby governments acquire private land for public use.

“Even though I don’t think that’s necessarily morally right,” he said, “that ability to secure right-of-way can certainly reduce the cost of a mega-project and majorly speed up development and construction times.”

In the U.S., Geddes said, right-of-way is a “huge issue” and “one argument for tunneling, because it’s easier to get a permit to tunnel than it is to get something at grade or something that is elevated on pylons.”

Existing interstates, he added, are a possibility because public right-of-ways are hundreds of feet wide on either side. Going down the middle is a possibility too. But those are options only if the route is straight. Negotiating a curve, even a small one, just isn't possible at 600 mph.

Safety concerns

Political and regulatory issues aren’t the only speed humps slowing hyperloop adoption. Safety, too, is a major concern. As the U.K.’s Eureka Magazine noted in a 2017 article titled “The impossible engineering reality check facing hyperloop,” a number of issues must be addressed. One is the thermal expansion of steel tubes under direct sunlight and whether or not they can withstand a sudden pressure change in case there’s a natural or manmade breach — before hyperloops can be practically implemented. 

On its website , Virgin Hyperloop addresses those potentially problematic matters and others by emphasizing that its tubes are made from buckle- and puncture-resistant “thick, strong steel.” Additionally, it goes on, tubes and pods are being designed to handle extremely low air pressure and to “tolerate small leaks, holes, and even breaches without suffering from reduced structural integrity.” And strategically placed sensors will immediately locate and report leaks so they can be quickly repaired. Also: “Every pod will have emergency exits if needed, but mostly pods will glide safely to the next portal (station) or egress point in the event of an emergency.”

And according to Chris Bobko, HyperloopTT's head of engineering integration, when it comes to the “well known and well understood” concept of thermal expansion, there are several possible strategies that stem from effective existing practices — including those employed by pipelines and railroads. 

“In some scenarios, we plan for thermal expansion bellows to control where we want the thermal expansion to accumulate — and these are off-the-shelf components with long lifespans. In other scenarios, we don’t need these devices at all.”

On the risk of hyperloop tubes buckling from a negative pressure difference, Bobko explained that “routine structural and mechanical engineering takes all these loads into account and adds appropriate safety design factors when developing a structural design for the tube.”

Automated hyperloop travel is less susceptible to human error as well, Miller claims. And besides being deer-free, the tubes are clear of obstructions that often cause train accidents, namely humans and cows. 

Better for people and The planet

A big selling point of hyperloops is their purported environmental friendliness. They could, for instance, be at least partly self-powered by solar energy instead of gobbling up fossil fuels — though at this point there’s no clear research to indicate if or to what degree that’s feasible. And they could potentially eliminate a lot of driving for commuters as well as freight haulers, which would ease fuel consumption and reduce pollution. 

In addition to feeding off the sun, Miller said, “you’ll potentially collect wind energy. And you get some [energy] back through kinetic and regenerative braking.” The pylons that support a hyperloop track, he added, could even double as power stations for recharging cars and providing other services. In short, he believes, nature wins and so do people.

From a humanitarian standpoint, Pring-Mill said, hyperloops could come to the rescue during natural disasters by serving as a transportational backup system. If a bridge is crippled, for example, or there’s congestion on the highways, hyperloops could speedily deliver disaster relief supplies and personnel to affected areas. 

Like so much else about hyperloops, though, all of that is merely speculative. Still, supporters maintain, they will come to fruition and they will be transformational. 

“I’m almost certain it will happen eventually,” Geddes said. “It’s just a question of the time. The last new mode of transportation was probably the Wright Brothers in 1904. And since then, we have kind of been refining and building out these old modes. So it’s really time for a new transportation mode to be explored and utilized.”

Hammer is even more certain, calling hyperloops “a fundamental change in how people live and move.”

Miller, too, is genuinely pumped: “It’s leagues above anything we’ve built as a civilization.” 

Both may be true, but there’s a long and winding path ahead that’s not conducive to high speeds. Unlike with other technological innovations, moving fast and breaking things isn’t an option.

“People thought airplanes could never get off the ground,” Gallucci said. “And there are some folks that never envisioned the worldwide air travel we have today. But that didn’t happen overnight. And this is not going to happen overnight.”

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The WIRED Guide to Hyperloop

First proposed by Elon Musk , the theoretical transportation system we call hyperloop would propel people- or cargo-filled pods over long distances through steel tubes. Magnetic levitation and big vacuum pumps would do away with pesky friction and air resistance, letting those bus-sized vehicles zip along at speeds approaching Mach 1. It wouldn’t just be fast, the boosters say: Hyperloop could be cheaper and better for the environment than the planes, trains, and cars in which humanity putzes about today.

And like so many promised panaceas, it’s actually quite simple—on the surface. The tubes and pods should be easy enough to build, but making hyperloop a reality takes more than a few good engineers and a small fortune or two. It will require a whole lot of legal maneuvering, regulatory wrestling, and a massive amount of political will and public buy-in. Infrastructure, you should know, is hard .

The tubular tizzy started in 2012, when Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk suggested The Hyperloop as a new form of transportation, one that would be twice as fast as a plane and totally solar powered. He didn’t offer any engineering specifics at the time, but in August 2013 he produced a 57-page white paper that outlined his technical thinking for how this system would work.

At its core, hyperloop is all about removing the two things that slow down regular vehicles: friction and air resistance. To do away with the former, you make the pod hover above its track, like a magnetic levitation train. Musk originally suggested doing this with air bearings, little jets of air on the bottom of the pod. Think of air hockey, he said, but where the air comes out of the puck instead of the table. Today, most hyperloop engineers have decided instead to rely on passive magnetic levitation. Where standard maglev systems are power hungry and expensive, this system uses an array of permanent magnets on the vehicle. When those magnets move over conductive arrays in the track, they create a magnetic field that pushes the pod up, no current required. A complementary magnet system (think of two magnets pushing off one another) would give the pods a push every few miles or so—the near total lack of friction and air resistance means you don’t need a constant propulsion system.

As for air resistance, that’s where the tube comes in. (Yes, tubes also just feel like the future, but that’s not the point.) The tubes enclose the space through which the pods move, so you can use vacuums to hoover out nearly all the air—leaving so little that the physics are like being at an altitude of 200,000 feet. And so, like a cruising airplane, a hyperloop needs only a little bit of energy to maintain the pods’ speed, because there’s less stuff to push through. More speed with less power gets you to where you’re going faster, greener, and—depending on energy costs—maybe cheaper too.

How Hyperloop Works

After explaining all this, Musk said he was too busy to build the thing himself. He was running both Tesla and SpaceX and didn’t have time to remake yet another industry. So he encouraged anyone interested to have a go. Let there be hyperloop, he said.

And there was hyperloop. Well, a hyperloop industry, anyway. Soon after Musk’s paper hit the internet, a handful of companies sprung up, bringing together engineers and VC money to solve the problems for real. From the beginning, LA-based Virgin Hyperloop One has appeared to be the most serious contender, with serious VC backing, hundreds of employees, a full bank account, and a test track in the Nevada desert where, in December, it sent a pod racing to 240 mph .

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies takes a less built-up approach. Nearly all its engineers have day jobs at other companies (places like Boeing, NASA, and SpaceX). In their free time, they work together, mostly online and in distinct groups, to solve the engineering problems standing between humanity and hyperloop. It has plans to build networks in Central Europe , South Korea , and India . Similarly, there’s rLoop, a Reddit-based community of people who study the various engineering problems in the mission of “decentralizing high technology.”

Oh, and Elon Musk is back in the game. The hyperloop progenitor started by hosting a series of student engineering competitions , using a short length of tube he built at SpaceX’s headquarters. Then, last summer, he confirmed he wants to build a hyperloop of his own . His plans are particularly vague, but he thinks the tubular system would go great with the tunnels he wants to create using another new venture, the Boring Company.

While the various companies here are mostly pursuing the same tech (passive magnetic levitation, big vacuum pumps), it didn’t take long for the young hyperloop industry to splinter. Former SpaceX engineer Brogan BamBrogan helped launch Hyperloop One, but left in August 2016 amid a bizarre and bitter legal dispute with the company, in particular cofounder Shervin Pishevar (who took a leave of absence from the company in December 2017 after several women accused him of sexual misconduct). BamBrogan (that’s his legal name) then started his own outfit, Arrivo, except now he’s working on what he calls a hyperloop-inspired system. He got rid of the tube , deeming it too expensive. “If I want to travel really fast between two cities in a low-pressure environment inside a metal tube, I would use an airplane,” he says. It’s a valuable reminder that “hyperloop” is not an invention but a clever combination of technologies that together make something very fast and very fun.

If you really want hyperloop, however, you must build a hyperloop. There are lots of renderings and promises out there: The companies in this space have announced plans to build hyperloops in California, Colorado, on the East Coast, in India, Slovenia, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. Hyperloop One wants a commercial line in service in 2020.

Over the next few years, then, we’ll start to see answers to the real question here. It’s not “can hyperloop work”—we know the engineering make sense. As BamBrogan puts it: “It’s within the laws of physics, but hard enough to be fun.”

Here’s the real question, as put by David Clarke, director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville: “Can it compete—from a capital standpoint and an operating standpoint and a safety standpoint?”

To really work, Clarke means, a hyperloop must offer the kind of service, pricing, and safety record that will draw paying passengers away from current modes of transportation, including airlines, trains (that applies more overseas than in the US), and the personal car. Those systems may not be perfect, but they have established user bases, are more or less profitable, and are safe enough to keep people riding and regulators happy. They know how to work with governments around the world, and they know how to build the infrastructure they need to run—how to get it certified and funded and in place.

That’s why the first hyperloop systems will likely target very specific use cases with built-in passengers and minimal political hurdles. They could connect an airport to a city center or public transit hub, or send cargo from a port to an inland distribution center, so trucks don’t have to crowd into already congested areas. Tackling a real long-distance, city-to-city route will make things much harder.

To even have a shot at competing, hyperloop must start by finding a way to finagle through the bureaucratic regulations that govern what gets built where. The people running these companies insist that it won’t be as hard as it seems and that they’re already working with eager governments to get their systems built. To make things easier, Hyperloop One held a competition in which cities pitched for the right to host the thing . No doubt, places willing to clear out obstacles like pesky regulations stood out. The winners included Canada (with a route connecting Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal), Florida (Orlando to Miami), and India (Mumbai to Chennai), but the company hasn’t announced any actual plans to start building. And, of course, it remains to be seen whether any promises will hold when local residents protest, land rights prove hard to acquire, and construction costs mount up.

More hurdles: These companies will need to figure out how to prove that traveling by tube is safe. What happens if an asteroid rips open the tube or one of the supporting pylons collapses in an earthquake? The hyperloop engineers say the pod will just slow down in the face of sudden air resistance, but a rapid slowdown is often known as a crash. And if the pod is near a ruptured tube, what happens if it flies out? Will regulators insist the pods meet crash standards, like cars, or that everyone wear seat belts at all times? Whatever the answers, expect the first working systems to move cargo, not carbon-based lifeforms.

More questions: How much energy will it take to fling those pods up to near-supersonic speeds? Doing it with renewables would be great, but can you generate and store enough solar power to run all those pods, wherever they are, whenever people want to whoosh?

Then there’s the money. Virgin Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd has said it would cost about $10 million to build one mile of two-way track, less than a third of what California is paying for its stuck-in-limbo high speed rail system. Musk’s original paper estimated a hyperloop from Los Angeles to San Francisco would cost $6 billion, and you could recoup the investment and cover operating costs with $20 ticket prices. Of course, that was five years ago and doesn’t account for changes in the engineering made by the involved companies; it also comes from a man notorious for lowballing cost (and time) estimates. The truth is, we have no idea how much it will cost to maintain a working hyperloop, which requires keeping hundreds of miles of tubes nearly free of air, and won’t until we’re closer to a working system.

If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the high speed rail system that was supposed to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, or why people stopped building super fast magnetic levitation trains after the first few systems started service, you should know that details like local politics and maintenance costs have a knack for hampering transportation innovation. And maybe that’s not such a terrible thing. Trains, hyperloops, airports, light rail lines—these are big things that cost a lot of money and impact many people’s lives. You want to be sure of what you’re doing before you throw the switch.

So what comes next? A bit more engineering, to start. Then real life—and that’s when we’ll see whether hyperloop can really change the world, or at least get rid of some of the traffic. And if you really want to ride in a hyperloop and you’re not a shipping container, you might want to move to Dubai. If any place can sweep away political hurdles and ignore potentially outrageous energy bills, it’s the city whose motto might as well be “Sounds shiny and impractical—let’s do it!”

The Age of Hyperloop Has Arrived. Well, for the Most Part The first public demonstration of anything resembling a hyperloop was in May 2016, when Hyperloop One (as it was then known) raced a 1,500-pound aluminum sled down a track at 300 mph before it stopped by plowing into a pile of sand. The test didn’t even feature a tube, but the company claimed it as a milestone, the first time it proved its propulsion system worked. Four years after Elon Musk first suggested tubular transportation, this was evidence the technology to make it happen was coming together.

Students Build the World’s Fastest Hyperloop—Then Elon Musk Showed Up When Elon Musk decided he wanted to help make hyperloop after all, he started by using SpaceX to host a series of (mostly) student competitions to design the pods that would travel inside the tube and see how fast they could make them go. Musk provided the test tube, a mile-long steel pipe, six feet in diameter. In the summer of 2017, the WARR Hyperloop team, from the Technical University of Munich, won the latest round, hitting 192 mph. A few days later, Musk revealed he had run his own test—and topped out at 220 mph. And now he says that yes, he is indeed trying to build a hyperloop.

The Elegant Tech That May Make Hyperloop a Reality The physics of making a pod levitate and of sucking air out of a tube are sound, but engineering challenges remain. Hyperloop One competitor Hyperloop Transportation Technologies rejected Musk’s original suggestion for the levitation bit—air bearings, which work like an air hockey table, in reverse—in favor of passive magnetic levitation.

Cities Crave Hyperloop Because It’s Shiny—And Talk Is Cheap In the spring of 2017, representatives from 11 American regions traveled to Washington, DC, in search of a common goal: winning the right to bring the hyperloop back home. The only problem? Hyperloop One has not proven it can make it work, especially not at scale, or for a reasonable cost. But the siren song of hyperloop—faster, greener, cheaper—is hard for cash-strapped, traffic-clogged cities to resist.

Brogan BamBrogan Is Taking the Hyperloop to Colorado Brogan BamBrogan is working on what he calls a hyperloop-inspired system—one without a tube, which he says is expensive, impractical, and doesn’t add all that much, at least not for the relatively short stretches he wants to cover.

The Race to Build the Hyperloop Could Fix Boring Old Trains and Planes Despite the hype, there’s a good—maybe better than that—chance hyperloop will never really happen, or that it will at least never spread to the point where it’s a common way of getting around. The good news is that the engineers trying to make this thing work could produce tech that makes existing transit modes better: better maglev trains, futuristic plane windows, safer and smarter cars, even cheaper space travel.

Meet the 89-Year-Old Reinventing the Train in His Backyard Max Schlienger doesn’t think much of the hyperloop. The 89-year-old engineer has his own way of improving travel. A modern update of the 19th century’s atmospheric railway, Schlienger’s Vectorr system uses vacuum power inside a small tube to propel a canister of sorts, which connects to the train carriage on the track above it with magnets. As the canister inside the tube moves, so does the train. Schlienger built a one-sixth scale model of the system at his Northern California home (which doubles as a vineyard), but like the hyperloop the path to deployment is hard to see.

This guide was last updated on January 31, 2018.

Enjoyed this deep dive? Check out more WIRED Guides .

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Hyperloop: Elon Musk backed futuristic tube transport system takes step forward

Developers aim to have capsules speeding through tubes at up to 700 kph, article bookmarked.

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A futuristic form of travel designed to be more efficient than flights, high-speed rail and freight trucks has taken a step closer, according to the company behind it.

Hyperloop , a new form of mass transit involving capsules whizzing on magnetic fields through depressurized tubes, has achieved significant liftoff in the northern Netherlands, a company developing the technology said Monday.

A test vehicle was levitated and zipped through a tube at a testing facility for the high-speed transit system once promoted by Elon Musk . Developers aim to have capsules speeding through tubes at up to 700 kph (435 mph).

“So today, with the first successful test, we were able to levitate the vehicle, also turn on the guidance system and the propulsion system," Marinus van der Meijs, the technology and engineering director at hyperloop company Hardt, told The Associated Press late last week before Monday's formal announcement.

The European Hyperloop Center's 420-meter (460-yard) tube is made up of 34 separate sections mostly 2½ meters (more than eight feet) in diameter. A vacuum pump sucks out the air to reduce the internal pressure. That reduces drag and allows capsules to travel at high speeds.

Backers say it's far more efficient than short-haul flights, high-speed rail and freight trucks, but it will involve significant investment in infrastructure.

So far, in the limited space offered by the test center, the speed has been modest.

Once the capsule was in place in the tube, “we launched it with an acceleration similar to that of a metro, up to a top speed of about 30 kph (18 mph), about 100 meters (more than 300 feet) in the pipe,” Van der Meijs added.

Even so, it's a milestone that required some careful conducting.

“The most difficult things that we are doing now is to test all of these functions together. Levitation, propulsion, guidance, all of those functions we are now capable of executing as an orchestra, making them work together,” said Roel van de Pas, commercial director of Hardt Hyperloop.

Musk first proposed the idea more than a decade ago, suggesting it could shuttle passengers the nearly 400 miles (645 kilometers) between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 30 minutes. Since then, teams around the world have been working to bring the idea to fruition.

“To deliver Hyperloop as a mobility system, we have a very complicated puzzle which requires technology, which requires policy, which requires public-private collaboration, and that is what is needed most," Van de Pas said. "At Hardt, we are ready for passenger operations by 2030.”

Some analysts are skeptical. When the hyperloop test facility opened in March, Robert Noland, distinguished professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, told The Associated Press that building the necessary infrastructure is too costly, calling it “another example of policymakers chasing a shiny object.”

In 2016, Dubai , in the United Arab Emirates, signed a deal with Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One to study the potential for building a hyperloop line between the city-state and Abu Dhabi, the Emirati capital.

The announcement of the deal took place atop the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, with a panoramic view of the skyline of the futuristic city-state serving as both a backdrop and a sign of Dubai’s desire to be the first to rush toward the future.

But like many flashy announcements in the city-state, the hyperloop idea faded in recent years with no track being built. Hyperloop One shut down in December.

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What is the Hyperloop? Here’s everything you need to know

Hyperloop transportation technologies unveils its new quintero one capsule.

We live in an age of unbelievable technological progress. To a visitor from the distant past, this would surely seem like a utopian age. Yet in many areas of life, things don’t seem to have changed all that much, and transportation is a woeful example of this. The roads are still lined with cars, the skies streaked with airliners. 20th century science fiction foresaw flying cars and teleporters; the 21st century settled for Segways.

What is the Hyperloop?

Why the need.

• The Hyperloop competition and recent developments

Dreams never die, however, and the fantasy of futuristic transportation is very much alive right now as exemplified by a concept called the Hyperloop . While it’s not as mind-shattering as a teleporter or as fun as a personal jetpack, the Hyperloop could revolutionize mass transit, shortening travel times on land and reducing environmental damage in the process.

The Hyperloop concept  as it is widely known was proposed by billionaire industrialist Elon Musk, CEO of the aerospace firm SpaceX and the guy behind Tesla (as well as, in the last year, a number of public gaffes ). It’s a reaction to the California High-Speed Rail System currently under development, a bullet train Musk feels is lackluster (and which, it is alleged, will be one of the most expensive and slow-moving in the world).

A one way trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles on the Hyperloop could take about 35 minutes.

Musk’s Hyperloop consists of two massive tubes extending from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Pods carrying passengers would travel through the tubes at speeds topping out over 700 mph. Imagine the pneumatic tubes people in The Jetsons use to move around buildings, but on a much bigger scale. For propulsion, magnetic accelerators will be planted along the length of the tube, propelling the pods forward.  The tubes would house a low pressure environment, surrounding the pod with a cushion of air that permits the pod to move safely at such high speeds, like a puck gliding over an air hockey table.

Given the tight quarters in the tube, pressure buildup in front of the pod could be a problem. The tube needs a system to keep air from building up in this way. Musk’s design recommends an air compressor on the front of the pod that will move air from the front to the tail, keeping it aloft and preventing pressure building up due to air displacement. A one way trip on the Hyperloop is projected to take about 35 minutes (for comparison, traveling the same distance by car takes roughly six hours).

Conventional means of transportation (road, water, air, and rail) tend to be some mix of expensive, slow, and environmentally harmful. Road travel is particularly problematic, given carbon emissions and the fluctuating price of oil. As the environmental dangers of energy consumption continue to worsen, mass transit will be crucial in the years to come.

Rail travel is relatively energy efficient and offers the most environmentally friendly option, but is too slow and expensive to be massively adopted. At distances less than 900 miles, supersonic travel is unfeasible, as most of the journey would be spent ascending and descending (the slowest parts of a flight.) Given these issues, the Hyperloop aims to make a cost-effective, high speed transportation system for use at moderate distances. As an example of the right type of distance, Musk uses the route from San Francisco to L.A. (a route the high-speed rail system will also cover). The Hyperloop tubes would have solar panels installed on the roof, allowing for a clean and self-powering system.

There are of course drawbacks. Most notably, moving through a tube at such high speeds precludes large turns or changes in elevation. As a result, the system is optimal for straightforward trips across relatively level terrain.

California is, of course, susceptible to earthquakes, and the Hyperloop design takes this into account. The tubes would be mounted on a series of pylons spread along the route, each pylon placed every 100 feet or so. The pylons will allow for slip due to thermal expansion and earthquakes, ensuring that the tubes will not be broken by any such movement.

Realistically, the most important problem in getting any project off the ground is money, doubly so when talking about a public work. Even if one can produce an impressive blueprint, there are still issues of public approval, legislation, regulations, and contractors to worry about. Fortunately, The Hyperloop would be a cost-saving measure, especially when measured against the corpulent rail project currently underway. Musk’s white paper for the Hyperloop estimates the total cost could be kept under six billion dollars. Meanwhile, phase one of the California high-speed rail project is expected to cost at least $68 billion.

The Hyperloop competition and recent developments

Although Elon Musk postulated the idea, SpaceX is not developing a commercial Hyperloop of its own. Instead, it has held various competitions to encourage students and engineers to develop prototype pods. To facilitate this, SpaceX built a one mile test track in California.

The contest was a way for engineers and companies to get the ball rolling to make the Hyperloop system a reality.

On January 30, 2016, the SpaceX Hyperloop design competition concluded. More than 100 prototype pod designs were submitted, and 27 teams have won the chance to test their designs on the SpaceX Hyperloop test track in June 2016. A team of grad students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) won Best Overall Design. According to the MIT team, the pod is lightweight and emphasizes speed and safety, including a fail-safe brake system. Whereas many Hyperloop designs use air jets to levitate, the MIT design uses two arrays of neodymium magnets to keep the pod aloft. Additional magnets inside the pod keep it stable as it races along the track. The power of the prototype was impressive, though it’s still very far from a commercial product given it currently lacks space for passengers or even cargo.

In January 2017, the long-running SpaceX Hyperloop competition wrapped up with “Competition Weekend I,” in which completed pods raced on the test track. A team from Delft University in the Netherlands took the top prize.

We are very proud be the overall winner of the first hyperloop pod competition ever! Thanks everyone for the great support! pic.twitter.com/BKl5bI5iNX — Delft Hyperloop (@DelftHyperloop) January 30, 2017

Although this particular contest is over, the Hyperloop project is far from finished, as companies and governments around the world explore the concept. For its part, SpaceX will be holding another competition from August 25-27 . In HyperLoop Pod Competition II, contestants will strive to attain the highest maximum speed. SpaceX has published the list of entrants, which includes some of the teams from the first contest.

The unveiling of the Quintero One

On October, 2018, HTT showed off its first passenger capsule, dubbed Quintero One. The capsule is 105-feet long, the Quintero One weighs five tons, and is made from two layers of a material HTT calls “vibranium.” Although HTT’s vibranium isn’t a product of Wakanda, it is the “safest material on earth,” according to co-founder and CEO Dirk Ahlborn, who goes on to say that vibranium, which is a carbon fiber material lined with sensors, can “actually sense integrity” and “ monitors impact.” HTT’s capsule consist of two layers of vibranium, so even if the first layer suffers damage, the capsule can survive until it reaches safety.

Bibop Gresta, chairman of HTT, says that the capsule “will be fully optimized and ready for passengers” in 2019. Gresta also emphasizes that HTT has “taken major steps in solving government regulations with our safety certification guidelines and insurance frameworks,” which suggests that the company may be close to getting a legitimate, accessible Hyperloop to consumers.

There’s no guarantee that anything concrete will come out of these competitions, though. They are a way for engineers and companies to exchange knowledge and maybe get the ball rolling to make the Hyperloop system a reality at some point down the line. Like a world’s fair expo, it’s a place for visions of the future to become a little bit clearer.

Developments abroad

While SpaceX’s contest was a good showcase for engineering students, the Hyperloop concept has also garnered interest from businessmen. Startups such as Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies) and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) are working on Hyperloop systems of their own, and what they lack in clever naming they make up for in ambition. Both companies are building their own test tracks, and a few years ago, HTT announced partnerships with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum , an engineering firm specializing in vacuum technology, and Aecom , an international corporation providing technical project support. The companies will receive stock options in exchange for their involvement.

HTT’s partnership with Oerlikon and Aecom was a massive development. International, publicly traded companies have deemed the Hyperloop concept solid enough to invest in. They also bring with them much-needed experience: Oerlikon has been a leader in vacuum technology since the dawn of the 20th century, while Aecom has been involved in many high profile engineering projects such as the Cape Town Stadium . This partnership represents a tremendous vote of confidence in the Hyperloop, and brings much needed legitimacy to a project that had been, until recently, a pipe dream.

January 2016 proved to be a big month for Hyperloop progress. HTT applied for a permit to begin construction on a test track along the I-5 freeway in Quay Valley, California. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, progenitor of the Hyperloop idea, partnered with Aecom to build its own test track in Hawthorne, California. With three test tracks currently in development, the Golden State is at the forefront of Hyperloop development.

In March 2016, HTT announced its intention to build a network of Hyperloop tracks connecting Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest, with Slovakia serving as a hub between the three.

In May 2016, Hyperloop One showed off its prototype system at a test track in Las Vegas .

At an April 2017 conference called “Vision for America,” Hyperloop One revealed several proposed tracks that it could build across the United States. The proposed routes include a track uniting Dallas, Houston, and Laredo — and stops in between — with a total transit time of roughly an hour or less. Throughout the proposals, the company laid out economic benefits — a route from Chicago to Pittsburgh could create an “economic megaregion” — and environmental ones; Hyperloop One noted that a proposed track from Orlando to Miami could avoid the Everglades.

It is a detailed presentation, offering a look at the many factors these startups are taking into account.

It remains unclear whether commercial Hyperloop systems will ever be widely adopted. As the global population swells and the environment declines, however, better mass transit systems will become essential. Leonard Bernstein once claimed that great endeavors require two things: “a plan, and not quite enough time.” The plan for the Hyperloop is there, but how much time do we have?

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Elon Musk's hyperloop dream may come true — and soon

Elon Musk first described his idea for a futuristic transportation system that would send passenger pods through tubes at speeds of hundreds of miles an hour back in 2013. At the time, the idea of actually building and operating a so-called “hyperloop” seemed far-fetched, to say the least.

But hyperloops are no longer quite so hypothetical. A handful of firms are now competing to develop the necessary technology. And in addition to designing the magnetically levitated pods and testing them on small-scale tracks , the firms are taking preliminary steps to set up hyperloop routes in the U.S. and abroad.

“It’s happening far faster than I would have ever expected, and it’s happening all over the world,” said Dr. David Goldsmith, a transportation researcher at Virginia Tech.

One of the biggest players is Musk himself. His whimsically named Boring Company is planning to dig a hyperloop tunnel that would make it possible to travel from Washington, D.C. to New York City in half an hour (the fastest Amtrak trains make the trip in just under three hours). Meanwhile, a pair of California-based startups, Virgin Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, are developing routes in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Many engineering and regulatory hurdles must be crossed before the first paying customer boards a hyperloop pod and zooms off down a tube — and not everyone shares Goldsmith’s rosy outlook. “I wouldn’t plan to take your next vacation on them,” Juan Matute, associate director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA, said of the pods. “It’s going to take a lot of time to get implemented, if they ever are.”

But with roads in many areas badly congested and air travel subject to weather delays, high-speed tube travel sounds appealing to many. In addition to shaving hours off of intercity trips, hyperloops promise to be less polluting than planes and cars. And hyperloop travel could even transform the morning commute, potentially allowing workers to travel comfortably to worksites hundreds of miles away from their homes.

The hyperloop experience

Hyperloop routes would consist of steel tubes roughly 11 feet in diameter that would be positioned on the ground or, in Musk’s vision, in underground tunnels. Either way, the routes would have to be picked carefully both to avoid existing infrastructure like roads and buildings and to make sure the routes take no sharp turns that could subject passengers to unpleasant jolts.

As for the pods, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies envisions 100-foot-long models fitted with virtual windows — video screens that would recreate the scenery outside — and capable of seating 40 passengers. Virgin Hyperloop One, meanwhile, has already built prototype pods fitted with leather seats and armrest-mounted entertainment screens.

The pods would accelerate and decelerate gradually, moving from one station to the next without stopping.

“The actual experience of riding in one of these things would be very serene,” Goldsmith said of the pods. “You’re sealed up in something like an airplane fuselage but without the air running past you,” he said, a reference to the fact that the tubes would be maintained at a partial vacuum to reduce air resistance that would slow the pods. (The pods themselves would carry their own air supply.)

In short, hyperloop trips promise to be quiet and smooth — and very fast. Ultimately, hyperloop developers aim to develop systems that will move pods along at speeds of up to 760 miles per hour. So far, the fastest any prototype pod has traveled is 240 miles per hour . That came last December during a test run that Virgin Hyperloop One conducted in the Nevada desert.

Testing and construction

Virgin Hyperloop One hopes to begin testing full-sized hyperloop systems in 2021 and then to build hyperloops in the United Arab Emirates and India, among other countries. The company is also conducting feasibility studies for routes in Missouri and Colorado . Musk’s Boring Company has received a permit to begin excavating a possible hyperloop station in Washington, D.C. And Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is carrying out a feasibility study for a hyperloop linking Chicago and Cleveland and is considering routes in Europe, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.

Among other things, the tests will show whether it’s possible to maintain the partial vacuum within the tubes over hundreds of miles and if airlocks can quickly and fully seal off the tubes when passengers exit a pod.

Once construction of commercial hyperloop routes begins, it’s likely to prove very costly. Some estimates suggest one mile of a hyperloop route could cost up to $121 million, Forbes reported .

mach Elon Musk reveals first photo of tunnel under LA to bypass traffic

Obtaining land rights and environmental approval will complicate matters. So will the need to develop regulations and safety standards for a new form of transportation. “We really need to know a lot more about the safety features and what would happen if something went wrong,” Philippa Oldham, head of technology and manufacturing at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, told The Guardian .

The price of hyperloop fares is uncertain. But as with existing modes of transportation, hyperloop travel will be more expensive at certain times and dates. As Matute put it, “It could be that if you want to go up to San Francisco [from Los Angeles] for cheap, you leave at 3 a.m., but if you want to go at 7:30 a.m. and have this life where you’re living in one city and working in the other, it will be a lot more expensive.”

When will commercial hyperloops begin operation? “Possibly, in a few years a few single lines can be in operation,” Kees van Goeverden, a transportation researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told NBC News MACH in an email. ”But I do not expect that a coherent system will be operated before 2030.”

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Elon Musk has started the building revolution for a new train system.

Dubbed Hyperloop, it will allow you to get from London to Edinburgh or LA to San Francisco in under 30 minutes. But what is it and how does it work? Good questions. Musk has likened it to a vacuum tube system in a building used to move documents from place to place. Confused? No worries. Here's everything you need to know about the futuristic train coming from the founder of Tesla and SpaceX.

We also delve into competitor systems, like Virgin Hyperloop One.

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What is Hyperloop?

Hyperloop is essentially a train system that Musk calls "a cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table". It's based on the very high-speed transit (VHST) system proposed in 1972, which combines a magnetic levitation train and a low pressure transit tube. It evolves some of the original ideas of VHST, but it still uses tunnels and pods or capsules to move from place to place.

Musk has likened it to a vacuum tube system in a building used to move documents from place to place.

What speeds have been proposed?

Hyperloop is being proposed as an alternative to short distance air travel, where the system will be much faster than existing rail networks and much cleaner that flight. Hyperloop isn't about going as fast as possible, because you'll have to deal with high G forces when it came to turns, which isn't ideal for passenger travel. Speeds of over 700mph are suggested for journeys.

But there are practical implications that have to be considered on a short stop-start journey, such as the acceleration and deceleration sensation that passengers would go through.

How does Elon Musk's Hyperloop work?

Air bearings or maglev.

One of the biggest problems with anything moving is friction, both against surfaces and the environment the pod is moving through. Hyperloop proposes to move away from traditional wheels by using air bearings for pods instead. This will have the pod floating on air. It's similar to maglev, in which the electromagnetic levitation of the train means there is no friction like a traditional train that runs on tracks.

This is how current maglev trains can achieve super speeds, like the 500km/h maglev train in Japan. One Hyperloop proposal, from Virgin Hyperloop One , uses passive magnetic levitation, meaning the magnets are on the trains and work with aluminium track. Current active maglev needs powered tracks with copper coiling, which can be expensive.

Musk's Hyperloop will take this to the next level by traveling through low pressure tubes.

Low pressure

Hyperloop will be built in tunnels that have had some of the air sucked out to lower the pressure. So, like high-altitude flying, there's less resistance against the pod moving through the tunnel, meaning it can be much more energy efficient, which is desirable in any transit system.

The original VHST proposed using a vacuum, but there's an inherent difficulty in creating and maintaining a vacuum in a tunnel that will have things like stations, and any break in the vacuum could potentially render the entire system useless. For Hyperloop, the idea is to lower the air pressure, a job that could be done by regularly placed air pumps.

Low pressure, however, means you still have some air in the tunnels.

The air bearing and passive maglev ideas are designed not only to levitate the pod, but also see the pod moving through the air, rather than pushing the air infront of it and dragging it along behind. The air cushion will see the air pumped from the front of the pod to the rear via these suspension cushions. The tunnels envisioned are metal tubes, elevated as an overground system.

Musk has suggested that solar panels running on the top of the tunnels could generate enough electricity to power the system. It could run as an underground system, too.

When will Elon Musk's Hyperloop arrive?

Hawthorne test track.

Musk hasn't yet given a date when we can expect to see Hyperloop up and running, he's merely announced that it will be made.

A one-mile test track built by SpaceX adjacent to Hawthorne, its California headquarters, has been built, and the first successful trial has been carried out. Virgin Hyperloop One plans to send an 8.5-metre long pod down a set of tracks in Nevada. In May 2017, a pod levitated on a separate test track in Nevada for 5.3-seconds and reached 70mph.

The first trial using one of the 8.7-metre passenger pods has now been carried out too. The pod travelled along the 500-metre test track, and reached a speed of 192mph before safely coming to a complete stop. 

LA to San Francisco

Planning documents currently propose a route between LA and San Francisco, a 354-mile journey, that would cost around $6 billion in construction. This is based on a passenger-only model, whereas one that can also transport vehicles would be $7.5 billion. This extra expenditure would be worth it since more people could use the system, offering potentially larger returns.

Shervin Pishevar, co-founder and chairman of Virgin Hyperloop One, aims to shuttle passengers and cargo in high-speed pods that are smaller than most planes and trains and designed to depart as often as every 10 seconds. He recently told CNBC : "Hyperloop will be operational, somewhere in the world, by 2020."

New York to DC

Must tweeted in July 2017 that his Boring Company tunnel project has received “verbal [government] approval” to build a Hyperloop that would connect the cities of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. He also tweeted more details about the project. The new Hyperloop would only take 29 minutes to travel between New York City and DC, Musk claimed. 

It would feature “up to a dozen or more” access points via elevator in each city. Keep in mind Musk released his Hyperloop concept as an open-source white paper in 2013. As a result, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is looking into a setup that would link Slovakia, Austria and Hungary. This is the same company that plans to create the five-mile test loop in California by 2018.

Musk has continually talked about his agitation with surface-level transportation. His tunnel project, dubbed the Boring Company, which began as a joke, is Musk's attempt at digging more efficiently. He's working on tunnel-boring machines than can both dig and reinforce tunnels, simultaneously. He also recently announced the completion of the first section of tunnel under Los Angeles.

Back to the “verbal govt approval": apparently, Musk's Boring Company will dig up the tunnel used for the New York-to-DC route. We've contacted the US Department of Transportation for more information. But based on Musk's tweets, we know work on the New York-to-DC Hyperloop will happen alongside the LA tunnel that's already in progress.

• Elon Musk's Hyperloop able to do London to Edinburgh run in 30 minutes

What about Virgin Hyperloop One?

Virgin Hyperloop One is a three-year-old startup out of Los Angeles. It is trying to develop a hyperloop train in order to reinvent transportation. Hyperloop transportation was first introduced by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in 2013 as an open-sourced idea. Virgin Hyperloop One's co-founder, Shervin Pishevar, often credits Musk for the inspiration, though Musk is not involved with Virgin Hyperloop One at all. 

Virgin Hyperloop One was previously known as Hyperloop One or Virgin Hyperloop One. In October 2017, Hyperloop One and the Virgin Group announced a strategic partnership, in which Virgin Group had invested Hyperloop One and Richard Branson would join Hyperloop One's board of directors. As a result, Hyperloop One has been rebranded to Virgin Hyperloop One.

How will Virgin Hyperloop One work?

Virgin Hyperloop One's system will be built on columns or tunneled below ground.

It’s fully autonomous and enclosed, eliminating pilot error and weather hazards. It's also clean, with no carbon emissions. And the trains can depart up to several times per minute and can transport passengers and cargo direct to their destination. Many of the technologies Virgin Hyperloop One is currently using have been around for a while, such as linear electric motors, maglev, and vacuum pumps.

Here's how Virgin Hyperloop One describes its system:

"Passengers or cargo are loaded into the Hyperloop vehicle and accelerate gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube. The vehicle floats above the track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to ultra-low aerodynamic drag."

When will Virgin Hyperloop One be ready?

The company has developed a full-scale test track, otherwise called a proprietary electric propulsion system, in North Las Veas. The first open-air propulsion test happened in May 2016, followed by the first full-systems test in May 2017 and Phase 2 testing in July 2017. The company is focused on developing a passenger and mixed-use operational hyperloop transportation system by 2021.

How much will it cost to ride?

According to Virgin Hyperloop One CEO Dirk Ahlborn, the cost of a ticket should be around $30 mark to get a passenger from LA to San Francisco. That, he says, should allow the company to pay back its initial costs in eight years.

Whether this will actually be the price of a ticket remains to be seen.

What will it feel and sound like?

Virgin Hyperloop One said it will feel like you're riding in an elevator or a passenger plane. There will be tolerable G forces, as you will be accelerating and decelerating gradually, but there will be no turbulence. In terms of sound, people on the outside will only hear a "big whoosh". The tubes are constructed out of thick, strong steel and can handle 100 Pa of pressure or more.

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A capsule has been propelled through a hyperloop test tube in a step forward for the transit system

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VEENDAM, Netherlands (AP) — Hyperloop, a new form of mass transit involving capsules whizzing on magnetic fields through depressurized tubes, has achieved significant liftoff in the northern Netherlands, a company developing the technology said Monday.

A test vehicle was levitated and zipped through a tube at a testing facility for the high-speed transit system once promoted by Elon Musk .

“So today, with the first successful test, we were able to levitate the vehicle, also turn on the guidance system and the propulsion system," Marinus van der Meijs, the technology and engineering director at hyperloop company Hardt, told The Associated Press late last week before Monday's formal announcement.

The European Hyperloop Center's 420-meter (460-yard) tube is made up of 34 separate sections mostly 2 1/2 meters (more than eight feet) in diameter. A vacuum pump sucks out the air to reduce the internal pressure. That reduces drag and allows capsules to travel at high speeds.

Hyperloop developers aim to have capsules speeding through tubes at up to 700 kph (435 mph). Its backers say it's far more efficient than short-haul flights, high-speed rail and freight trucks, but it will involve significant investment in infrastructure.

So far, in the limited space offered by the test center, the speed has been modest.

Once the capsule was in place in the tube, “we launched it with an acceleration similar to that of a metro, up to a top speed of about 30 kph (18 mph), about 100 meters (more than 300 feet) in the pipe,” Van der Meijs added.

Even so, it's a milestone that required some careful conducting.

“The most difficult things that we are doing now is to test all of these functions together. Levitation, propulsion, guidance, all of those functions we are now capable of executing as an orchestra, making them work together,” said Roel van de Pas, commercial director of Hardt Hyperloop.

Musk first proposed the idea more than a decade ago, suggesting it could shuttle passengers the nearly 400 miles (645 kilometers) between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 30 minutes. Since then, teams around the world have been working to bring the idea to fruition.

“To deliver Hyperloop as a mobility system, we have a very complicated puzzle which requires technology, which requires policy, which requires public-private collaboration, and that is what is needed most," Van de Pas said. "At Hardt, we are ready for passenger operations by 2030.”

Some analysts are skeptical. When the hyperloop test facility opened in March, Robert Noland, distinguished professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, told The Associated Press that building the necessary infrastructure is too costly, calling it “another example of policymakers chasing a shiny object.”

In 2016, Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, signed a deal with Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One to study the potential for building a hyperloop line between the city-state and Abu Dhabi, the Emirati capital.

The announcement of the deal took place atop the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, with a panoramic view of the skyline of the futuristic city-state serving as both a backdrop and a sign of Dubai’s desire to be the first to rush toward the future.

But like many flashy announcements in the city-state, the hyperloop idea faded in recent years with no track being built. Hyperloop One shut down in December.

For more AP tech stories: https://apnews.com/technology

Aleksandar Furtula, The Associated Press

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High-speed train company Hyperloop One shuts down

The company which became well known for its idea of shooting people hundreds of miles an hour through a vacuum has shut down.

The aim of Hyperloop One, based on an idea by Elon Musk, was to dramatically cut journey times.

It has previously received backing from Virgin founder Richard Branson, but he pulled out last year.

The firm will lay off its remaining staff by the end of the year, according to Bloomberg.

The company had promised a new era of high speed travel, using magnetic levitation (maglev) technology - which is already used in some transport systems - within a vacuum tube.

This would reduce friction and air resistance, allowing the train to travel at speeds of 700mph (1,127km/h).

It was also meant to be greener than current high-speed transport.

However, while Hyperloop One did build some prototypes in the Nevada desert, the project stalled with some experts expressing doubts about its engineering challenges.

It would have required the construction of giant tubes across the countryside and within towns.

It also had a problem with corners - so all the tubes would have to be in a straight line.

A trial of the system took place with two company employees in 2020 - the first successful passenger ride using hyperloop technology.

The pod reached a top speed of 107mph (172km/h) on the 546yds (500m) test run.

But the company announced a change in strategy in 2022, saying it would focus on transporting cargo instead of people.

That change also came with an announcement of over 100 job losses, and was followed by more job cuts later in the year.

By the end of the year, it was reported that Richard Branson, who had been company chairman, was pulling out and the company lost the endorsement of Virgin.

The company had also endured scandal over the years, with one previous director Ziyavudin Magomedov jailed in Russia on embezzlement charges.

Another investor, Shervin Pishevar, left in 2017 after Bloomberg reported sexual misconduct allegations.

The original hyperloop was based on a report published by Elon Musk in 2013 which proposed the idea of shooting capsules through a tube at high speed, however the scientific ideas which underpinned it have been around for centuries.

Mr Musk has his own firm, The Boring Company, which is researching similar technology using underground tunnels.

There are also other similar companies around the world which continue to work on the concept.

DP World, the Dubai-based company which owns a majority stake in Hyperloop One, has been contacted for comment.

The future of high-speed travel?

Virgin hyperloop to focus on cargo, not people.

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Hyperloop’s not dead, apparently

By Mack DeGeurin

Posted on Sep 10, 2024 2:19 PM EDT

Back in 2013, billionaire Elon Musk laid out a vision of an underground “hyperloop” tunnel system capable of using magnetic fields to beam commuters from New York to DC in under 30 minutes. To say those plans haven’t quite panned out is an understatement. Musk’s Boring company converted its original test facility into a parking lot and appears to have deprioritized hyperloop tech to focus on slowly sending Tesla’s through tunnels . Hyperloop One, the most well-funded of the other hyperloop ventures, shut down at the end of last year . Those major setbacks have led some to declare the hyperloop officially dead , however, a successful test completed by a Dutch hyperloop company this week may have put the industry back on life support.

This week, Hardt Hyperloop announced it successfully used magnetic levitation to lift a pod in the air and guide it smoothly through 90 meters of its 420-meter long test track. The pod completed the test at just around 18 miles an hour, roughly the speed of some underground metro trains. That’s nowhere near the 600 miles an hour goal set by Musk and other evangelists, but it’s a start for a technology that’s struggled to make any meaningful movement in recent years. The tests were conducted at the European Hyperloop Center in Veendam, Netherlands. Hardt says it’s now preparing for a full speed test, which would see the pod approach 62 miles an hour, later this year.

“This achievement marks a key milestone toward realizing the hyperloop in Europe and around the world,” Hardt Hyperloop Commercial Director  said in a statement. “It is a great step in the right direction to continue with proving the other aspects of hyperloop, like cornering, lane-switching, and hyperloop vehicles branching in and out.”

How a hyperloop works 

Early engineering interest in pushing pods though pneumatics tubes dates black to at least the 1870s but commercial efforts to turn those ideas into a viable transit method really picked up steam over the past decade. In theory, a Hyperloop works by using a vacuum to suck out the air from a tubular tunnel track. That removal of the tunnel’s air greatly reduces drag, which allows a pod to travel at high speeds. Proponents of the tech argue pods traveling through a hyperloop could potentially rival speeds of a commercial airliner without having to burn gasoline. The pods themselves use magnetic levitation (maglev) to lift them up and keep them hovering in place while in transit. Electric propulsion pushes the pod forward. Unlike a traditional train, hyperloop tunnels don’t have tracks, which means the pods could switch directions at high speeds and potentially exist the tube one demands, similar to a car exiting a highway. If realized, hyperloops would supposedly offer a high speed transit option that’s efficient and reduces our reliance on gas-powered vehicles. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever. 

Overcoming the technological barriers inherent to hyperloops might be the easiest challenge to overcome. Far more difficult is figuring out the infrastructure and logistical requirements necessary to make large scale, underground travel viable . Hyperloop tunnels are unique, and won’t work inexisting underground tunnels. That means companies building these systems would need to come up with the immense capital and resources needed to build hundreds, or even thousands of miles of new infrastructure. Even if the funding were available, these companies would then need to acquire rights of way and work with local property owners and regulatory bodies to get approval to operate. All of that requires time and serious sustained investment. Those ballooning costs with no near term return were part of the reason Hyperloop One shuttered its operations last year. 

At the same time, recent advances in more conventional high speed rail in the US are potentially making the ambitious and expensive promise of hyperloops less appealing. Last year, Brightline officially began offering rides between Miami and Orlanda in trains capable of reaching 125 miles per hour. Builders have also officially broken ground on a first of its kind high-speed railway that could complete a trip from Las Vegas to Los Angeles in two hours. Even Texas, which has long struggled with expanding rail, is making inroads on a new train system that could connect Houston to Dallas . In other words, the hyperloop isn’t totally dead, but more realistic alternatives are thriving.

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Hyperloop: Travelling between continents in 3hrs will be a reality

To travel 350km between two cities in 30 minutes could become a reality in the next decade thanks to hyperloop technology, the transport system that combines the best of trains and planes to create a new means of transport.

eMobility Expo World Congress 2023 presented, at its first edition held in Valencia (Spain) from 21—23 March 2023, the advances in hyperloop technology, with a clear commitment to innovation and sustainable mobility. Andrés de León, CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, stated that "with the hyperloop, we could connect all continental distances in two to three hours".

Globally, the hyperloop market is already worth more than €2 billion in projects worldwide and is estimated to grow to €800 billion by 2040 and to reach €2 trillion by 2050.

David Pistoni, CEO of Zeleros, presented their transport system that will allow people and goods to be moved at ultra-fast speeds (1,000 kilometres per hour). The Spanish company, which develops hyperloop technologies for sustainable mobility by combining technologies such as the linear motor, levitation system, and aerodynamic propulsion, is also working to make this system scalable and detect application opportunities in other markets.

"We have divided our developments into two platforms: the propulsion system and the magnetic platform. There are great opportunities to include hyperloop technology to help decarbonise the movement of cargo in ports", he said.

Sustainability has been a common element of debate during the first edition of the eMobility Expo World Congress. Indeed, data provided by Hyperloop Transportation Technologies states that transport is responsible for 23% of global CO2 emissions, and the cost of air pollution is 54.1 trillion.

Andrés de León pointed out the creation of a new high-speed transport system that is cost-effective, emission-free and offers a smooth and comfortable experience for passengers. De León also stated that safety and sustainability will be two key elements of the hyperloop.

In the first aspect, the hyperloop works with intelligent constant monitoring sensors built into the capsule and works with very safe passive magnetic levitation. In terms of sustainability, this mode of transport can be defined as a 'net zero' carbon system.

"We put solar panels on top and generate 5—15% more energy than we consume", he explained.

The company, which has a network of 800 partners worldwide, is working on both passenger and cargo applications.

"We have created the first full-scale hyperloop test system in Toulouse, 4 metres in diameter, and we have built the first full-scale passenger capsules", he said. They are now focused on several projects, one in Italy, one in the Great Lakes and one in the harbour of Canada. "The Italian project will drastically accelerate the implementation of the hyperloop worldwide and will probably be a reality between 2026 and 2028", he said.

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A traveler's guide to Novosibirsk, the unofficial capital of Siberia

Trans-Siberian heritage

Residents of Novosibirsk love trains and are proud of the fact that their city played a significant role in the history of the grand Trans-Siberian railway, which spans the breadth of Russia. The railway is such a part of Novosibirsk identity that it is even depicted on the city’s emblem, along with the bridge that crosses the Ob river and two Siberian sables standing on their hind legs.  

In the city, there are as many as five monuments to trains, and an open-air locomotive museum is located in the vicinity of the train station Seyatel’. The museum has more than 100 steam locomotives, diesel locomotives and carriages, reflecting the history of rail transportation in Russia from pre-revolutionary times to the present day. Wondering around the stationary trains and comparing your height with the diameter of the gigantic iron wheels of the first steam locomotives is all very well, but why not climb inside the carriages and see how the nobility once traveled across Russia in pre-revolutionary times? These tours will however need to be booked in advance. The museum opens from 11:00 until 17:00 every day except Mondays. 

Novosibirsk spans both sides of the river Ob. In the early twentieth century, the border of two different timezones passed right through the city which led to a strange situation- morning on the east bank started one hour earlier than on the west bank! The two-kilometer covered metro bridge that crosses the river is considered the longest in the world. Due to the fluctuations in temperature across the year (on average +30 °C to -30 °C), during the summer the metro bridge expands, and in the winter it contracts by half a meter. To counter these effects, the bridge’s supports are equipped with special rollers that allow it to move.   

The cultural center of Siberia

The repertoire of the theatre can be viewed on its official website . The theatre season runs from September to July, and comprises mainly classical performances, like the ballet “The Nutcracker” by Tchaikovsky, Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” and Verdi’s “La Traviata”.  

The large Siberian sea and ligers

Weekends are best spent at the Novosibirsk zoo . The zoo is known for breeding big cats, although surrounded by controversy, hosts a successful crossing of a tiger and lion, which of course would not otherwise breed in wildlife. Ligers, or exotic cubs of an African lion and Bengal tigress, feel quite comfortable in the Siberian climate and even produce offspring. The zoo is open to visitors year-round, seven days a week, and even has its own free mobile app, Zoo Nsk .

Every year at the beginning of January, the festival of snow culture takes place bringing together artists from across Russia and around the world to participate in a snow sculpting competition. The tradition started in 2000 inspired by the snow festival in Sapporo, Novosibirsk’s twin-city.

Siberian Silicon Valley

Despite the fact that Akademgorodok was built half a century ago in the middle of the uninhabited Siberian taiga, architecturally it was ahead of its time. No trees were destroyed for its construction, and houses were built right in the middle of the forest. A man walking through the woods would seemingly stumble upon these structures. At that time, no one had built anything similar in the world and ecovillages only became fashionable much later.

For residents of the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok is a different world. When you step out the bus or car, you are immediately on one of the hiking paths through the forest, between the scientific buildings and clubs. On a walk through Akademgorodok, it is possible to unexpectedly encounter art-like objects handmade by residents of the city which have been erected as monuments and some monuments fixed up by city authorities. For example, the monument to the laboratory mice, which knits a strand of DNA on to some needles, can be found in the square alongside the Institute of Cytology and Genetics. In Akademgorodok there are many cafes and restaurants, in which it is possible to rest after a long walk. Grab a coffee and go to eat at Traveler’s Coffee , or eat lunch at the grille and bar People’s or Clover .

Winters in the Akademgorodok are slightly colder than in the city, so wrap up. Spring and summer are usually wetter, so waterproof boots are recommended. In the summer the Ob sea provides respite from the heat, so do not forget your swimsuit to go for a dip.

Memento Mori

Among the exhibits of the museum is one dedicated to world funeral culture — hearses, memorial jewellery from the hair of the deceased, samples from a specific photo-genre of  "post mortem", a collection of funeral wear from the Victorian era, deathmasks, statues and monuments. There’s also an impressive collection of coffins. One of them, resembling a fish, was manufactured on a special visit to Novosibirsk by a designer coffin-maker from Africa, Eric Adjetey Anang, who specializes in the production of unusual coffins.

Surprisingly, the crematorium itself does not look at all gloomy in appearance and definitely does not look like infernal scenes from movies, or like crematoriums of other cities that gravitate towards gloomy temple aesthetics. The Novosibirsk crematorium is decorated in “cheerful” orange tones and is surrounded by a park with a children’s playground nearby. A visit to the museum then leaves you with mixed feelings. 

Novosibirsk underground

Tourists from all over the world go down into the Moscow metro to take a ride and a few selfies in the most famous underground museum. The Novosibirsk metro is also quite a museum in itself — it has 13 stations, the most beautiful of which is Gagarinskaya, Sibirskaya and Rechnoy Vokzal.

The ultramodern Gagarinskaya station is like a real cosmos underground. Its technologically themed design includes marble walls with metallic elements, dark blue backlighting and portraits of Yuri Gagarin. The Sibirskaya station looks like an underground treasure trove, decorated by Altai masters craftsmen with mosaics of precious Siberian stones. The Rechnoy Vokzal station is framed with ten glowing stained glass windows depicting the largest cities of Siberia, including Novosibirsk itself, Omsk, Barnaul and others. The platform resembles a big ship sailing on the Ob, from which ancient Siberian cities are visible through its windows.  

How to get there

The easiest way to get to Novosibirsk is by plane with Aeroflot or Novosibirsk airline S7 with one-way tickets from Moscow costing from 200-250 USD. If you decide to take from the train from Moscow, you’ll have to travel approximately a third of the Trans-Siberian Railway. That’s 3,300 kilometers over almost a three-day journey. 

Where to stay

There are many great hotels in Novosibirsk. Amongst the best include a four-star Doubletree hotel by Hilton , which is located near Lenin Square (per room from $200). After renovations and repairs, the congress-hotel Novosibirsk has improved (per room from $100) and is located across from the train station. Less expensive but of a similar standard is the four-star River Park hotel near Rechnoy Vokzal metro station, which costs $80 per night.

All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

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