The construction of Hyperloop has finally started
A safe way to travel at more than 1,100 km/h without using fossil fuels, rails or roads might sound like science fiction, but it’s exactly what Elon Musk suggested when envisioning the fastest means of transport in the world: Hyperloop. Instead of using a roads and rails, the Hyperloop consists of a long, depressurized tube that ‘shoots’ a capsule carrying people or materials, from a point A to a point B.
“You just remove the pressure from an enclosed environment — you can think of that as a tube. You remove the friction of wheels by levitating that pod inside the tube, and then it takes a very little amount of energy to move that pod at incredible speed,” said Rob Lloyd, President of Hyperloop Technologies, in an interview with CNNMoney.
Elon Musk, who first proposed the hypothesis of Hyperloop, did so to protest against the plans of the former governor of California to build a bullet train that would cost $68 billion to build and would charge people $100 to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles. According to the billionaire, you can create a collective means of transport much faster spending much less, provided with the right technology.
Musk has developed guidelines for the construction of Hyperloop and then open-sourced a 60-page document on how it could be done, challenging investors, companies and scientists to make it happen – and Hyperloop Technologies owned up to the challenge. The test tubes being built by the company will begin to be assembled and tested in the coming months in the state of Nevada, and it is expected that the final model will be fully-functional by 2020.
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