All Aboard the Hyperloop!
As promised in July, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk has revealed the details of his mysterious transportation innovation, the Hyperloop! And it's exactly what folks theorized it was in July — a high-speed transportation system where folks zip from Los Angeles to San Francisco in tubes.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports:
Almost a year after Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, first floated the idea of a superfast mode of transportation, he has finally revealed the details: a solar-powered, city-to-city elevated transit system that could take passengers and cars from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. In typical Musk fashion, the Hyperloop, as he calls it, immediately poses a challenge to the status quo—in this case, California's $70 billion high-speed train that has been knocked by Musk and others as too expensive, too slow, and too impractical.
In Musk's vision, the Hyperloop would transport people via aluminum pods enclosed inside of steel tubes. He describes the design as looking like a shotgun with the tubes running side by side for most of the journey and closing the loop at either end. These tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, and the pods inside would travel up to 800 miles per hour. Some of this Musk has hinted at before; he now adds that pods could ferry cars as well as people. "You just drive on, and the pod departs," Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek in his first interview about the Hyperloop.
Musk seems to think he can build this for between $6 and $10 billion, an estimate that should be greeted with a significant amount of skepticism. He doesn't seem to have any plans to directly pursue it, explaining he's focusing on his other companies. But he is going to publish an open-source design, so anybody who wants to can try to work on it themselves.
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