MIT
A sketch from the MIT Hyperloop team.
Construction will begin mid-year in Quay Valley, California, halfway between L.A. and San Francisco.
It sounds a little too good to be true: Imagine traveling at the speed of sound, seated comfortably in a capsule that looks something like a gelcap pill for giants. You're hurtling in a low-pressure vacuum tube on pillows of air, with technology that is impervious to human error, weather changes, and traffic; it's also earthquake resistant, and runs on solar, wind, and kinetic energy. Better still: It can get you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. This is Hyperloop, the much-touted (and debated) high-speed transit system that could change the way the word travels—if the concept can get out of the station, so to speak.
Since Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk breathed new life into a century-old concept in 2013, the Hyperloop has gone from a sketch to a number of companies jostling for the best idea—one that may put the American rail system out of business. Musk named the MIT Hyperloop team the top talent at the SpaceX Hyperloop pod competition in January, and just yesterday, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies CEO Dirk Ahlborn confirmed that construction will begin mid-year on a five-mile stretch of Hyperloop pylons alongside Interstate 5 in Quay Valley, California, halfway between L.A. and San Francisco.
That project—part of a full-scale system that may cost upwards of $68 billion, conceived and executed by acrowdsourced team of 500-plus employees—is slated to be completed in 2018, followed by a Hyperloop rollout slated for Slovakia in 2020, and "maybe Austria and Hungary," Ahlborn said during a panel discussion at SXSW in Austin yesterday. The pressure is on to make this tube travel a reality, if only to make "travel suck less," said Ahlborn. "I think traveling sucks. I think no one enjoys travel. You don’t look forward to taking a plane. You look forward to arriving. We can disrupt all this."
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