Hyperloop the Future of Transportation

A Hyperloop is a proposed mode of passenger and/or freight transportation, first used to describe an open-source vactrain design released by a joint team from Tesla and SpaceX.[1] Drawing heavily from Robert Goddard's vactrain, a hyperloop is a sealed tube or system of tubes through which a pod may travel free of air resistance or friction conveying people or objects at high speed while being very efficient.

Perhaps the most futuristic of all new transportation technologies is Hyperloop—a combination of maglev train and (partial) vacuum tube capable of propelling 'capsules' or 'pods' of passengers and/or freight at velocities approaching the speed of sound.

Although based on pre-existing ideas, Hyperloop's recent visibility is down to super-entrepreneur Elon Musk, who released an open-source white paper entitled Hyperloop Alpha in 2013 outlining the technology and promoting its suitability for linking "high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart." Beyond that inflection point, Musk argued, supersonic air travel should be cheaper and faster.

To date, tests of Hyperloop systems have reached 240mph (387km/h)—about a third of the 760mph (1,200km/h) posited by Musk in his 2013 white paper.

Hyperloop may eventually get fully up to speed, but plenty of issues remain surrounding public acceptance, regulation and business viability.

SEE: Hyperloop: A cheat sheet (TechRepublic)

In an online survey of 1,346 US adults conducted in February 2017, 17 percent of respondents said they would choose a one-time Hyperloop trip over a one-time trip to space. That may have cheered the technology's proponents, but the survey also revealed that 43 percent doubted Hyperloop would be available in their lifetime. Were it up and running now, 37 percent said they would use it, with 8 percent refusing outright.

Building a Hyperloop system is a major undertaking, whether the partial vacuum tube is located above or, more expensively, below ground. Typically, Elon Musk has founded his own tunnelling business, The Boring Company, among whose goals is to reduce the cost of tunnel construction—which currently can be as much as $1 billion per mile.

Apart from construction cost, other questions hovering over Hyperloop include land acquisition and building/tunnelling rights, environmental impact, safety standards and security.

None of these potential obstacles have deterred several startups from seeking to advance and implement Hyperloop technology. Apart from Elon Musk's SpaceX/Tesla, the frontrunner is Hyperloop One—recently rebranded Virgin Hyperloop One following an (undisclosed) investment by Richard Branson's group.

SEE: Hyperloop One CEO: Here's our roadmap to transform the future of transportation (ZDNet video)

Notable Hyperloop One milestones include: a Global Challenge, launched in May 2016, that identified 10 possible routes from a shortlist of 35; a test track—DevLoop—in Nevada, completed in March 2017; and the current Hyperloop speed record, set in December 2017 on the DevLoop. Although Virgin Hyperloop One says it is "working aggressively to meet a goal of having three production systems in service by 2021," anyone who has followed the tortuous progress of its Galactic stablemate may be forgiven for not holding their breath.

Other players in this nascent ecosystem include Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), Transpod and Arrivo.