In 2013, Elon Musk shared plans to create a Hyperloop. These are high-speed capsules with magnetic levitation that move inside vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 1102 km/h.
This is not a new idea. A similar concept was proposed by the scientist’s leader, Robert Goddard, in 1904.
The main advantage of Hyperloop is its travel speed, which is twice the speed of an airplane. No ground transport has yet learned to produce such results.
Musk promised that the Hyperloop would be 3-4 times faster than a high-speed train, with travel time from Los Angeles to San Francisco being 30 minutes.
This is a very ambitious project that requires many decisions and costs. At the same time, the usefulness of Hyperloop is often questioned due to the very large number of nuances that must be observed for its stable operation.
After Musk presented the Hyperloop, several companies appeared in the world that offered similar solutions and promised to change the world of passenger transportation, but not all of them survived until 2023.
Arrivo
Arrivo Corporation scored in 2016 by Brogan BamBrogan (yes, that revealed the first and last name). The startup initially wanted to create its own version of the Hyperloop, but the idea was quickly abandoned using magnetic platforms for cars.
The idea was to have cars leave the roads and drive onto special magnetic platforms that would take them from downtown Denver to the airport at 200 mph.
The project remained on paper. The startup shut down at the end of 2018 because it was unable to raise funds from the shutdown.
Delft Hyperloop
This is a non-profit project of students from the Delft University of Technology, located in the Netherlands. It was launched in 2016 to study technologies to be used in Hyperloop.
The main goal of the project is to enable students to study the technologies of the future. Students participate in the development of the Delft Hyperloop for a year, and then new ones take their place.
Over the course of the seven-year lighting program, students were able to create a scaled-down prototype of the Hyperloop, and are now creating a levitating capsule for it.
Transport technologies Hyperloop
In 2013, the company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies was founded in the United States, which built its own version of the Hyperloop with capsules accelerating up to 1,300 km/h and an annual passenger flow of 15 million people.
But for 10 years the company did nothing. Its greatest achievements are the test track in France and participation at the MWC exhibition.
The company regularly updates its website and talks about its successes and new partnerships, but it hasn’t really done anything to make it a real Hyperloop.
Hyperloop One
Hyperloop One was founded in 2014 and has since changed its name several times to Virgin Hyperloop and Virgin Hyperloop One. One of its co-founders is Brogan BamBrogan, who previously worked at SpaceX and launched his own startup, Arrivo, in 2016.
Among its competitors, Hyperloop One was the closest to launching the tunnel. In 2017, the company raised $295 million and developed terms for a landfill in Las Vegas. To do this, Hyperloop One built a 500-meter tunnel into which it placed a capsule similar to a fuselage aircraft.
In 2020, the company tested people at speeds of 172 km/h. The capsule moved due to an electric motor, and strong shaking was felt in the cabin.
At the beginning of 2022, Hyperloop One decided to limit human participation and close this project. The company switched to cargo transportation and laid off half of its employees. Since then, there has been no news about Hyperloop One, and a stub has been posted on the official website.
Elon Musk Looks Like He Wasn’t Going to Build a Hyperloop at All
As a concept, Hyperloop has many advantages. But some of them turn into disadvantages when it comes to implementation in real life.
It is enough to blow up or remove the structure from its sections so that the capsules cannot continue moving. The explosion will also lead to depressurization of the vacuum; the trapped air can instantly turn the entire tunnel and capsules into scrap metal.
In addition, in the USA, where all the startups were founded, it is very difficult to obtain permission to build any objects. It is impossible to directly build a tunnel between the two cities. There is foreign land, unsuitable land, swamps, forests, fields, mountains and rivers that can influence the progress of construction.
It is also worth considering that the capsules do not take into account the possibility of a sharp turn at a speed of 1000 km/h, so the builders will not be able to bypass the unsuitable area, they simply made a sharp turn.
And the most important thing: all these projects require very large investments and, as the experience of the last 10 years has shown, cannot be built within a few years.
At the same time, if someone could build a working Hyperloop, then a passenger ticket would be very expensive, because otherwise the company would not be able to recoup the project. Cargo transportation was also not in demand due to high prices, even despite the speed of delivery.
Elon Musk himself doesn’t seem very interested in Hyperloop. For 10 years, SpaceX managed to obtain permission to build only one tunnel, 16 km long, between Baltimore and Hanover, but work was not started. Initially, Musk’s goal was connected by high-speed communication with San Francisco and Los Angeles, the distance between the countries of the world is 600 km.
In the biography of Elon Musk said, that he proposed creating a Hyperloop in 2013 to replace the main highway connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. Musk argued that Hyperloop would be faster and cheaper than government-owned rail.
He hoped that California would abandon this project using Hyperloop, while Musk himself had no intention of seriously pursuing Hyperloop. At that time, he was more interested in Tesla and SpaceX.
As a result, California began construction of its railways, and the Hyperloop mask is in fact frozen. Latest post on Hyperloop Twitter went out in July 2019.
Source: Iphones RU
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
