Tesla’s head Elon Musk shows his fast travel new idea, The Hyperloop. Paypal creator Elon Musk, the man who “revolutionized the online payment business and transformed spaceflight missions for NASA via SpaceX, is now taking on California’s public transportation system,” according to the LA Times. This past Monday, for the first time Mr. Musk showed his design of the fast travel transit system he calls his ‘Hyperloop.’ It is a $6 billion dollar transportation system which travels upto 760 miles per hour utilizing solar energy.
California has billions of dollars in deficits and currently has a plan for a $68 billion dollar bullet train that has been delayed and has ballooned in costs. Musk believes that his system is superior and is a fraction of the cost of the current idea such that he wants the state of California to leave the failure that it has on its plate, and move forward with his plan.
The idea seems space aged and straight out of star trek. However 42 years young Elon Musk revolutionized how people drive, with Tesla Motors, and he also revolutionized how people integrate business and payment power online with PayPal, bringing secure transactions into peoples homes for day-to-day secure internet-buying transactions.
Musk is an industrialist, and all of his start-ups have made him into a well-respected celebrity. Planning for a environmentally sound transport vehicle, Tesla motors doesn’t rely on carbon. Additionally, Mr. Musk founded the company SpaceX, the space exploration technologies corporation. His head is not in the clouds but definitely he has a long vision for the future. He calls the Hyperloop ‘the fifth mode’ of transportation, after rail, road, water and air. As weird as it sounds, people will travel via vacuum tubes. Dr. Michio Kaku, famous physicist and string theory proponent, gives him the thumbs up, calling him a “doer who has to be taken seriously.”
Details on the new transport indicate that travel speed would be between 300 and 760 mph, as passengers travel through a steel tube that was kept at low pressure. The travel capsule would go through the tube on a cushion of air (like a puck gliding on an air hockey table) and would be accelerated by a magnetic system at points along its travel path. Approximately 7.5 million people a year are estimated to travel via the Hyperloop.
Currently a 57 page ‘alpha’ design has been created by engineers from SpaceX and Tesla. Critics wonder if the young Mr. Musk can work through California’s terrain of seismic zones, cutting through residential business, farms, and communities. Critics also consider that the “alpha” paper is short on economics while also being completely uneducated in California’s political system, which the Hyperloop would require a lot of support from before it were to get the green light.