Ready to Bite the Bullet: Hyper Loop, a “Fifth mode of Transport” and a Revolutionary Low-cost, Smart Travel Green Concept

How would you like to travel at the speed of sound? Travelling between inter-cities in just an hour's time. Perhaps lesser than the time it takes to travel in the past. You could actually stay in one city and work in another. Incredible, isn't it?. Stuck in Los Angeles traffic, about an hour late for a talk got Elon Musk wondering about an alternate way of travelling.

The Hyperloop

Elon Musk, the South Africa-born Canadian-American billionaire and, more importantly, a visionary, did follow up on this thought with a 58-page white paper published in August 2013 on Space X website - an advanced rocket and spacecraft agency. His proposed idea, named Hyperloop, was outrageously glorious. A solar-powered elevated tube that floats passenger pods on a cushion of air, travelling at a jaw-dropping speed of 1223.1 kilometers per hour or the speed of sound. Which means travelling the distance 1500 km would take an hour, you could live in one city and work in another city...It gives people more freedom,” Musk said.

What is hyper loop?

The Hyper loop Transportation System is an entirely new mode of transport that will revolutionize travel by connecting people and goods safely and efficiently. Hyper loop is a conceptual transport system in which passengers are loaded into pods and fired through vacuum tubes at more than 600mph (1,000km/h).

WHY A HYPERLOOP?

Our cities are polluted, our roads are crowded, and our travel experiences are now defined by chaos and calamity. Hyper loop is not just about record-breaking speed; it’s about improving the entire transportation infrastructure. It’s time to use resources smartly, travel green, and lower the cost of mass transit for everyone.

Mr. Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, and when he published in 2013 a white paper outlining a way to use airtight tubes to propel pods at speeds of up to 700mph (1130km/h), he set a challenge to anyone and everyone who wanted to try and build the technology.

The Speed of Sound
Travelling in a vacuum tube as fast as the speed of sound, “right next door” will take on an entirely new meaning.

Prototype pods have been tested running along magnetic tracks, much like the maglev trains used in countries such as Japan today.

Pumping the air out of the tubes reduces resistance, allowing high speeds to be achieved, potentially using less energy than a train. The idea could reduce journey times over long distances, but there are many challenges for the developers to overcome before any such project can become a reality.

Operating principle

Developments in high-speed rail have historically been impeded by the difficulties in managing friction and air resistance, both of which become substantial when vehicles approach high speeds. The vactrain concept theoretically eliminates these obstacles by employing magnetically levitating trains in evacuated (airless) or partly evacuated tubes, allowing for speeds of thousands of miles per hour. However, the high cost of maglev and the difficulty of maintaining a vacuum over large distances has prevented this type of system from ever being built. The Hyperloop resembles a vactrain system but operates at approximately one millibar (100 Pa) of pressure

Related Historical Projects

The concept of transportation of passengers in pneumatic tubes is not new. The first patent to transport goods in tubes was taken out in 1799 by the British mechanical engineer and inventor George Medhurst. In 1812, Medhurst wrote a book detailing his idea of transporting passengers and goods through air-tight tubes using air propulsion

In the early 1800s, there were other similar systems proposed or experimented with and were generally known as an Atmospheric railway.

The Crystal Palace pneumatic railway operated in London around 1864 and used large fans, some 22 feet (6.7 m) in diameter, that were powered by a steam engine. The tunnels are now lost but the line operated successfully for over a year.

Operated from 1870 to 1873, the Beach Pneumatic Transit was a one block-long prototype of an underground tube transport public transit system in New York City. The system worked at near-atmospheric pressure, and the passenger car moved by means of higher-pressure air applied to the back of the car while somewhat lower pressure was maintained on the front of the car

In the 1910s, vacuum trains were first described by American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard.While the Hyper loop has significant innovations over early proposals for reduced pressure or vacuum-tube transportation apparatus, the work of Goddard "appears to have the greatest overlap with the Hyper loop".

Princeton Physicist Gerard K. O'Neil, wrote about transcontinental trains using magnetic propulsion in his book "2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future". While a work of fiction, this book was an attempt to predict future technologies in everyday life. In his prediction he envisioned these trains which used magnetic levitation running in underground tunnels which had much of the air evacuated to increase speed and reduce friction. He also demonstrated a scale prototype device that accelerated a mass using magnetic propulsion to high speeds. It was called a mass driver and was a central theme in his non-fiction book on space colonization "The High Frontier"

Swissmetro was a proposal to run a maglev train in a low-pressure environment. Concessions were granted to Swissmetro in the early 2000s to connect the Swiss cities of St. Gallen, Zurich, Basel, and Geneva. Studies of commercial feasibility reached differing conclusions and the vactrain were never built.

China was reported to be building a vacuum based 1,000 km/h maglev train in August 2010 according to a laboratory at Jiaotong University. It was expected to cost CN￥10-20 million more per kilometer than regular high speed rail. As of August 2016, it has not been built.

There are multiple examples of depressurized tubes in literature and media going back to the 19th century. Harry Harrison's 1972 book “Tunnel Through the Deeps” is an early steampunk book that gives explicit details about how such a system would work both on land and at sea - including the use of underwater bridges to float the tubes across the depths beyond the continental shelf. Gene Roddenberry's follow-on to Star Trek, Genesis II, used a very similar concept - called a "subshuttle" in the programme - to move characters from place to place quickly

Presently, The ET3 Global Alliance (ET3) was founded by Daryl Oster in 1997 with the goal of establishing a global transportation system using passenger capsules in frictionless maglev full-vacuum tubes. Oster and his team met with Elon Musk on September 18, 2013, to discuss the technology, resulting in Musk promising an investment in a 3-mile (5 km) prototype of ET3's proposed design.

Socio Economic Consideration

The alpha proposal projected that cost savings compared with conventional rail would come from a combination of several factors. The Hyper loop white paper suggests that US$20 of each one-way passenger ticket between Los Angeles and San Francisco would be sufficient to cover initial capital costs, based on amortizing the cost of Hyperloop over 20 years with ridership projections of 7.4 million per year in each direction and does not include operating costs (although the proposal asserts that electric costs would be covered by solar panels). No total ticket price was suggested in the alpha design.

The early cost estimates of the Hyperloop are a subject of debate. A number of economists and transportation experts have expressed the belief that theUS$6 billion price tag dramatically understates the cost of designing, developing, constructing and testing an all-new form of transportation.

Political impediments to the construction of such a projects will be very large. There is a great deal of "political and reputation capital" invested in the existing mega-project in High-Speed Rail. Building a successful Hyperloop sub-scale demonstration project could reduce the political impediments and improve cost estimates. Musk has suggested that he may be personally involved in building a demonstration prototype of the Hyperloop concept, including funding the development effort.

Human Factors considerations

Some critics of Hyperloop focus on the experience- possibly unpleasant and frightening- of riding in a narrow, sealed, and windowless capsule inside a sealed steel tunnel, that is subjected to significant acceleration forces; high noise levels due to air being compressed and ducted around the capsule at near-sonic speeds; and the vibration and jostling. Even if the tube is initially smooth, ground may shift due to seismic activity. At speeds approaching 900 feet per second (270 m/s), deviations of 1 millimeter (0.039 in) from a straight path would add considerable buffeting and vibration, with no provisions for passengers to stand, move within the capsule, use a restroom during the trip, or get assistance or relief in case of illness or motion sickness. This is in addition to the obvious practical and logistical questions regarding how to best deal with equipment malfunction, accidents, and emergency evacuations.

Pushing the concept further

Instead of monopolizing the idea, Musk says he's not endorsing any company or building his own Hyperloop system. Like anyone of us, he just wants the concept to move ahead. Hence, in the summer of 2015, SpaceX launched a pod design competition and promised the winner a one-mile (1.6 km) test track near its headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Students across the world sent in their request to compete in numbers. On the day of the event, 1000-plus students showed up representing 20 countries. A key point about this competition that Anthony Foxx, U.S Transportation Secretary, very right points out is that "everybody here is involved in envisioning the future." A future that is fast, self-sustainable and substantially cheaper than any other means of long distance travel.

The most amazing thing ever?

But while a majority of the public sounded very interested, some even calling it "the most amazing thing ever," there have been a growing number of sceptics. From some wondering if the Hyperloop could actually be mass-produced, to travelling across boundaries, to some serious safety concerns. Musk acknowledges in his paper, but also argues that the system will be safer in comparison to trains, planes and automobiles. It'll be powered by lithium ion battery packs along with solar panels so it won't be affected by block outs or rainy days. It will be strong enough to withstand tremors while travelling earthquake countries.

“The knowledge gained here will continue to be open-sourced,” SpaceX says on its website. We will, very possibly, be witnessing the future of transportation here with Musk hosting more Hyperloop competitions in the future. It's outrageous. Glorious.