How Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Will Give Bullet Trains a Run for their Money

What if I told you that you could travel from San Francisco to LA in 30 minutes or from Mumbai to Bangalore in an hour, without ever stepping foot inside an airplane?

Thanks to science, that will soon be possible. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, has proposed an idea for a futuristic means of transport called the Hyperloop. Topping out at a whopping speed of 700mph, it will revolutionize the way we travel over short and medium distances.

It looks like something that popped out of a science fiction movie.

To put it simply, Hyperloop is a combination of a Concorde (a supersonic plane), a rail gun, and an air hockey table. The Concorde was fast and revolutionary for personal transport, a railgun uses electromagnetic forces to transport objects at super-high speeds, and an air hockey table reduces sliding friction to nearly nothing. When you put all these concepts in one magic means of transportation, you essentially have the Hyperloop!Seems pretty cool, right?

The Hyperloop incorporates reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors.

An artist’s impression of the capsule that will carry the passengers.

Basically, it’s just a closed, supersonic, enlarged roller-coaster.

Elon Musk claims that the Hyperloop will be safer, faster, cheaper, more convenient and completely weather-resistant as compared to the supersonic trains that are currently operating today. At the very least, it won’t get flooded by the abominable Mumbai rains and will skip the horrendous traffic on Pacific Coast Highway.

SpaceX has announced an open competition where enthusiasts can make their own prototype of functional Hyperloop pods that can travel at least 1 mile without any hiccups. Competitors have until September 2015 to make their submissions. The full-scale model is expected to be tested by June 2016.

It won’t be long until we’ll be able to have breakfast in London, lunch in Paris and dinner in Edinburgh without thinking twice! The future looks pretty amazing for us. It’s a great time to be alive!

Source: www.scienceabc.com