You must have heard of billionaire innovator Elon Musk’s ambitious project of developing a high-speed vacuum transportation project called Hyperloop. It envisions pods traveling at more than the speed of sound and revolutionizing inter-city travel. Elon Musk is known to be quite passionate about this new development and has already begun to woo investors into the fledgling project. Now part of his plan is to let other people do groundbreaking work and assist wherever it is necessary and that was when he announced a Hyperloop competition in which design firms would compete with one another to land the contract with Tesla.
So far, two companies have come forward with concrete ideas and are working to run their ideas on a standard Hyperloop cycle. Out of those two, Hyperloop one or formerly Hyperloop Technologies appears to be more active of the two and had been teasing about the first test run for some time. Now anyone can drive pods using vacuum tubes but the main objective of this program is to use the current technologies to make scalable hyperloop transport networks that can carry actual human beings in a safe manner.
After months of speculation, Hyperloop One has tested the first pod using jets of air while the other company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) is also in the process of doing a similar experiment. While Elon Musk’s ideas are the basic driving force, both of these two companies have significantly veered off the original design as HTT has been testing a magnetic lifting mechanism as they believe it is much better suited while Hyperloop One has ditched the idea of solar power for Hyperloop pods at the present and are willing to use any energy source.
Here is the footage from the first test of Hyperloop One in Nevada:
Seems quite fast, doesn’t it? The company has already installed 2000 feet long length of test track and will test the newer system there. They also claim that soon, the pods will be traveling at 400 mph and they plan on breaking the 700 mph barrier just later this year. To put this into perspective, the coast-to-coast distance in US will be reduced to just a couple of hours. How cool is that?
The future is here, people. Never be afraid to invest in it.
