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 For a select few the way we'll move ourselves across the world
tomorrow is in a glass tube at speeds of almost 800mph.
This was originally the brainchild of billionaire U.S. entrepreneur
Elon Musk, who envisioned being able to whisk passengers between San
Francisco and Los Angeles in under half an hour.
Two years after unveiling plans for a futuristic, high-speed
Hyperloop transportation system, Musk has now announced plans for
building a test track in southern California and a competition for
prototype pods.
Several companies subsequently announced plans for pilot projects in
California, Texas and other locations, but Musk and his companies,
which include privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or
SpaceX, and Tesla Motors Inc electric car company, were not
involved.
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and Dirk Ahlborn are one of
those in the driving seat.
"Well imagine a capsule filled with people that's hovering inside
the tube. Inside the tube you create a low pressure environment very
similar to an airplane that's at high altitudes. So now the capsule
traveling inside the tubes doesn't encounter as much resistance, and
so therefore can travel really fast with very little energy,"
Ahlborn told Reuters.
"It's 100 percent solar powered, that's basically the invention
here," he said.
The capsules would ride a cushion of air blasted from underlying
skis, propelled by a magnetic linear accelerator, according to
Musk's plans, running above or below ground and along low pressure
steel tubes.
When Musk announced this idea in 2013, many were quickly excited -
with the Hyperloop described as combining Concorde, a rail gun and
air-hockey table; a 57-page design brief imagines it carrying
automobiles and people at speeds almost impossible for land based
vehicles.
Compared to alternatives like the state's planning high-speed rail
system, the Hyperloop would be safer, faster, lower cost and more
convenient, Musk originally said in a blog post.
On June 15 SpaceX said it would be building a mile-long test track
near its Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters and host a competition for
student and independent engineering teams to design subscale
transport pods.
But presenting the Hyperloop project to a European audience for the
first time in Vienna at the Pioneer's Festival in May, Ahlborn said
HTT were also on the cusp of building their own track.
"So at the beginning of 2016 we will break ground on Quay Valley
which is a newly to be built town in California, it's an 8 kilometer
track, which would allow us to optimize passenger boarding and the
capsule handling for example," he said.
"We're not going to get up to 760 miles an hour, but we believe we
can actually break the records that are existing right now, and it's
a necessary phase before we go and build a full scale, full length
model," he added.
It's not just the technology that Ahlborn is pioneering either.
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He and his team of around 360 people at HTT have been able to push
forward with their plans so quickly because of the way they've
structured their business - crowdsourcing talent and labor, rather
than crowdfunding the project with money.
That means that individuals and organizations, including publicly
traded companies, are all involved.
For Quay Valley itself, they are looking currently at sponsorship
deals and investment from strategic partners that can help them with
developing the system globally and get them access to the right
people.
But what's exciting for him right, he said, is the potential.
"We try to look at everything in a very disruptive way. So do we
need a ticket? Are there other ways of creating revenue? The pylons
are just out of concrete - is there anything else we could do with
them so that it actually makes sense and you want to have them on
your ground," he told Reuters.
"So you can have concrete that cleans the air, you can have gardens
in them, you could have bee hives inside those concrete pylons,
different energy solutions, so there's lots of things that we can do
to create a new cutting edge technology," he said.
Once Quay Valley is complete, Ahlborn reckons the only barrier
remaining will be scale - involving more pylons and longer tubes.
"Quay Valley going to be full scale, we're going to move around 10
million people a year, it's going to be opening up in 2018," he
said, adding that he expects Quay Valley to be full commercially
viable.
"So we assume right now that in 2017 we will be finished with the
building process and basically starting to do the optimization and
testing before we open. At that time we will obviously open it up to
our potential partners in the different countries, and I assume that
we will close very, very fast the contract for the first full length
track," he added.
With a strong business model that Ahlborn says makes the railway
industry look like a dinosaur, the cost, safety and reliability of
Hyperloop could provide an environmental model for future, lightning
fast transport.
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