Elon Musk came up with the idea for hyperloop pods that could whisk riders through sealed tubes at 700 mph as an ultra-fast, future-friendly form of travel. While not interested in building them himself, he issued a challenge for others to create a hyperloop that would, compared to current transit systems, be:
- Safer
- Faster
- Lower cost
- More convenient
- Immune to weather
- Sustainably self-powering
- Resistant to Earthquakes
- Not disruptive to those along the route
Musk’s hyperloop is based on an even earlier 1972 proposal from R. M. Salter of the Rand Corporation that envisioned an Very High Speed Transit System (VHST) based on magnetically levitated pods moving inside a low-pressure vacuum tube. The tube would ease pod movement with about “1/6 that of the pressure of the atmosphere on Mars” — the low pressure being maintained by vacuum pumps.
A “hard” vacuum, according to Musk’s proposal is problematic: “All it takes is one leaky seal or a small crack somewhere in the hundreds of miles of tube and the whole system stops working.”Hyperloop One, a company working to…
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