vacuum tube travel technology

​What is Hyperloop? Everything you need to know about the race for super-fast travel

What is Hyperloop?

Special report

Tech and the future of transportation (free pdf).

This ebook looks at emerging autonomous transport technologies and how they will affect society and the future of business.

Hyperloop is a new form of ground transport currently in development by a number of companies, It could see passengers travelling at over 700 miles an hour in floating pod which races along inside giant low-pressure tubes, either above or below ground.

What makes Hyperloop different?

There are two big differences between Hyperloop and traditional rail. Firstly, the pods carrying passengers travel through tubes or tunnels from which most of the air has been removed to reduce friction. This should allow the pods to travel at up to 750 miles per hour .

Secondly, rather than using wheels like a train or car, the pods are designed to float on air skis, using the same basic idea as an air hockey table, or use magnetic levitation to reduce friction. 

What are the benefits of Hyperloop?

Supporters argue that Hyperloop could be cheaper and faster than train or car travel, and cheaper and less polluting than air travel. They claim that it's also quicker and cheaper to build than traditional high-speed rail. Hyperloop could therefore be used to take the pressure off gridlocked roads, making travel between cities easier, and potentially unlocking major economic benefits as a result.

When are the first Hyperloops going to be available?

A number of different companies are working to turn the idea into  a functioning commercial system .

Hyperloop technology is still in development even though the basic concept has been around for many years. At the moment, the earliest any Hyperloop is likely to be up and running is 2020 but most services are expected to be later, as trials of the technology are still in their early stages.

Where will Hyperloop services run?

It's still not clear where Hyperloops will actually be established but a number of companies have sketched out routes in the US, Europe, and elsewhere . Potential routes include New York to Washington DC, Pune to Mumbai, Kansas City to St Louis, Bratislava to Brno, Vijaywada and Amaravati, and many more.

What is the history of Hyperloop?

Russia taps Hyperloop for domestic transport

A proposed project to bring Musk's Hyperloop to Russia would cost between $12 and $13 billion.

The idea of using low-pressure or vacuum tubes as part of a transport system has a long heritage. The Crystal Palace pneumatic railway used air pressure to push a wagon uphill (and a vacuum to drag it back down) way back in Victorian south London in 1864. Similar systems using pneumatic tubes to send mail and packages between buildings have been in use since the late nineteenth century, and can still be seen in supermarkets and banks to move money around today.

One clear predecessor of the Hyperloop is the 'vactrain' concept developed by Robert Goddard early in the twentieth century; since then, many similar ideas have been proposed without much success.

However, it was entrepreneur Elon Musk who really reignited interest in the concept with his 'Hyperloop Alpha' paper in August 2013, which set out how a modern system would work -- and how much it would cost.

What is Hyperloop Alpha?

In his Hyperloop Alpha paper, Musk set out the case for a service running between Los Angeles and San Francisco, which would be cheaper and faster than a proposed high-speed rail link. He argued that his Hyperloop could be safer, faster, more affordable, weather-proof, self-powering -- and less disruptive to people living along the route.

Musk said that a Hyperloop service could be the answer to travel between cities less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart; beyond that, supersonic air travel would be more efficient, he said.

"Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment," Musk wrote. Nobody has got very far with the teleportation idea, alas, but a number of companies have seized at the potential of Hyperloop.

How does a Hyperloop tube work?

The basic idea of Hyperloop as envisioned by Musk is that the passenger pods or capsules travel through a tube, either above or below ground. To reduce friction, most -- but not all -- of the air is removed from the tubes by pumps.

Overcoming air resistance is one of the biggest uses of energy in high speed travel. Airliners climb to high altitudes to travel through less dense air; in order to create a similar effect at ground level, Hyperloop encloses the capsules in a reduced-pressure tube, effectively allowing the trains to travel at airplane speeds while still on the ground.

In Musk's model, the pressure of the air inside the Hyperloop tube is about one-sixth the pressure of the atmosphere on Mars (a notable comparison as Mars is another of Musk's interests ). This means an operating pressure of 100 pascals, which reduces the drag force of the air by 1,000 times relative to sea level conditions, and would be equivalent to flying above 150,000 feet.

How do Hyperloop capsules work?

The Hyperloop capsules in Musk's model float above the tube's surface on a set of 28 air-bearing skis, similar to the way that the puck floats just above the table on an air hockey game. One major difference is that it is the pod, not the track, that generates the air cushion in order to keep the tube as simple and cheap as possible. Other versions of Hyperloop use magnetic levitation rather than air skis to keep the passenger pods above the tracks.

The pod would get its initial velocity from an external linear electric motor, which would accelerate it to 'high subsonic velocity' and then give it a boost every 70 miles or so; in between, the pod would coast along in near vacuum. Each capsule could carry 28 passengers (other versions aim to carry up to 40) plus some luggage; another version of the pods could carry cargo and vehicles. Pods would depart every two minutes (or every 30 seconds at peak usage).

How would Hyperloop be powered?

Elon Musk's Hyperloop: Here's the Dutch team with designs on supersonic train concept

Engineers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands are taking tech entrepreneur Elon Musk's Hyperloop travel idea very seriously.

The pods will get their velocity from an external linear electric motor -- effectively a round induction motor (like the one in the Tesla Model S ) rolled flat. Under Musk's model, the Hyperloop would be powered by solar panels placed on the top of the tube which would allow the system to generate more energy than it needs to run.

How is Hyperloop different from high-speed trains?

Supporters argue that Hyperloop is significantly better than high-speed rail. It is lower cost and more energy efficient because, among other things, the track doesn't need to provide power to the pods continuously and, because the pods can leave every 30 seconds, it's more like an on-demand service. It's also potentially two or three times faster than even high-speed rail (and ten times the speed of regular rail services).

How much would a Hyperloop cost to build?

For the LA to San Francisco Hyperloop that Musk envisaged , he came up with a price tag of under $6bn. Musk envisioned an LA to San Francisco journey time of half an hour with pod departures every 30 seconds, each carrying 28 passengers.

Spreading the capital cost over 20 years and adding in operational costs, Musk came up with the figure of $20 plus operating costs for a one-way ticket on the passenger Hyperloop.

The costs of a Hyperloop according to Elon Musk's Hyperloop Alpha paper.

Most of the cost of the system lies in building the tube network: the overall cost of the tube, pillars, vacuum pumps, and stations was calculated at just over $4bn for the passenger version of Hyperloop ($7bn for a slightly larger version that could also take freight). The cost of the capsules was put at around $1.35m a piece; with 40 needed for the service, the cost of these is around $54m (or $70m for a mix of passenger and cargo capsules). That's less than 9% of the cost of the proposed passenger-only high-speed rail system.

What will it feel like to travel in a Hyperloop?

Critics of Hyperloop have warned that travelling in the tube might be an uncomfortable experience, due to nausea-inducing acceleration, plus lateral G-force on bends in the route. However, Virgin Hyperloop One says that a journey via Hyperloop will feel about the same as riding in an elevator or a passenger plane.

Virgin Hyperloop One's XP-1 passenger capsule.

"Although Hyperloop will be fast, the systems we are building will accelerate with the same tolerable G-forces as that of taking off in a Boeing 747," it said. Acceleration and deceleration will be gradual, it added, with no G-forces and turbulence.

Travelling in a concrete pipe in a windowless pod means there isn't going to be much to look at; Musk's original vision said that "beautiful landscape will be displayed in the cabin" and each passenger will have access their own personal entertainment system.

What a Hyperloop Transportation Technologies capsule might look like from inside.

How much will Hyperloop tickets cost?

Musk's LA to San Francisco version offered tickets at just $20 but Virgin Hyperloop One is more vague on its plans: "Difficult to say as it will depend greatly on the route, but the goal is to make it affordable for everyone," it said, while Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) said it expects "a profitable system with low ticket price projections".

Will Hyperloop be a success?

That's the huge, multibillion dollar -- and, as yet, unanswered -- question around Hyperloop. The concept has been around for a long time, but until now the technology has been lacking. This time around, it's possible that the technology may have just caught up with the concept. 

There are well-funded companies racing to be the first to deliver a working service but, despite their optimistic timescales, these projects are still very much in the pilot and experimental stages. Going from short test routes to hundreds of kilometres of track is a big jump that none of these firms has made yet. 

If the technology is still in development, that's also very true of the business models to support it. The success of Hyperloop will vary depending on the destinations, local economics, and geography. Trying to build a new line overland across England, for example, can prove an expensive and complicated business which can take many years (as the ongoing HS2 controversy has shown).  In other countries where land is cheaper or where routes can travel through less populated areas, it may be easier to get services up and running faster.  

Capacity is another issue. It's not clear that Hyperloop can do a better job of moving a large number of people than other mass transit options. Critics argue that lots of pods will be required to achieve the same passenger numbers as more traditional rail, which uses much bigger carriages. And there are many engineering hurdles to overcome, like building the tubes strong enough to deal with the stresses of carrying the high-speed pods, and finding energy- and cost-efficient ways to keep them operating at low pressure. 

Moving from a successful test to a full commercial deployment is a big jump, and passenger trials are still to come. Assuming that consumers are happy being zoomed around in these tubes, finding the right price for the service will be vital, too.

Right now Hyperloop is at an experimental stage, even if the companies involved are very keen to talk about its potential.

Can Hyperloop make a profit?

Why hyperloop is poised to transform commutes, commerce, and communities

Elon Musk may have popularized the concept, but multiple teams are racing to deploy hyperloop routes at key spots across the globe.

The companies building Hyperloop services argue that they are significantly cheaper to build than high-speed rail services. Musk's Hyperloop Alpha paper claimed his LA to San Francisco route could be built for one-tenth of the price of a high-speed rail alternative. Other companies have said their services could be one-third to half the price of rail services and much faster. Being cheaper to build should mean these services can become profitable quickly. 

However, there are plenty of engineering challenges to be tackled which could push the costs up, and how these services will be funded in the first place is not clear; many of the feasibility studies under way are looking at how to finance them, likely through a combination of public and private investment.

How is Hyperloop like Linux?

Rather than keeping the Hyperloop to himself, Musk threw the idea open to anyone who wanted to develop it, comparing it to the Linux operating system: an open-source design built by a community of developers in order to bring it from concept to reality.

Indeed, in his Hyperloop Alpha paper, Musk noted that a number of areas still remained to be resolved including the control mechanism for Hyperloop capsules; station designs with loading and unloading of both passenger and passenger-plus-vehicle versions of the Hyperloop capsules; comparisons of Hyperloop with more conventional magnetic levitation systems; and testing to demonstrate the physics of Hyperloop.

Who is building Hyperloop services?

Despite doing much to lay the groundwork for Hyperloop services, Musk initially said he was too busy to develop his own service. There are now a number of companies working to turn the idea into reality, including startups and others that have been working on the idea for some time already. Among them are Virgin Hyperloop One , HTT, TransPod, Arrivo, and others. Each is developing a slightly different set of technologies, but the fundamental underlying idea remains the same.

Is Elon Musk building a Hyperloop service?

Despite saying he was too busy, it looks like Musk remains intrigued by the idea of Hyperloop: last year he said that he had received 'verbal approval' for a New York to Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington DC Hyperloop, which would cut the New York to Washington DC travel time to just 29 minutes. "Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly," he added.

In February, the Washington Post reported that Musk's Boring Company had received a permit for some preparatory and excavation work in New York.

In October 2017, Maryland's Department of Transportation also gave conditional approval to the construction of a Boring Company tunnel from Baltimore to Washington , allowing it to dig under state roads.

In April 2019, the company provided more details on its plans for the Washington DC to Baltimore section -- it aims to build a high-speed Loop underground transportation system that transports passengers in autonomous electric vehicles, or AEVs, at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour.

It adds that the Loop tunnels could potentially serve as Hyperloop corridors, which could potentially transport passengers at speeds of up to 700 miles per hour. However, it warned: "The potential future use of Hyperloop technology is currently unknown ."

What is the Boring Company?

Musk set up the Boring Company with the aim of making it easier and faster to dig the tunnels under, and between, cities in order to make Hyperloop projects viable. Tunnels can cost as much as $1bn a mile to dig; The Boring Company wants to dig tunnels at one-tenth of the price. The company says it can do this by digging smaller tunnels, making faster and more efficient digging machines, and replacing diesel-powered machines with electric ones.

A Boring Company tunnel.

As well as building more efficient digging machines, the Boring Company also offered a line of caps and more unusually flame throwers, both of which sold out rapidly after they were released.

In May, the Boring Company won a $48.6m contract to design and build the city of Las Vegas' planned loop of underground tunnels for moving people in autonomous electric vehicles. The tunnel is expected to be operational by the end of the year. 

What is Loop?

The Boring Company hopes that one use for these tunnels, as well as Hyperloops, will be Loop. This is a high-speed underground public transportation system which sees passengers carried on autonomous electric 'skates' travelling at 125 to 150 miles per hour. Electric skates will carry between eight and 16 passengers or a single passenger vehicle. Passengers (and vehicles) would enter the pods at street level and then elevators would drop them down to the level of the Loop to continue the journey underground, bypassing street traffic (with pedestrians and cyclists getting priority over cars).

The company is currently working on an initial test tunnel in Hawthorne (near the SpaceX and the Boring Company HQ) and has submitted plans for a 6.5-mile proof-of-process tunnel which would run within the City of Los Angeles and Culver City.

The company said that unlike a subway, there is no practical upper limit to the number of stations that can be built along the tunnel route, as stations can be as small as a single parking space because the service is accessed via lifts.

Each Loop 'station' is made up of a bank of elevators to transport the skates to and from ground level. "Since stations require such a small footprint, they can be easily integrated in busy city-centers, residential communities, or any location along the tunnel route that can accommodate a single parking space," the company said. It has published a map showing a potential set of routes for the service.

What is the Hyperloop Pod Competition?

Musk's SpaceX has its own Hyperloop test track at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California -- about one mile long and with a six-foot outer diameter.

In order to accelerate the development of functional prototypes and encourage student innovation, SpaceX announced the Hyperloop Pod Competition in 2015, which challenges university teams to design and build the best transport pod, judged by different criteria each time. In 2018, the focus was the maximum speed for a self-propelled pod on the test track, or as the competition puts it: "Fastest time without crashing wins!". In 2019 it was judged on maximum speed with successful deceleration .

What is Virgin Hyperloop One?

Virgin Hyperloop One is one of the leading contenders attempting to create a commercially viable Hyperloop system. It was founded in June 2014 and has over 300 staff. It has raised $295m with the aim of building an operational system by 2021. The company currently has projects underway in Missouri, Texas, Colorado, North Carolina, the Midwest, India, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Virgin Hyperloop One's DevLoop in North Las Vegas.

In February, the company announced plans for the Indian state of Maharashtra to build a Hyperloop between Pune and Mumbai beginning with an operational demonstration track. The project will start with a six-month feasibility study looking at the route, environmental impact, the economic and commercial aspects of the route, the regulatory framework, and cost and funding model recommendations.

Assuming all goes well, an operational demonstration track will be built between two points on the route two to three years from the signing of the agreement and serve as a platform for testing. The company said the construction of the full Pune-Mumbai route -- a 25-minute journey -- would take place in five to seven years. It added the high-capacity passenger and cargo Hyperloop route could eventually see 150 million passenger trips annually.

"I believe Virgin Hyperloop One could have the same impact upon India in the 21st century as trains did in the 20th century," said Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin group.

The company is also working on a feasibility study into a Hyperloop route linking Kansas City, Columbia, and St Louis running along the I-70 in Missouri, and is looking at high-level cost estimate and funding model recommendations.

The company has a 500 meter-long DevLoop, which has a diameter of 3.3m and is located 30 minutes from Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. In December, the company said it had completed its third phase of testing, achieving test speeds of 387 kilometers per hour.

"The tests were conducted in a tube depressurized down to the equivalent air pressure experienced at 200,000 feet above sea level. A Virgin Hyperloop One pod quickly lifts above the track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to ultra-low aerodynamic drag," the company said.

It has identified 11 potential routes in the US , from the short -- a Boston-Somerset-Providence route of just 64 miles -- to the epic -- the Cheyenne-Houston route which would run 1,152 miles across four states, potentially reducing to 1 hour and 45 minutes a journey that currently takes 17 hours by car or truck. The company has also identified nine routes across Europe , potentially connecting over 75 million people in 44 cities, and spanning 5,000 kilometers. 

In June 2019, the Indian project took a step forward with the government of Maharashtra giving Hyperloop the green light and preparing to start the public procurement process. This project will be a partnership between the DP World-Virgin Hyperloop One consortia and the state government, with DP World expected to invest $500m to complete the first phase of the project which will certify the new technology for passenger operations.

In July, Virgin Hyperloop One announced a development partnership with Saudi Arabia's Economic City Authority (ECA) to conduct a study to build a 35-kilometer test and certification Hyperloop track -- the longest so far -- as well as a research and development center and Hyperloop manufacturing facility north of Jeddah. In the future, traveling from Riyadh to Jeddah would take 76 minutes (instead of over 10 hours) using Hyperloop technologies, the company said. 

What is Hyperloop Transportation Technologies?

Tech and the future of transportation: From here to there

Transportation is about to get a technology-driven reboot. The details are still taking shape, but future transport systems will certainly be connected, data-driven and highly automated.

Founded in 2013, Hyperloop Transport Technologies (HyperloopTT or HTT) is another company looking to turn Hyperloop into reality. It has a team of 800 engineers and headquartered in Los Angeles. It wants to build a transport system built on a passive magnetic levitation system and says its 30-meter capsules will be able to carry 28 to 40 passengers and travel at a maximum speed of 1,223 kilometers per hour, moving 164,000 passengers a day on one line at full efficiency. The company points to reinsurance company Munich Re deeming its system to be "feasible and insurable" as a reflection of its progress so far.

In September, HyperloopTT said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board to build a Hyperloop between the city centers of Vijaywada and Amaravati, potentially turning a trip of more than one hour into a six-minute ride. The project will use a public-private partnership, with funding primarily coming from private investors and starting with a six-month feasibility study. The company is also working on the development of a route from Bratislava, Slovakia to Brno, Czech Republic .

The company has a 320-meter test track system in Toulouse, France. "With tubes assembled and pumps installed, HyperloopTT is now beginning the process of integrating their full-scale passenger capsule for human trials in 2020," the company said in June this year.

Last year, the company said it also planned a second full-scale system, spanning one kilometer and elevated by pylons at a height of 5.8 meters. It's expected to be completed in 2019 .

Another route identified as having Hyperloop potential would see the 313-mile journey from Chicago to Cleveland completed in 28 minutes -- at a speed of 730 miles an hour. A $1.2m feasibility study for developing a Hyperloop corridor route is due to be completed by the fall of this year.

HTT's first commercial Hyperloop project is a 10-kilometer length of track due to go live next year in the United Arab Emirates. Bibop Gresta, chairman of HyperloopTT said when the deal was announced in April 2018 that "with regulatory support" the first section will be operational in time for Expo 2020, which opens in October of that year . Construction work on the project is due to start in Abu Dhabi in the third quarter of this year.

In February, HyperloopTT told Australian politicians its technology could transport people from Sydney to Canberra in 22 minutes .

Who else is building Hyperloop services?

TransPod is another contender, and released a study that predicted that a TransPod Hyperloop system would cost 30 percent less than high-speed rail lines in Europe -- and be more efficient for passengers and freight, at more than three times the speed. It also said a Hyperloop will cost 50% less and travel four times faster than high-speed rail between Toronto and Windsor in Canada. In November 2016, TransPod announced the closing of a first $15m round of funding from Angelo Investments.

In January this year, TransPod said it was building a new three-kilometer-long test track in Limoges, France. Construction of the test track will begin in 2019, and the company plans to start high-speed testing in 2020. The results of the program will inform the construction of a working prototype of the TransPod's Hyperloop vacuum train , also to be built in Limoges.

Another company looking to build Hyperloop-style systems, Arrivo, shut down at the end of 2018.

What's next for Hyperloop?

Hyperloop is a technology that, for its supporters at least, could have a huge impact. It could reduce air travel between big cities, boost economies and trade, and reduce the pressure on housing in cities by allowing commuters to live further away. But none of this is anywhere near proven -- yet. There are major technical and business hurdles that Hyperloop technologies will need to surmount before they can carry passengers in comfort through a pneumatic tube, let alone change the world.

The next stage for Hyperloop is to move beyond initial testing and feasibility studies, start longer distance trials of the technology and, even more importantly, testing the service with passengers. Another challenge will be to find commercial models that work around the world. Only when all this is done will it become clear whether Hyperloop can really become a success.

Additional resources

• Hyperloop's 240 mph speed record puts us one step closer to sci-fi tube travel (TechRepublic)
• Virgin Hyperloop One hits new top speed (ZDNet)
• Elon Musk's Hyperloop: Here's the Dutch team with designs on supersonic train concept (ZDNet)
• Moscow wants a Hyperloop (CNET)
• Hyperloop could cart ya to Jakarta someday (CNET)

Everything you need to upgrade your camping trip

The best travel vpns: expert tested, april 2024 solar eclipse faq: how to watch, what you need, and everything else to know.

Hyperloop Travel: Could Vacuum Tube Travel Be a Reality?

The tubular tizzy started in 2012, when Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk suggested The Hyperloop as a new form of transportation, one that would be twice as fast as a plane and totally solar powered. He didn’t offer any engineering specifics at the time, but in August 2013 he produced a 57-page white paper that outlined his technical thinking for how this system would work.

At its core, hyperloop is all about removing the two things that slow down regular vehicles: friction and air resistance. To do away with the former, you make the pod hover above its track, like a magnetic levitation train. Musk originally suggested doing this with air bearings, little jets of air on the bottom of the pod. Think of air hockey, he said, but where the air comes out of the puck instead of the table. Today, most hyperloop engineers have decided instead to rely on passive magnetic levitation. Where standard maglev systems are power hungry and expensive, this system uses an array of permanent magnets on the vehicle. When those magnets move over conductive arrays in the track, they create a magnetic field that pushes the pod up, no current required. A complementary magnet system (think of two magnets pushing off one another) would give the pods a push every few miles or so—the near total lack of friction and air resistance means you don’t need a constant propulsion system.

As for air resistance, that’s where the tube comes in. (Yes, tubes also just feel like the future, but that’s not the point.) The tubes enclose the space through which the pods move, so you can use vacuums to hoover out nearly all the air—leaving so little that the physics are like being at an altitude of 200,000 feet. And so, like a cruising airplane, a hyperloop needs only a little bit of energy to maintain the pods’ speed, because there’s less stuff to push through. More speed with less power gets you to where you’re going faster, greener, and—depending on energy costs—maybe cheaper too.

How Hyperloop Works

Reece Rogers

David Gilbert

Scott Gilbertson

Andy Greenberg

After explaining all this, Musk said he was too busy to build the thing himself. He was running both Tesla and SpaceX and didn’t have time to remake yet another industry. So he encouraged anyone interested to have a go. Let there be hyperloop, he said.

And there was hyperloop. Well, a hyperloop industry, anyway. Soon after Musk’s paper hit the internet, a handful of companies sprung up, bringing together engineers and VC money to solve the problems for real. From the beginning, LA-based Virgin Hyperloop One has appeared to be the most serious contender, with serious VC backing, hundreds of employees, a full bank account, and a test track in the Nevada desert where, in December, it sent a pod racing to 240 mph .

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies takes a less built-up approach. Nearly all its engineers have day jobs at other companies (places like Boeing, NASA, and SpaceX). In their free time, they work together, mostly online and in distinct groups, to solve the engineering problems standing between humanity and hyperloop. It has plans to build networks in Central Europe , South Korea , and India . Similarly, there’s rLoop, a Reddit-based community of people who study the various engineering problems in the mission of “decentralizing high technology.”

Oh, and Elon Musk is back in the game. The hyperloop progenitor started by hosting a series of student engineering competitions , using a short length of tube he built at SpaceX’s headquarters. Then, last summer, he confirmed he wants to build a hyperloop of his own . His plans are particularly vague, but he thinks the tubular system would go great with the tunnels he wants to create using another new venture, the Boring Company.

While the various companies here are mostly pursuing the same tech (passive magnetic levitation, big vacuum pumps), it didn’t take long for the young hyperloop industry to splinter. Former SpaceX engineer Brogan BamBrogan helped launch Hyperloop One, but left in August 2016 amid a bizarre and bitter legal dispute with the company, in particular cofounder Shervin Pishevar (who took a leave of absence from the company in December 2017 after several women accused him of sexual misconduct). BamBrogan (that’s his legal name) then started his own outfit, Arrivo, except now he’s working on what he calls a hyperloop-inspired system. He got rid of the tube , deeming it too expensive. “If I want to travel really fast between two cities in a low-pressure environment inside a metal tube, I would use an airplane,” he says. It’s a valuable reminder that “hyperloop” is not an invention but a clever combination of technologies that together make something very fast and very fun.

If you really want hyperloop, however, you must build a hyperloop. There are lots of renderings and promises out there: The companies in this space have announced plans to build hyperloops in California, Colorado, on the East Coast, in India, Slovenia, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. Hyperloop One wants a commercial line in service in 2020.

Over the next few years, then, we’ll start to see answers to the real question here. It’s not “can hyperloop work”—we know the engineering make sense. As BamBrogan puts it: “It’s within the laws of physics, but hard enough to be fun.”

Here’s the real question, as put by David Clarke, director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville: “Can it compete—from a capital standpoint and an operating standpoint and a safety standpoint?”

To really work, Clarke means, a hyperloop must offer the kind of service, pricing, and safety record that will draw paying passengers away from current modes of transportation, including airlines, trains (that applies more overseas than in the US), and the personal car. Those systems may not be perfect, but they have established user bases, are more or less profitable, and are safe enough to keep people riding and regulators happy. They know how to work with governments around the world, and they know how to build the infrastructure they need to run—how to get it certified and funded and in place.

That’s why the first hyperloop systems will likely target very specific use cases with built-in passengers and minimal political hurdles. They could connect an airport to a city center or public transit hub, or send cargo from a port to an inland distribution center, so trucks don’t have to crowd into already congested areas. Tackling a real long-distance, city-to-city route will make things much harder.

To even have a shot at competing, hyperloop must start by finding a way to finagle through the bureaucratic regulations that govern what gets built where. The people running these companies insist that it won’t be as hard as it seems and that they’re already working with eager governments to get their systems built. To make things easier, Hyperloop One held a competition in which cities pitched for the right to host the thing . No doubt, places willing to clear out obstacles like pesky regulations stood out. The winners included Canada (with a route connecting Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal), Florida (Orlando to Miami), and India (Mumbai to Chennai), but the company hasn’t announced any actual plans to start building. And, of course, it remains to be seen whether any promises will hold when local residents protest, land rights prove hard to acquire, and construction costs mount up.

More hurdles: These companies will need to figure out how to prove that traveling by tube is safe. What happens if an asteroid rips open the tube or one of the supporting pylons collapses in an earthquake? The hyperloop engineers say the pod will just slow down in the face of sudden air resistance, but a rapid slowdown is often known as a crash. And if the pod is near a ruptured tube, what happens if it flies out? Will regulators insist the pods meet crash standards, like cars, or that everyone wear seat belts at all times? Whatever the answers, expect the first working systems to move cargo, not carbon-based lifeforms.

More questions: How much energy will it take to fling those pods up to near-supersonic speeds? Doing it with renewables would be great, but can you generate and store enough solar power to run all those pods, wherever they are, whenever people want to whoosh?

Then there’s the money. Virgin Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd has said it would cost about $10 million to build one mile of two-way track, less than a third of what California is paying for its stuck-in-limbo high speed rail system. Musk’s original paper estimated a hyperloop from Los Angeles to San Francisco would cost $6 billion, and you could recoup the investment and cover operating costs with $20 ticket prices. Of course, that was five years ago and doesn’t account for changes in the engineering made by the involved companies; it also comes from a man notorious for lowballing cost (and time) estimates. The truth is, we have no idea how much it will cost to maintain a working hyperloop, which requires keeping hundreds of miles of tubes nearly free of air, and won’t until we’re closer to a working system.

If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the high speed rail system that was supposed to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, or why people stopped building super fast magnetic levitation trains after the first few systems started service, you should know that details like local politics and maintenance costs have a knack for hampering transportation innovation. And maybe that’s not such a terrible thing. Trains, hyperloops, airports, light rail lines—these are big things that cost a lot of money and impact many people’s lives. You want to be sure of what you’re doing before you throw the switch.

So what comes next? A bit more engineering, to start. Then real life—and that’s when we’ll see whether hyperloop can really change the world, or at least get rid of some of the traffic. And if you really want to ride in a hyperloop and you’re not a shipping container, you might want to move to Dubai. If any place can sweep away political hurdles and ignore potentially outrageous energy bills, it’s the city whose motto might as well be “Sounds shiny and impractical—let’s do it!”

The Age of Hyperloop Has Arrived. Well, for the Most Part The first public demonstration of anything resembling a hyperloop was in May 2016, when Hyperloop One (as it was then known) raced a 1,500-pound aluminum sled down a track at 300 mph before it stopped by plowing into a pile of sand. The test didn’t even feature a tube, but the company claimed it as a milestone, the first time it proved its propulsion system worked. Four years after Elon Musk first suggested tubular transportation, this was evidence the technology to make it happen was coming together.

Students Build the World’s Fastest Hyperloop—Then Elon Musk Showed Up When Elon Musk decided he wanted to help make hyperloop after all, he started by using SpaceX to host a series of (mostly) student competitions to design the pods that would travel inside the tube and see how fast they could make them go. Musk provided the test tube, a mile-long steel pipe, six feet in diameter. In the summer of 2017, the WARR Hyperloop team, from the Technical University of Munich, won the latest round, hitting 192 mph. A few days later, Musk revealed he had run his own test—and topped out at 220 mph. And now he says that yes, he is indeed trying to build a hyperloop.

The Elegant Tech That May Make Hyperloop a Reality The physics of making a pod levitate and of sucking air out of a tube are sound, but engineering challenges remain. Hyperloop One competitor Hyperloop Transportation Technologies rejected Musk’s original suggestion for the levitation bit—air bearings, which work like an air hockey table, in reverse—in favor of passive magnetic levitation.

Cities Crave Hyperloop Because It’s Shiny—And Talk Is Cheap In the spring of 2017, representatives from 11 American regions traveled to Washington, DC, in search of a common goal: winning the right to bring the hyperloop back home. The only problem? Hyperloop One has not proven it can make it work, especially not at scale, or for a reasonable cost. But the siren song of hyperloop—faster, greener, cheaper—is hard for cash-strapped, traffic-clogged cities to resist.

Brogan BamBrogan Is Taking the Hyperloop to Colorado Brogan BamBrogan is working on what he calls a hyperloop-inspired system—one without a tube, which he says is expensive, impractical, and doesn’t add all that much, at least not for the relatively short stretches he wants to cover.

The Race to Build the Hyperloop Could Fix Boring Old Trains and Planes Despite the hype, there’s a good—maybe better than that—chance hyperloop will never really happen, or that it will at least never spread to the point where it’s a common way of getting around. The good news is that the engineers trying to make this thing work could produce tech that makes existing transit modes better: better maglev trains, futuristic plane windows, safer and smarter cars, even cheaper space travel.

Meet the 89-Year-Old Reinventing the Train in His Backyard Max Schlienger doesn’t think much of the hyperloop. The 89-year-old engineer has his own way of improving travel. A modern update of the 19th century’s atmospheric railway, Schlienger’s Vectorr system uses vacuum power inside a small tube to propel a canister of sorts, which connects to the train carriage on the track above it with magnets. As the canister inside the tube moves, so does the train. Schlienger built a one-sixth scale model of the system at his Northern California home (which doubles as a vineyard), but like the hyperloop the path to deployment is hard to see.

This guide was last updated on January 31, 2018.

Enjoyed this deep dive? Check out more WIRED Guides .

Rhett Allain

Eric Berger, Ars Technica

Morgan Meaker

Sabrina Weiss

Parker Hall

Adrienne So

Hyperloop is a new mode of transport first envisioned by Tesla and Space CEO Elon Musk. It consists of a low-pressure environment taking the form of a tube in which pods travel at high-speed.

Several people brought forward similar ideas, but the term and specific system was first revealed to the public in a white paper published by Musk and a few engineers at Tesla and SpaceX in 2013.

He open-sourced the concept and several startups have since launched efforts to make the concept a reality.

• The Boring Company

Elon Musk’s Boring Company begins testing full-scale Hyperloop system, with a twist

Elon Musk’s The Boring Company announced that it is starting testing on its first full-scale high-speed Hyperloop transportation system.

The company might fulfill Musk’s vision for a new mode of transportation 10 years after unveiling it. But there have been some changes to the spec…

The Boring Company is finally going to make a full-scale version of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop

The Boring Company is finally going to make a full-scale version of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop – a new high-speed mode of transportation – and it is coming as soon as this year.

SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition live blog and livestream

Electrek (Seth and myself) are in Hawthorne today for the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition where teams of engineers and students are going to try to break some speed records with prototype pods of this new mode of transportation.

We are going to bring you as much as possible through our social media platforms and this post is going to be the hub for the event.

Expand Expanding Close

• Virgin Hyperloop One

Virgin Hyperloop One unveils a new ultra-fast cargo system ‘at the cost of trucking and speed of flight’

Virgin Hyperloop One, previously known as Hyperloop One before  they secured a new investment from Richard Branson’s Virgin,  has announced a new partnership with DP World for a new ultra-fast hyperloop cargo system with global ambitions. Expand Expanding Close

Virgin Hyperloop One releases video of full-scale working pod prototype in test tube track

Virgin Hyperloop One, previously known as Hyperloop One before  they secured a new investment from Richard Branson’s Virgin,  is still pushing to bring its hyperloop system to market and they released a full-scale working pod prototype in their test tube track. Expand Expanding Close

First look at what it would be like inside a hyperloop pod

Most companies working on hyperloop systems are currently focused on the actual low-pressure tunnel and propulsion sub-systems and not the interior of the passenger pods.

But Virgin Hyperloop One has been making some progress and now they are unveiling their first   hyperloop pod interior design. Expand Expanding Close

Virgin Hyperloop One secures deal to build first hyperloop system in India

Hyperloop One hasn’t been in the news as much since they secured a new investment from Richard Branson’s Virgin  and changed their name, but now they are coming back into the spotlight with a deal presented as “historic”.

They signed an agreement with India to build a major hyperloop system between Pune and Mumbai. Expand Expanding Close

• hyperloop one

Virgin Hyperloop One reaches new record speed in test loop, raises another $50 million, and Branson becomes Chairman

Virgin Hyperloop One, previously known as Hyperloop One until a large investment from Virgin in October , made several announcements this week.

The company announced that it achieved a new record speed in its test loop in Nevada, raised another $50 million, and made Richard Branson its new Chairman. Expand Expanding Close

Elon Musk shows what Tesla/SpaceX’s hyperloop pod pusher can do

SpaceX’s second Hyperloop Pod Competition ended last weekend and WARR team won with a top speed of 201 mph (324 km/h) achieved in 0.8 mile in SpaceX’s 1-mile long near vacuum tube.

Now Elon Musk shows what a machine built by Tesla and SpaceX can do in the same hyperloop. Expand Expanding Close

Elon Musk teases Tesla Model S in his tunnel under LA

As we reported last week,  Elon Musk’s Boring Company received a green light from the city of Hawthorne to build a 2-mile long tunnel.

Now the CEO teases Tesla’s all-electric Model S in the tunnel – giving us a glimpse of what his vision of a network of tunnels alleviating traffic in cities could look like. Expand Expanding Close

Elon Musk plans to build his own hyperloop technology for his Boring Company’s tunnel projects

Elon Musk surprised quite a few people last month when he revealed that his latest plans to dig tunnels would include a proposed  underground hyperloop between New York and Washington DC.

The plans for his ‘Boring Company’ were previously limited to networks of tunnels under cities, but the new hyperloop project raised an interesting question: who will be building the hyperloop technology for the project?

The answer is apparently Elon Musk’s own Boring Company. Expand Expanding Close

Hyperloop One reaches new top speed of 192 mph in test with actual pod in vacuum tube

After announcing “the successful completion of the world’s first full systems Hyperloop test in a vacuum environment” last month, Hyperloop One is now releasing the details of a new test with their actual pod in their vacuum test tube.

They achieved a new top speed of 192 mph (310 km an hour). Expand Expanding Close

Elon Musk’ Boring Company plans underground Hyperloop for New York-DC in ’29 mins’

Elon Musk just casually announced on Twitter that he received “verbal government approval” for The Boring Company, his new tunnel boring startup, to build an underground Hyperloop system connecting New York city, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC.

The system would be fast enough to travel “city center to city center” between New York City and Washington DC in just 29 minutes, according to Musk. Expand Expanding Close

Hyperloop One shows first ‘Full Systems Test’, unveils first ‘pod’

Hyperloop One, one of the main companies developing the new mode of transportation envisioned by Elon Musk, announced today “the successful completion of the world’s first full systems Hyperloop test in a vacuum environment.”

Surprisingly, this test was privately conducted on May 12, 2017 at the company’s test track in Nevada, known as the ‘DevLoop’, and they are only now disclosing it. Expand Expanding Close

Hyperloop One unveils 9 new potential European routes for high-speed travel

After unveiling  11 potential routes for the high-speed transportation system in the US , Hyperloop One is now announcing 9 new potential European routes.

While it doesn’t mean that any of them will actually be built, those are currently the most likely routes to be among the first regions to get a new high-speed transportation system. Expand Expanding Close

• Green Energy
• Gigafactory
• Boring Company

Elon Musk on Boring Company, Semi-Truck, Mars – TED Talk [transcript]

Chris: Elon. Hey, welcome back to TED. It’s great to have you here.

Elon: Thanks for having me.

Chris: So, in the next half hour or so we’re going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes my first question a little ironic. Why are you boring?

Hyperloop One reveals 11 potential routes for the high-speed transportation system in the US

While Hyperloop One has been making great technical progress in the US on the high-speed transportation system first envisioned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the interest for actual deployment of the system has been way greater outside of the states, like in Dubai for example.

But today, the company attempts to change that by revealing the US routes with the most potential. Expand Expanding Close

Tesla CEO Elon Musk to join President Trump to talk about infrastructure with other business leaders

U.S. President Donald Trump is set to hold a meeting with officials and business leaders today to discuss his $1 trillion infrastructure program.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk will be present at the meeting, according to a White House official talking to Reuters . Expand Expanding Close

Hyperloop One: images of the first Hyperloop full scale test track released

In another “it’s actually happening” moment with the hyperloop today, we get an updated look at what is probably the most advanced hyperloop system developed so far. We saw SpaceX’s test track earlier this year , but the mile-long tube that the rocket company built is only meant for testing propulsion systems and it isn’t full-scale.

Hyperloop One’s track in Nevada is the first that could support a full-scale pod to carry people and cargo. The company released the first pictures of their progress since installing the first tube last November . Expand Expanding Close

Elon Musk says hole in SpaceX’s parking is start of a ‘vast underground transportation network’ for cars and hyperloop

There’s a big hole in the middle of the parking lot of SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. CEO Elon Musk already announced that it would be used to test new digging techniques  under development by his new ‘Boring Company’ in order to increase tunneling speed.

Musk has now elaborated a little more on his plan for the new company and on the first hole in Los Angeles, which he described as the beginning of a ‘vast underground transportation network’ for cars and the hyperloop.  Expand Expanding Close

Elon Musk speaks about Hyperloop and tunneling at SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod Competition

SpaceX held a Hyperloop Pod Competition this weekend at their facility in Hawthorne, CA, and earlier today Elon gave the crowd a short speech talking about transportation innovation, efficiency, and his new “boring” company focused on  building tunnels to alleviate traffic , showing that his recent focus on tunnels is probably related to how he sees hyperloop developing as underground, rather than overground, transport.

Hyperloop teams are gearing up for SpaceX’s pod competition this weekend

SpaceX is holding the last phase of its first ‘Hyperloop Pod Competition’ this weekend at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Surprisingly and despite some startups making significant progress, this mostly-student competition could represent the most advanced hyperloop technology demonstration since Elon Musk first published the idea back in 2013. Expand Expanding Close

• Hyperloop Transportation Technologies

Hyperloop startup announces $30 million investment, claims total raised over $100 million based on some unconventional math

While Hyperloop One, the main startup developing hyperloop technologies and deployment projects, is moving full steam ahead with its test track in Nevada and several full-scale projects around the world , another startup called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. (HTT) is also trying to carve itself a place in the space.

Hyperloop One has been taken more seriously than HTT since it has been backed with more money from serious investors, but today the company announced that Hyperloop One is not the only hyperloop company capable of raising capital and confirmed a $30 million round of investment and a $100 million total investment to date, but that’s based on some unconventional math to say the least. Expand Expanding Close

Hyperloop One installs the first tube of its ‘DevLoop’ in Las Vegas – it’s really happening

In another “it’s really happening” moment with the hyperloop following the announcement of a new system in development in Dubai , Hyperloop One announced today that it installed the very first tube of its “DevLoop” in North Las Vegas. Expand Expanding Close

MIT Technology Review

• Newsletters

The Unbelievable Reality of the Impossible Hyperloop

• Ryan Bradley archive page

The tube is out back, 11 feet in diameter, 60 feet long, the unfinished end spiraling into wide ribbons of steel—like a gigantic Pillsbury dough container with its seams gaping open. Behind the tube is a big blue tent known as the robot school, where autonomous welders wheel or crawl along, making the tubes airtight. The goal is to put tracks and electromagnets inside the tube and vacuum the air out. Ultimately, capsules will scream through the center of such a tube at 700 miles per hour on a cushion of air—a way to get from A to B faster and more efficiently than planes or trains. The first public tests of this concept, albeit on an open-air track, will take place in North Las Vegas this week (you can read about the results of that test here ). They’re aiming to hit 400 miles per hour.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk introduced the world to the concept of a giant vacuum-tube transportation system, the Hyperloop, two and a half years ago. The basic idea is to build a partially evacuated tube, inside which capsules would float on a layer of air, pulling themselves along with a fan and getting extra propulsion from electromagnets in the tube’s walls. Musk talked of trips from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes, with off ramps at each end loading and unloading pods with 28 seats every two minutes. Although the design was ambitious to the point of being outlandish, none of its components were fundamentally unproven, something often overlooked. But Musk was too busy revolutionizing the space industry (as CEO of his company SpaceX), the automotive industry (as CEO of his other company, Tesla Motors), and the energy industry (as chairman of his other other company, SolarCity), to devote any time to the Hyperloop. He released a 58-page outline of his implausible idea and left it to someone else to finish it off.

In a former ice factory by the paved-over Los Angeles River, a startup company called Hyperloop Technologies is trying, using $100 million from optimistic venture capitalists. Musk’s improbable and incomplete design and his unlikely plan to get it built are suddenly looking less unbelievable—maybe even conceivable. Maybe. “The thing about Hyperloop is that it does not exist until it actually exists,” Josh Giegel, vice president of design and analysis at Hyperloop Tech, tells me before we step into the backyard to look at the various elements of the Hyperloop that do exist. There's the tube, the robots, a length of track, and various pieces of the electromagnetic propulsion system. A couple of hundred miles away, 2,000 feet of track in the Nevada desert is being readied for a public test of the track and electromagnetic propulsion system.

Giegel left the space tourism company Virgin Galactic to join Hyperloop Tech as its first employee a year and a half ago. At the time the company was based in a garage in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. The garage was owned by Hyperloop Tech’s cofounder, a fellow stupendous in facial hair, engineering chops, and name: Brogan BamBrogan . He’d worked with Giegel—and for Musk—at SpaceX, a company that sent a craft into orbit to dock with the International Space Station just five years after incorporating. In the Hyperloop they’d found something still more audacious that has drawn even more skepticism and snickering. But here I was staring at giant tubes and robots and powerful magnets and being told that within weeks the world would see the core of the crazy thing tested in public.

Floating steel

The fact that two-year-old Hyperloop Tech has already grown from a handful of engineers in a garage to 140 people across three acres of old industrial buildings near downtown Los Angeles, plus a patch of desert in North Las Vegas, seems to indicate something about the West Coast tech industry in 2016. Perhaps that it’s too easy to raise tremendous cash reserves for technological larks. Or perhaps the power and promise of an entirely new form of transportation.

Either way, Hyperloop Tech’s growth is impressive (and puts it far ahead of a competitor, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies , which is funded by donations). A tour of Hyperloop Tech’s offices offers both the aesthetic notes of a fast-growing startup (exposed brick, stand-up desks, whiteboards, huddles of engineers) and the delights of an inventor’s workshop. Beyond the steel tubes and welding robots, there's a wind tunnel, a huge pressurized chamber called the levitation rig, and an even bigger vacuum tube (appropriately dubbed the Big Tube) for testing the full set of Hyperloop components. I also see a block of electromagnets float a large, flat steel square a foot or so in the air. It hovers there stiffly, so stiffly that even when I press down on it very hard, it does not budge. This was a demonstration of the Hyperloop’s shock absorption system. Possibly. Everything is being continuously built and tested and torn apart and put back together again. It’s a methodology lifted from Musk, who at SpaceX set out to apply principles from software engineering, like continuous iteration and exploration, to the kind of massive hardware usually built slowly and surely, without any backtracking. “We build fast, adapt fast, and get a lot more data rather than wait and wait until one final build, which may or may not work,” Giegel tells me, beaming.

We move from the backyard, where the tubes were, to a room adjacent to the banks of monitors, exposed brick, and engineers: the power electronics lab. It’s literally humming with various tests running in every corner, on generators, switch boxes, and hulking pressurized chambers. Hyperloop Tech engineers are tweaking Musk’s original plan, which imagined solar cells atop the tubes feeding energy to acceleration points every 40 or 50 miles where pods would get an extra magnetic shove. In between, pods could coast without much slowing down thanks to their air cushion and low pressure in the tube reducing friction (a well-designed braking system could reclaim energy when it was time to slow down). But counting on solar energy to deliver the sudden bursts of power to the acceleration magnets doesn’t look practical for all places or weather conditions. And Hyperloop Tech claims to be in talks with governments and businesses “all around the world.” The company is designing the Hyperloop to use any power source.

Although the design was ambitious to the point of being outlandish, none of its components were fundamentally unproven.

Rob Lloyd, Hyperloop Tech’s CEO, pulls out his phone and shows me a series of photographs: a white rail, open to the air, running into the distance across a flat sandy expanse of Nevada desert. “The first test was”—he checks his watch—“a few hours ago. This morning.” During my visit it’s an early afternoon in the middle of April. He says that within a few weeks he expects to be running the test sled down the test track at speeds of more than 400 miles per hour. By the end of the year, they’d break 700 miles per hour.

“We’re working in a time frame that shocks people, because we have to,” Lloyd continues. The Hyperloop does not exist until it exists, and politicians won’t believe in it either until it exists, he says. Lloyd went state to state looking for somewhere with a loose enough regulatory system that a test site could be built more or less immediately. Although many states boasted the necessary “regions of great flatness and straightness,” as Lloyd puts it, all clammed up at the thought of a big, heavy, fast test track. All except reliably business-friendly and regulation-free Nevada. “People we got here hate waiting to do things,” Giegel says. So North Las Vegas was it. Lloyd says he is closing in on a deal overseas for a larger test site that could turn into a full-scale production system. As well as much more track, it would have the capacity to try out hauling, loading, and unloading shipping containers, and integrating with existing transportation facilities, such as docks.

Indeed, although Musk emphasized transporting people, Hyperloop Tech’s vision is broader. Lloyd tells me to think of it as a network of tubes, exchange points, and off-ramps that can transport all kinds of things. It sounds a lot like the Internet, and not by accident. Lloyd joined Hyperloop Tech after retiring as president of networking equipment company Cisco, where he spent decades building Internet infrastructure through deals brokered with governments and businesses worldwide. He was convinced to join Hyperloop Tech by the company’s cofounder and chairman, investor Shervin Pishevar, most famous for making a large bet on Uber.

“Transportation is the new broadband,” says Pishevar. He sees Uber and Hyperloop as complementary. “You are taking atoms and bits and, for the first time in history, smashing them together,” he says. “I can take my phone out and move a car in Beijing if I wanted to. Hyperloop will do the same, but between cities.”

There are still plenty of reasons to believe the Hyperloop will not exist. “It gives me pause to think that otherwise intelligent people are buying into this kind of utopian vision,” says Jose Gomez-Ibanez, a professor of urban planning and public policy at Harvard. “I don’t understand where they think they can get their savings—they’re up against the airlines, and airlines don’t need to install hundreds of miles of track.” Giegel counters that airlines expend a tremendous amount of energy getting up to 30,000 feet and don’t recapture any of it on the way back down. The low pressure inside Hyperloop Tech’s tubes aims to replicate the atmospheric drag at about 160,000 feet. The company calculates that the magnetic boosts required every 40 miles or so will allow a Hyperloop to be more efficient than rail can be at very high speeds.

“We’re working in a time frame that shocks people, because we have to.”

Another (fair) criticism is that the upfront installation costs will be outrageously expensive, even compared with rail, and especially compared with Internet infrastructure, despite Hyperloop Tech’s favored analogy. “Laying optic fiber is not really pricey,” says Genevieve Giuliano, a transportation professor at the University of Southern California. “Laying Hyperloop tube is going to be pricey.” But she and the other economists and transportation experts I spoke to perked up when I explained Hyperloop Tech’s interest in freight. “The concept is right,” says Giuliano. Freight rail in the U.S. is already quite profitable and efficient (Warren Buffett invests heavily in it). But a high-speed freight backbone—broadband for goods—linking major population centers could make economic sense, she says.

How much economic sense is hard to know. Large transit projects must balance three buckets of money, says John Macomber, who lectures on urbanism and real estate at Harvard Business School: construction, operations, and value creation. The first two are not too difficult to estimate. The third is incredibly difficult. Calculating the economic payoff of a working Hyperloop is very hard to do, especially ahead of raising the piles and piles of cash necessary to build it. This is why massive transportation infrastructure projects have usually been undertaken or supported by governments, not private industry, despite the fact that private industry can reap huge benefits. Nearly every shipping company in the world benefits from the U.S. interstate system, for example. Their containers leave ports on trucks that roll along roads built with taxpayer dollars. Hyperloop Tech’s leaders aren’t against the idea of public funding. But they argue that in an era where consumers and companies such as Amazon expect goods to move faster than ever, a Hyperloop could be subsidized by businesses that stand to benefit. Then when the infrastructure is built and the kinks are worked out, people could travel on the Hyperloop, too.

At the end of my afternoon at Hyperloop Tech, Giegel and I stare at a big screen displaying a grand image of a Hyperloop system integrated with a container port, the tubes moving underneath and alongside a ship’s berth. Then we look at another rendering that feels slightly closer to reality: a map of a roughly 90-mile-long Hyperloop connecting Abu Dhabi and Dubai, complete with off-ramps and acceleration points. Finally, we walk back to Giegel’s desk and gaze at the one piece of decor along the exposed brick walls: vintage posters from the golden age of rail travel, when train engines looked like gleaming silver bullets, visions of a spectacular future that had already arrived.

Giegel mentions how early presentations about the Hyperloop included schematics of the first pneumatic railway. “Do you know how long ago that was built?” he asks. I disappoint him with my answer, because I know all about the London and Croydon Railway, which had run 7.5 miles and achieved, in September 1845, a top speed of 70 miles per hour. The pneumatic tube was underneath the cart, between the rails, and a series of engines pumped air out ahead of the train, creating a vacuum that drew it forward. And I know that it closed just two years after it opened, after it was unable to connect seamlessly to traditional rail. Giegel’s face brightens at that cautionary tale. “Yes. Exactly!” That was the point: it failed because it couldn’t integrate into existing systems. It was ahead of its time, but also outside of its time. Hyperloop Tech has to be wary of falling into the same trap.

Keep Reading

Most popular, large language models can do jaw-dropping things. but nobody knows exactly why..

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

• Will Douglas Heaven archive page

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

The problem with plug-in hybrids? Their drivers.

Plug-in hybrids are often sold as a transition to EVs, but new data from Europe shows we’re still underestimating the emissions they produce.

• Casey Crownhart archive page

Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch

Genie learns how to control games by watching hours and hours of video. It could help train next-gen robots too.

Stay connected

Get the latest updates from mit technology review.

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at [email protected] with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.

Pocket-lint

What is hyperloop the 700mph subsonic train explained.

Elon Musk has started the building revolution for a new train system.

Dubbed Hyperloop, it will allow you to get from London to Edinburgh or LA to San Francisco in under 30 minutes. But what is it and how does it work? Good questions. Musk has likened it to a vacuum tube system in a building used to move documents from place to place. Confused? No worries. Here's everything you need to know about the futuristic train coming from the founder of Tesla and SpaceX.

We also delve into competitor systems, like Virgin Hyperloop One.

• What is X.COM? Elon Musk's new website and project teased
• What is SolarCity and why is Tesla buying it?
• Tesla: Everything you need to know about its cars and more

What is Hyperloop?

Hyperloop is essentially a train system that Musk calls "a cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table". It's based on the very high-speed transit (VHST) system proposed in 1972, which combines a magnetic levitation train and a low pressure transit tube. It evolves some of the original ideas of VHST, but it still uses tunnels and pods or capsules to move from place to place.

Musk has likened it to a vacuum tube system in a building used to move documents from place to place.

What speeds have been proposed?

Hyperloop is being proposed as an alternative to short distance air travel, where the system will be much faster than existing rail networks and much cleaner that flight. Hyperloop isn't about going as fast as possible, because you'll have to deal with high G forces when it came to turns, which isn't ideal for passenger travel. Speeds of over 700mph are suggested for journeys.

But there are practical implications that have to be considered on a short stop-start journey, such as the acceleration and deceleration sensation that passengers would go through.

How does Elon Musk's Hyperloop work?

Air bearings or maglev.

One of the biggest problems with anything moving is friction, both against surfaces and the environment the pod is moving through. Hyperloop proposes to move away from traditional wheels by using air bearings for pods instead. This will have the pod floating on air. It's similar to maglev, in which the electromagnetic levitation of the train means there is no friction like a traditional train that runs on tracks.

This is how current maglev trains can achieve super speeds, like the 500km/h maglev train in Japan. One Hyperloop proposal, from Virgin Hyperloop One , uses passive magnetic levitation, meaning the magnets are on the trains and work with aluminium track. Current active maglev needs powered tracks with copper coiling, which can be expensive.

Musk's Hyperloop will take this to the next level by traveling through low pressure tubes.

Low pressure

Hyperloop will be built in tunnels that have had some of the air sucked out to lower the pressure. So, like high-altitude flying, there's less resistance against the pod moving through the tunnel, meaning it can be much more energy efficient, which is desirable in any transit system.

The original VHST proposed using a vacuum, but there's an inherent difficulty in creating and maintaining a vacuum in a tunnel that will have things like stations, and any break in the vacuum could potentially render the entire system useless. For Hyperloop, the idea is to lower the air pressure, a job that could be done by regularly placed air pumps.

Low pressure, however, means you still have some air in the tunnels.

The air bearing and passive maglev ideas are designed not only to levitate the pod, but also see the pod moving through the air, rather than pushing the air infront of it and dragging it along behind. The air cushion will see the air pumped from the front of the pod to the rear via these suspension cushions. The tunnels envisioned are metal tubes, elevated as an overground system.

Musk has suggested that solar panels running on the top of the tunnels could generate enough electricity to power the system. It could run as an underground system, too.

When will Elon Musk's Hyperloop arrive?

Hawthorne test track.

Musk hasn't yet given a date when we can expect to see Hyperloop up and running, he's merely announced that it will be made.

A one-mile test track built by SpaceX adjacent to Hawthorne, its California headquarters, has been built, and the first successful trial has been carried out. Virgin Hyperloop One plans to send an 8.5-metre long pod down a set of tracks in Nevada. In May 2017, a pod levitated on a separate test track in Nevada for 5.3-seconds and reached 70mph.

The first trial using one of the 8.7-metre passenger pods has now been carried out too. The pod travelled along the 500-metre test track, and reached a speed of 192mph before safely coming to a complete stop. 

LA to San Francisco

Planning documents currently propose a route between LA and San Francisco, a 354-mile journey, that would cost around $6 billion in construction. This is based on a passenger-only model, whereas one that can also transport vehicles would be $7.5 billion. This extra expenditure would be worth it since more people could use the system, offering potentially larger returns.

Shervin Pishevar, co-founder and chairman of Virgin Hyperloop One, aims to shuttle passengers and cargo in high-speed pods that are smaller than most planes and trains and designed to depart as often as every 10 seconds. He recently told CNBC : "Hyperloop will be operational, somewhere in the world, by 2020."

New York to DC

Must tweeted in July 2017 that his Boring Company tunnel project has received “verbal [government] approval” to build a Hyperloop that would connect the cities of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. He also tweeted more details about the project. The new Hyperloop would only take 29 minutes to travel between New York City and DC, Musk claimed. 

It would feature “up to a dozen or more” access points via elevator in each city. Keep in mind Musk released his Hyperloop concept as an open-source white paper in 2013. As a result, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is looking into a setup that would link Slovakia, Austria and Hungary. This is the same company that plans to create the five-mile test loop in California by 2018.

Musk has continually talked about his agitation with surface-level transportation. His tunnel project, dubbed the Boring Company, which began as a joke, is Musk's attempt at digging more efficiently. He's working on tunnel-boring machines than can both dig and reinforce tunnels, simultaneously. He also recently announced the completion of the first section of tunnel under Los Angeles.

Back to the “verbal govt approval": apparently, Musk's Boring Company will dig up the tunnel used for the New York-to-DC route. We've contacted the US Department of Transportation for more information. But based on Musk's tweets, we know work on the New York-to-DC Hyperloop will happen alongside the LA tunnel that's already in progress.

• Elon Musk's Hyperloop able to do London to Edinburgh run in 30 minutes

What about Virgin Hyperloop One?

Virgin Hyperloop One is a three-year-old startup out of Los Angeles. It is trying to develop a hyperloop train in order to reinvent transportation. Hyperloop transportation was first introduced by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in 2013 as an open-sourced idea. Virgin Hyperloop One's co-founder, Shervin Pishevar, often credits Musk for the inspiration, though Musk is not involved with Virgin Hyperloop One at all. 

Virgin Hyperloop One was previously known as Hyperloop One or Virgin Hyperloop One. In October 2017, Hyperloop One and the Virgin Group announced a strategic partnership, in which Virgin Group had invested Hyperloop One and Richard Branson would join Hyperloop One's board of directors. As a result, Hyperloop One has been rebranded to Virgin Hyperloop One.

How will Virgin Hyperloop One work?

Virgin Hyperloop One's system will be built on columns or tunneled below ground.

It’s fully autonomous and enclosed, eliminating pilot error and weather hazards. It's also clean, with no carbon emissions. And the trains can depart up to several times per minute and can transport passengers and cargo direct to their destination. Many of the technologies Virgin Hyperloop One is currently using have been around for a while, such as linear electric motors, maglev, and vacuum pumps.

Here's how Virgin Hyperloop One describes its system:

"Passengers or cargo are loaded into the Hyperloop vehicle and accelerate gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube. The vehicle floats above the track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to ultra-low aerodynamic drag."

When will Virgin Hyperloop One be ready?

The company has developed a full-scale test track, otherwise called a proprietary electric propulsion system, in North Las Veas. The first open-air propulsion test happened in May 2016, followed by the first full-systems test in May 2017 and Phase 2 testing in July 2017. The company is focused on developing a passenger and mixed-use operational hyperloop transportation system by 2021.

How much will it cost to ride?

According to Virgin Hyperloop One CEO Dirk Ahlborn, the cost of a ticket should be around $30 mark to get a passenger from LA to San Francisco. That, he says, should allow the company to pay back its initial costs in eight years.

Whether this will actually be the price of a ticket remains to be seen.

What will it feel and sound like?

Virgin Hyperloop One said it will feel like you're riding in an elevator or a passenger plane. There will be tolerable G forces, as you will be accelerating and decelerating gradually, but there will be no turbulence. In terms of sound, people on the outside will only hear a "big whoosh". The tubes are constructed out of thick, strong steel and can handle 100 Pa of pressure or more.

Virgin Hyperloop hits an important milestone: the first human passenger test

For the first time, two people rode a hyperloop pod through a nearly airless tube at 100 mph.

By Andrew J. Hawkins , transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.

Share this story

Virgin Hyperloop announced that for the first time it has conducted a test of its ultra-fast transportation system with human passengers.

The test took place on Sunday afternoon at the company’s DevLoop test track in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada. The first two passengers were Virgin Hyperloop’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Josh Giegel, and head of passenger experience, Sara Luchian. After strapping into their seats in the company’s gleaming white and red hyperloop pod, dubbed Pegasus, they were transferred into an airlock as the air inside the enclosed vacuum tube was removed. The pod then accelerated to a brisk 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) down the length of the track, before slowing down to a stop.

It’s an important achievement for Virgin Hyperloop, which was founded in 2014 on the premise of making Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s vision of a futuristic transportation system of magnetically levitating pods traveling through nearly airless tubes at speeds of up to 760 mph (1,223 km/h) a reality.

“No one has done anything close to what we’re talking about right now.”

The DevLoop test track is 500 meters long and 3.3 meters in diameter. The track is located about 30 minutes from Las Vegas, out in the kind of desert that hyperloop pods could one day traverse in minutes. The company says it has conducted over 400 tests on that track, but never before with human passengers — until today. 

“No one has done anything close to what we’re talking about right now,” Jay Walder, CEO of Virgin Hyperloop, told The Verge . “This is a full scale, working hyperloop that is not just going to run in a vacuum environment, but is going to have a person in it. No one has come close to doing it.”

The Pegasus pod used for the first passenger test, also called XP-2, was designed with help from famed Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’ design firm. It represents a scaled-down version of what Virgin Hyperloop hopes will eventually be a full-sized pod capable of carrying up to 23 passengers. It weighs 2.5 tons and measures about 15-18 feet long, according to Giegel. Inside, its lush white interior is meant to be familiar to passengers, who may not be immediately comfortable with the idea of slingshotting through a vacuum-sealed tube at the speed of a commercial jet.

“This is not like some crazy, newfangled science fiction invention,” Luchian said in an interview several days before the test. “This is something that reminds me of a place that I’ve been and I’ve used many times, that I would feel comfortable putting grandma in and sending her on a visit somewhere.”

“This is not like some crazy, newfangled science fiction invention.”

Prior to the test, Luchian said she was eager to experience the acceleration, as well as monitor the temperature inside the pod and the ventilation system. Giegel said he wanted to see the system’s safety procedures in action, and would be keeping track of whether they’re able to maintain communication with operators during the test. “If it’s not safe enough for me, it’s not safe enough for anyone,” he said.

Giegel said the acceleration will feel similar to a plane taking off. The pod is propelled by magnetic levitation — the same technology used for bullet trains. The top speed of the fastest commercial bullet train, the Shanghai Maglev, hovers around 300 mph. 

To be sure, the pod didn’t reach the hyperloop’s theoretical maximum speed of 760 mph. Virgin Hyperloop projects that with enough track it can eventually get up to 670 mph — but the company’s record to date is 240 mph, which it hit in 2017 .

“It’ll be a bit short,” Giegel said before the test. “We’ll get up to probably about 100 miles an hour, a little over, and we’ll accelerate, decelerate, and it’ll be smooth. We’re not astronauts, we’re just there — we’re sitting in it.”

In 2013, Musk published his  “alpha paper”  which theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at airliner-speeds of up to 760 mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. He called it a “fifth mode of transportation” and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel. The most eye-catching scenario he proposed was a trip from LA to San Francisco in only 30 minutes. The idea captured the imaginations of engineers and investors across the world.

Virgin Hyperloop was originally founded as Hyperloop Technologies before changing its name to Hyperloop One in 2016 and then again to Virgin Hyperloop One after being acquired by Richard Branson’s company . The company came out of the gate strong with tens of millions of dollars of funding and a bold vision of hyperloop systems all around the globe.

• SpaceX’s hyperloop race was all about ‘maximum speed’ (and celebrating Elon Musk)

But it wasn’t always smooth traveling for Virgin Hyperloop. In 2017, the company settled a lawsuit with one of its co-founders over competing claims of harassment and sabotage. A year later, another co-founder was ousted amid allegations of sexual assault and misconduct.

The company was also strapped for cash for a notable stretch of time. Branson helped secure a new $50 million investment from two existing investors, which helped meet payroll obligations. More recently, Virgin Hyperloop raised  $172 million in new funding in 2019, $90 million of which came from Dubai port operator DP World, which has previously invested $25 million in the company and already has two seats on the startup’s board of directors.

After that, things settled down, with Giegel and his team working diligently to validate the technology with a series of tests. On the regulatory front, things are looking brighter. The company recently announced its plan to build a $500 million certification center to advance its vision of the future of high-speed transportation in West Virginia. And the federal government has  recently laid out the framework  for regulating the hyperloop, giving hope to companies like Virgin Hyperloop that it may eventually break ground on a full-sized operational hyperloop system.

There are still a host of technical, financial, and regulatory challenges ahead

Critics say the hyperloop may be technically feasible, but still only amounts to vaporware. It’s been called a “utopian vision” that would be financially impossible to achieve. It’s one of those technologies that is also “just around the corner” according to its boosters — despite outwardly appearing to still being years away from completion. In 2017, Virgin Hyperloop’s top executives told  The Verge   they expect to see “working hyperloops around the world... by 2020.” That deadline was later pushed to 2021, the year they believe the hyperloop will be ready for human passengers.

There are still a lot of safety questions that need to be answered, said Constantine Samaras, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “A hyperloop vehicle will travel much faster than high-speed rail, maybe even reaching 760 mph,” Samaras said in an email. “Maintaining safety at such high speeds is very important, and all of the unforeseen disasters need to be engineered into the system. An earthquake? The vacuum tube breaks? The train somehow punches through the tube? At such high speeds, these events amplify the danger, and so safety has to be paramount.”

No government in the world has awarded a contract or approved the building of a hyperloop system yet. It’s unclear how much it would cost to build a hyperloop, but surely it would be in the billions of dollars. Leaked financial documents in 2016 suggested the hyperloop would cost between $9 billion and $13 billion, or between $84 million and $121 million per mile — significantly more than high-speed rail. Even with public funding, any company would need to raise millions of dollars in funding, acquire the enormous tracks of land, and certify that the hyperloop can be operated safely. Which is all to say, the hyperloop is still very far off.

The ability to maintain a vacuum in the tube, especially one hundreds of miles long, is another enormous challenge. Every time a pod arrives at a station, it has to decelerate and stop. Then the airlock will have to close, pressurize, and open again. Then the pod has to clear the airlock before the next pod arrives. The speed at which this occurs will determine the distance between pods. Turning will also be extremely difficult. A hyperloop would need approximately six miles to execute a 90-degree turn at 600 mph, a Virgin Hyperloop engineer once  told the New York Times . 

“At such high speeds, these events amplify the danger, and so safety has to be paramount”

Another potential hurdle is headways. The longer the headway, the less capacity these pods will have, which may determine how useful a mass transit system the hyperloop can be. Operators can try to compensate by building larger pods, but then they’ll need stronger steel for their tubes to accommodate the added weight, and that spells higher costs.

Walder, who has run public transportation systems in China and the US and most recently was head of Citi Bike in New York City, said that headways would be “a few seconds apart” in a full-scale, commercially operational hyperloop, compared to 2 minutes or more for most trains.

Luchian said she was excited, if a little nervous. “A little bit of nervous energy,” she said, “only because I can appreciate the gravitas of the moment.”

She said it was important the experience of riding in the hyperloop feel comfortable and familiar, like riding in a train, other normal people would reject it as a feasible and safe mode of transportation. She noted that neither Giegel nor herself received special training beforehand or wore protective clothing like astronauts.

“Even for such a momentous occasion, for a technology that was literally a pipe dream like six, seven years ago, we don’t have to do all of these iterations with specialists,” she said. “We’re getting right in.”

For Giegel, this test was the culmination of years of labor. It takes place almost six years after he quit his job as a systems propulsion lead at Virgin Galactic to start a hyperloop company in his garage.

“I think a long time from now, this moment, this thing in the desert that wouldn’t have existed unless we put it here, is going to be that spot where people can look and say, ‘that was a really big idea, it was a really risky idea,’” he said, “‘but they came, they did it, and they made it successful.’”

Elon Musk says his posts did more to ‘financially impair’ X than help it

With vids, google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work, microsoft is confident windows on arm could finally beat apple, google’s gemini 1.5 pro can now hear, the total eclipse shows us how important solar energy is to the us.

More from Tech

Here are the best Apple Watch deals right now

OpenAI can’t register ‘GPT’ as a trademark — yet

Sony’s portable PlayStation Portal is back in stock

The Nintendo Switch 2 will now reportedly arrive in 2025 instead of 2024

• The Magazine
• Stay Curious
• The Sciences
• Environment
• Planet Earth

What Is Hyperloop and When Will It Be Ready?

Early tests show that hyperloop technology can work quickly and safely. is it coming to a city near you anytime soon here's everything you need to know about the super speed train..

The two passengers strapped into their seats inside the gleaming white interior of the Pegasus as the pod lifted into the airlock. In the time it takes to finish reading this paragraph, the pod accelerated to 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) down a length of track, before delivering its first passengers to a safe stop. The ride lasted only 15 seconds and was in no danger of breaking any land-speed records, but Virgin Hyperloop One nevertheless made history as the first company that has successfully tested hyperloop technology. 

A hyperloop, as you may have heard, is a super speed ground-level transportation system in which people could travel in a hovering pod inside a vacuum tube at speeds as high as 760 mph (1220 km/h), just shy of the speed of sound. Virgin's system includes magnetic levitation, much like the technology used in advanced high-speed rail projects in Japan and Germany.

As a concept for fast transportation, vacuum tube transit systems have been around for a surprisingly long time. In 1845, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, an engineer in Britain and the Elon Musk of his time, proposed building a tube in southwest England that would propel trains at a then-dizzying speed of 70 mph (110 km/h). The project proved unfeasible due to lack of materials that would sustain it, and Brunel’s concept was abandoned. 

Despite Brunel's efforts, it was more than a century before Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk turned the world’s attention back to tubular transit technology. In 2013, he published a 58-page technical paper that outlined the design of Hyperloop, a solar-powered transportation system, which he described as "a cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table." 

Musk claimed that the vehicle could make the 350-mile (560-kilometer) journey between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 35 minutes for $20 a ticket and estimated the cost of the infrastructure at $6 billion. He also said that the new transit system should be safer than any current mode of transport, immune to weather and resistant to earthquakes. Musk never devoted many resources to making the project a physical reality but released his Hyperloop Alpha as an open-source design for universities and companies to research and develop.

In 2014, Virgin Hyperloop was founded on the premise of making Musk’s vision of a futuristic transportation system a reality. The company has made substantive technical changes to Musk's initial proposal and chose not to pursue the Los Angeles–to–San Francisco route the billionaire envisioned. But Virgin wants to keep the futuristic vehicle environmentally friendly, with vegan leather seats and some of the pod materials made from recycled content.  

How Does a Train-in-a-Tube Work?

At its core, a hyperloop system is all about removing the two things that slow down regular vehicles: friction and air resistance. To do away with the former, the pod needs to hover above its track, making hyperloop a magnetic levitation (maglev) train. 

To put it in the simplest terms, maglev trains use two sets of magnets: one set to repel and push the train up off the track, and another set to move the floating train ahead, taking advantage of the lack of friction. Once two sets of magnetic waves are established, they work in tandem to push the vehicle forward, says Sam Gurol, former director of Maglev Systems at General Atomics, an energy and defense corporation based in San Diego, California.

“The advantage of maglev is that it allows you to go to very high speeds, in addition to having a very nice ride quality,” Gurol says. “It’s like riding on a magic carpet.”

The super speed of hyperloop, however, is achieved through drastically minimizing air resistance. Passenger pods move through a low-pressure sealed tube, which contains vacuums that suck out nearly all of the air. The air pressure inside the chamber is so low that it mimics the conditions of being at about 200,000 feet (61,000 meters) above sea level. By virtue of being in a tube, the system is protected from the weather and can operate in almost any weather conditions.

Examining the Hyper Problems

Although the technology addresses problems of friction and air resistance, hyperloop projects have suffered from a different kind of drag: economics. Financial and transportation experts have expressed the belief that Musk’s $6 billion price tag dramatically understates the cost of designing, developing, constructing, and testing an all-new form of transportation. Leaked financial documents in 2016 suggested that Musk’s Hyperloop would cost as much as $13 billion, or $121 million per mile.

Like any form of transit, hyperloop transport carries inherent risks, and contingencies for any unforeseen disasters still need to be engineered into the system. At high speeds, even a small earthquake or the slightest breakage of a vacuum tube would pose a significant danger to passengers and crew. In addition to safety assurance, a hyperloop system must offer the kind of pricing that would draw paying passengers away from current modes of transportation.

With large-scale projects like this, good engineering needs to co-exist with good politics. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Gurol’s company collaborated with a German firm Transrapid to build a maglev-based high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim. In 2007, former U.S. Senator Harry Reid (Nevada), became the Senate majority leader and decided the state had more important priorities.

“That’s the kind of political change that can just reverse any progress. Hundreds of engineers and fifteen years of work, and the project just died.” Gurol says.

According to Financial Times , in 2018, Saudi Arabia pulled its $1 billion deal with Virgin Hyperloop after the company’s ex-chairman Richard Branson criticized the kingdom over the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Still, as of May 2019, the company had raised $400 million from private investors and plans to begin commercial operations in 2030 (pushed back from early predictions that envisioned a passenger-ready hyperloop in 2021).

Besides Virgin, the companies working out the hurdles of this transportation method include the Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT), a U.S.-based startup that signed an agreement in China to build a test track, Hardt Hyperloop in the Netherlands and TransPod, a Canadian company.

Until these companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, acquire the massive tracts of land needed for a viable system, and prove that the system can be operated safely, hyperloop remains a near-future dream.

• engineering
• transportation

Already a subscriber?

Register or Log In

Keep reading for as low as $1.99!

Sign up for our weekly science updates.

Save up to 40% off the cover price when you subscribe to Discover magazine.

Traveling-Wave Tubes Travel Far Subheadline Electronic components designed for NASA see use in satellite systems and ground applications

Forty-five years ago, the Voyager 2 spacecraft launched on a mission to visit the outer planets. One vital component of the craft that still works is the key to getting data as it leaves the solar system. But this piece of the now-interstellar spacecraft, the traveling-wave tube (TWT), has also become a necessary component for utilizing microwaves in several applications back on Earth. For example, satellite radio spacecraft use the amplification power of TWTs, and thanks to NASA’s help, listeners have coverage over all of North America and receive better sounding audio.

Wherever you see a specialized microwave radio transmitter, there’s usually a traveling-wave tube somewhere within. Traveling wave tubes were initially created during the 1940s and were instrumental to the development of technologies like radar. Like the cathode-ray tube in an old television, the traveling-wave tube works due to the movement of electrons within it: Inside a vacuum tube, a stream of electrons is fired from one end of the tube, which causes movement back and forth between electrodes on either side of the tube. A spiral of wire wraps around the path of the beam, and a radio signal is passed through it. The movement of electrons synchronizes with the radio frequency, boosting the signal. All-in-one traveling-wave tube units that include a power source gain the additional moniker of “amplifier.”

In the early 1960s, Hughes Space and Communications Group received contracts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to build spacecraft for NASA’s Surveyor program, which successfully landed five robotic Moon missions before astronauts arrived during Apollo. To maintain communications 238,000 miles from Earth, these landers’ transmitters needed massive amounts of amplification, with the additional constraint of having to fit on a small spacecraft. When Surveyor 1 landed on June 2, 1966, it was able to send signals carrying television images of the Moon’s surface back to Earth, paving the way for astronauts to land there a few years later.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hughes supplied the traveling wave tubes for every deep space mission, working to the exacting standards that NASA set, including the two Voyager spacecraft, as well as the Galileo and Cassini missions to Jupiter and Saturn respectively. This work pushed the tube’s capabilities further. Thanks to NASA’s need for better ways to transmit data, modern traveling-wave tubes are smaller and able to amplify signals in a wider range of frequencies, such as the Ka band that space telescopes use to send back high-resolution imagery of distant stars and galaxies.

“If it wasn’t for NASA, the technology wouldn’t be anywhere near how advanced it is today,” said Nick Gritti, executive vice president of strategy and business development at Stellant Systems of Torrance, California, a successor company to Hughes.

In a Solid-State World, Vacuum Tubes Endure

It might seem strange that a component most associated with retro aesthetics is still relevant in modern technology, but there are several reasons why the venerable tube is better than alternatives.

“This is the last field where vacuum tubes thrive,” said Wayne Harvey, an engineer at JPL who’s worked on numerous spacecraft missions.

Much as some high-quality audio amplifiers still use vacuum tubes, microwave amplifiers made from tubes can have much better performance than other signal-strengthening methods developed with more conventional solid-state electronics.

“Solid-state electronics can’t keep up in the ranges we need,” said Rainee Simons, a microwave electronics engineer who specializes in traveling wave tubes at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “The TWTA has much higher efficiency at the same frequencies.”

Keep on Traveling

After splitting from the larger Hughes Aircraft Company, Hughes Microwave Tubes continued to make these specialized components. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, the company existed as part of Boeing before being sold to L3 Corporation, where the company was combined with another vacuum electronics manufacturer under the company’s portfolio, Litton Electron Devices. In 2021, the company split from the L3Harris conglomerate and became Stellant Systems, still operating at the same facility that Hughes did in the 1960s.

“I like to compare us to the island of Sicily,” said Gritti. “We’re the most conquered company in the world.”

Today, Stellant Systems is the only company in the United States that makes space-rated traveling wave tube amplifiers. In addition to being present in NASA spacecraft like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Kepler Space Telescope, Stellant amplifiers are also used in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth-observation satellites and in military applications like onboard radar for planes. Compared to the enormous TWTs used in applications on the ground like Doppler weather radar, the space-based TWTs are miniature but still powerful enough to boost signals enough to transmit massive amounts of data from orbit.

Privately funded operations are also benefiting from Stellant’s decades of experience with miniaturizing traveling wave tubes. In late 2021, Stellant sold traveling wave tubes to SiriusXM for its next generation of satellite radio spacecraft. And machines that provide Lasik eye surgery use these tubes to ensure their beams are properly amplified.

“I think for TWTAs, it’s a sort of a leapfrog process,” Harvey said. “Sometimes we’re taking advantage of developments in the commercial world, sometimes those come back around to NASA missions. There’s a synergy there.”

In 2020, the traveling wave tube amplifier was added to the Space Foundation’s Space Technology Hall of Fame. And as of 2022, the TWT on Voyager 2 is still plugging away, transmitting data as it continues to make the journey through interstellar space.

“Nobody can explain why the Voyager TWT is still working,” said Harvey. “There’s going to be life for this technology for some time.”

An engineer works on a Voyager spacecraft’s high-gain antenna dish. A component necessary to transmitting data on the Voyager 2 spacecraft, the traveling-wave tube, is still functioning over 45 years later. Credit: NASA

NASA electronics engineers Dale Force and Rainee Simons with an L3 (now Stellant) traveling-wave tube amplifier (TWTA). Today, Stellant is the only company making space-rated TWTAs and has several private sector customers in addition to NASA. Credit: NASA

Apollo 12 astronaut Charles Conrad examines the television camera on the Surveyor 3 lunar probe. To have reliable transmissions during the Surveyor program, Hughes Corporation worked to miniaturize traveling-wave tubes, which are used to boost the power of radio signals. Credit: NASA

Related Stories

Watch CBS News

Hyperloop, Vacuum Tubes Shaping Up As Travel Of The Future?

August 12, 2013 / 6:27 PM EDT / CBS New York

LOS ANGELES (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Imagine traveling from Manhattan to Beijing in two hours. A couple of innovative minds believe they know how to cut travel time drastically, using high-speed capsules racing through tubes – much like making a drive-through transaction at a bank.

Colorado inventor Daryl Oster calls his idea the "Evacuated Tube Transport Technology" and says it can send someone 400 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about a half-hour. His technology would require a system for sending a capsule through a vacuum tube with the air sucked out just like outer space, eliminating friction.

"What you'll feel is like if you're in a Corvette and push the throttle down all the way," Oster told CBS 2's Barry Petersen.

Oster's idea is similar to another one being floated by Elon Musk, who has made billions of dollars creating Tesla electric cars, the online payment system PayPal and SpaceX, one of the world's first private rockets for launching satellites.

Musk has been dropping hints about his "Hyperloop" system for more than a year during public events, mentioning that it could never crash, would be immune to weather and would move people from Los Angeles to San Francisco also in about 30 minutes. On Monday, he finally revealed details of his plan for the solar-powered, elevated transit system.  Musk said his Hyperloop would transport people -- or cars -- in aluminum pods traveling 800 mph through steel tubes.

"You just see a carpet of cars that aren't moving, and it's just like, 'Wow, how much misery is that causing?' and surely there's something we can do about it," Musk told CBS in an earlier interview.

Musk, however, said he is too focused on other projects to consider actually building it.

"I think I kind of shot myself by ever mentioning the Hyperloop," he said. "I don't have any plans to execute because I must remain focused on SpaceX and Tesla."

Musk said he invites critical feedback to his design "to see if the people can find ways to improve it." It will be an open-source design, meaning anyone can use it and modify it.

So why aren't Oster's and Musk's plans imminent? It will take at least several billion dollars before one or the other can come to life.

Complicating matters further is that another set of California dreamers has already come up with a high-speed rail system with speeds of 220 mph, making an L.A.-to-San Francisco trip in three hours possible. The rail, approved by voters last November, would cost nearly $70 billion.

"To meet the needs of the 50 million people that we're going to have in the next 20 or 30 years, we have to build more freeways, more airports and do things that are going to cost a lot more than the high-speed rail system is going to cost," reasoned Dan Richards, chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

Musk and Oster said their transport devices would cost only about one-tenth of the California high-speed rail.

You May Also Be Interested In These Stories

(TM and © Copyright 2013 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2013 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

Featured Local Savings

More from cbs news.

NYC parents, teachers feel left out of school decisions, report says

1,000 gallons of dielectric fluid leaked into Bronx River, Con Ed says

John "Junior" Gotti's wife and daughter back in court

Conn. man talks about bout with rare Rocky Mountain spotted fever

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

In Moscow’s Technological Advances, a ‘Double-Edged Sword’

The latest example is Face Pay, which replaces a Metro card with facial recognition. It may be advanced, but activists are sounding the alarm on privacy issues.

By Celestine Bohlen

The Moscow Metro — a world-class marvel of efficient mass transportation since it opened in 1935 — made headlines last month with a very 21st-century innovation: a payment system that doesn’t require passengers to produce a ticket, a transit card, a smartphone or a contactless bank card. All they have to do is show their face.

By Oct. 15, the facial recognition system, called Face Pay, was up and running at about 240 stations on the Moscow Metro, a sprawling and constantly expanding system famous for its on-time track record and its grandiose and ornate stations.

Moscow city officials were quick to tout the system’s latest technological innovation, one of several over the last decade. “There are no analogues of Face Pay in terms of quality and ease of use for a passenger anywhere in the world,” said Maksim Liksutov, deputy mayor for transport.

To activate Face Pay, passengers must connect their photo with a bank card and the Metro’s Troika, or transit card, via a special mobile app. Once connected, a camera at the turnstiles identifies their faces (even with masks on) and opens the gates. In theory, it should take two to three seconds for a passenger to clear the turnstile, easing the crush of people at peak rush hours.

It is one of the most visible — and controversial — of the city’s projects to modernize its services, one that takes full advantage of advancing biometric technology and the skills of a new generation of Russian computer engineers. “The technology is new and very complex, we will continue to work on improving it,’’ said Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, in a statement.

But digital privacy activists in Russia were quick to raise the alarm, noting that the new system is not just about improving service on the Moscow Metro. “It is a good pretext to put cameras at the turnstiles,’’ said Artyom Koslyuk, a director at Roskomsvoboda, a digital rights group based in Moscow. “This will allow them to perfect the algorithms used for the recognition of faces.’’

According to Mr. Koslyuk, Moscow ranks third in the world for the most surveillance on streets and public transport, with some 200,000 cameras placed around the city and on the Metro to help police identify criminals and prevent crime. Russian police have already used facial recognition to find and arrest demonstrators who participated in peaceful opposition protests.

The two other countries that have gone ahead with facial recognition payment systems are China and Belarus, where privacy rights are also of little concern to the government. (In Belarus, the facial recognition system on the Minsk metro is called Look and Go.) In contrast, the European Parliament voted last month in favor of a nonbinding resolution to ban use of facial recognition technology in public places for police purposes.

Moscow officials have tried to calm concerns about privacy invasion by insisting that the images and data collected are “securely encrypted.’’ Roskomsvoboda, though, said they have uncovered evidence that the system is porous, vulnerable to intruders who can use the data and images for criminal purposes.

Privacy advocates are pushing for a more transparent system of control for this and other advanced, and often intrusive, technologies. “We need to be sure that all these innovations are used to help the people, not harm them,’’ said Mr. Koslyuk.

Face Pay is part of a broader set of efforts in the city to institute technological solutions. Moscow is undoubtedly Russia’s “smartest” city, not least because it is the nation’s capital, and a focus of government attention. Its 12.5 million people make it the second most populous city in Europe — and it is growing. Between 2002 and 2010, while Russia’s population decreased by 1.2 percent, Moscow’s grew by 10.9 percent. And the average wage in the capital is almost double the national average.

The capital also gets royal treatment from the federal government. In 2019, Moscow’s urban renewal budget equaled that of the rest of the country.

“Moscow has the power in terms of finance and budgets,’’ said Sergei Kamolov, a professor at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations. “Moscow is in the avant-garde, a test case for all different kinds of systems.’’

Two years ago, Russia adopted its own system for ranking its “smart cities,” measuring what is called their “I.Q. level.” This provides benchmarks for cities to measure progress in putting modern techniques and digital services in place for their population. Mr. Kamolov said these are useful tools to pressure local officials to meet targets set in a national “Smart Cities” program.

Mr. Kamolov, who is member of a working group on the “Smart Cities” program, cautions that its ideas and technologies are not easily duplicated from city to city. Nor, he said, do fancy new technologies necessarily have an impact on the citizens’ quality of life. “It seems to me that ‘Smart Cities’ is a deep marketing concept,’’ he said in a telephone interview.

In recent years, Russia has put a major nationwide effort into its e-government services. Ahead of the 2018 World Cup, Russia developed a system of e-visas, allowing tourists to come into the country for a limited time and for limited purpose. And like many countries, it has developed a popular online government portal — known as Gosuslugi , a one-stop website where citizens can retrieve documents, pay fines and make appointments. In a 2020 United Nations e-government survey , Russia’s services ranked 36th out of 193 countries.

In this, as in other areas, Moscow leads the way. More Muscovites use Gosuslgi proportionately than any other region of Russia — not surprising given its concentration of young, educated and computer literate people. But other regions are stepping up efforts to catch up, by offering special courses for computer literacy , especially for the elderly.

Moscow and six other regions were also used as a test case for Russia’s experiment with online voting in last September’s parliamentary elections. The system was challenged by democracy protesters, who described it as a “black box” that allowed the government to fiddle with the vote. Setting aside the contested results — a huge caveat, to be sure — online voting did its job, at least on a technical level.

Moscow has introduced other digital services in health care, in schools and in the legal system, but transportation continues to receive a hefty share of the city’s modernization budget.

According to Mr. Kamolov, Moscow has the largest fleet of electronic buses in Europe while the Metro — which now moves about six million passengers on weekdays (down from more than eight million in the pre-Covid era) — still commands a large portion of public funds: $27 billion for expansion and improvement from 2011 to 2022 , most of it for expansion but some of it undoubtedly for the facial recognition system that is now expected to be introduced in other Russian cities.

At Roskomsvoboda, Mr. Koslyuk says the key to introducing advanced digital services that depend on personal data is trust. ‘‘We need to be sure there are controls,’’ he said. “These improvements can be a double-edged sword.”