US billionaire unveils plans for Hyperloop that will shoot passengers from LA to San Francisco in 30mins
Paypal billionaire Elon Musk, inset, has revealed plans for a radical
new 'Hyperloop' transport system that could 'shoot' passengers from Los
Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes.
Travellers enter aluminium pods
mounted by skis either to their feet or to their cars, top. The pods,
mounted above the ground on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, travel
through steel tubes, reaching speeds of up to 800mph and travelling on a
cushion of air. These images, left and right, show sketches of the
passenger transport capsule and how it would look travelling through the
steel tubes. See more after the cut
Musk told Bloomberg Business Week the system would be ‘like getting a ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland.’
‘It
would have less lateral acceleration—which is what tends to make people
feel motion sick—than a subway ride, as the pod banks against the tube
like an airplane,' he said.
‘It would feel supersmooth.’
'The
Hyperloop (or something similar) is, in my opinion, the right solution
for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than
about 1500 km or 900 miles apart,' he claimed.
THE HYPERLOOP: HOW IT WORKS
Inside the tubes, hyperloop pods are mounted on thin skis
made out of inconel,an alloy already used by Musk’s SpaceX firm that can
withstand high pressure and heat.
Air is pumped into the skis via small holes to make an
air cushion, and each pod has air inlets at the front.
An electric turbo compressor compresses air from the nose
and routes it to the skis and to the cabin.
Magnets on the skis, plus an electromagnetic pulse give
the pod its initial thrust; reboosting motors along the route would keep the
pod moving at just below the speed of sound so the system does not produce
sonic booms.
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