Is Hyperloop actually happening?

There is no Hyperloop service in the U.S. today. First mentioned by Musk to a reporter in 2012, the Hyperloop is a high-speed electric vehicle that carries passengers and travels in a low-pressure environment such as a vacuum tube without touching the walls.



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A harder problem: the vacuum tube Maintaining this vacuum, about one-thousandth the pressure of Earth's atmosphere, through millions of cubic feet of volume will be a big challenge. Whenever passengers enter or exit the system, the Hyperloop has to be temporarily unsealed. Thus, stations would require interlocks.

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All it takes is one leaky seal or a small crack somewhere in the hundreds of miles of tube and the whole system stops working, Musk wrote in his initial Hyperloop report. Another technical problem centers on the pod moving through a tube containing air.

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Now, Musk estimates that such a Hyperloop would only cost $6 billion to construct, which may sound like a lot, but high-speed rail between these two cities is estimated to cost $68 billion!

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If you have 10 tons per square metre pushing on the outside of the Hyperloop, and nothing pushing on the inside, there is a risk of a vacuum collapse - essentially the tube being crushed by the atmosphere, says Mason.

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The proposed accelerations for the Hyperloop are a factor of seven greater than the Shinkansen in Japan allow for concerning human passengers, as humans can only handle about 0.2g's (or about 2 m/s^2) of acceleration in the up-and-down or side-to-side directions.

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According to Musk the costs for the system are US$10 million. Musk said: The Loop is a stepping stone toward hyperloop. The Loop is for transport within a city. Hyperloop is for transport between cities, and that would go much faster than 150 mph.

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Hyperloop is a futuristic transportation system that resembles a supersized version of a pneumatic tube at the drive-through window of a bank. Here's how it would work. People hop into a pod, which would travel up to 760 miles per hour inside a tube. That's a whisker shy of breaking the sound barrier.

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