Elon Musk Says He'll Unveil Hyperloop Plans Soon - So What's a Hyperloop?

Elon Musk, billionaire, inventor, entrepreneur, and all around genius behind the SpaceX commercial rocket and the Tesla electric cars, tweeted something pretty cryptic yesterday. He said he would reveal the plans to his "Hyperloop" by August 12.

Musk has been teasing the Hyperloop for quite some time now, never quite revealing what it is, though he has given some tantalizing clues before. The Hyperloop is a futuristic transportation system that Musk has been working on, ever since he heard about the high-speed rail line going up between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Musk has called it a so-called 'fifth mode' of transportation - a new alterative to boats, trains, cars, and trains.

According to PCMag, Musk gave more details of the Hyperloop system in an interview with Pando Daily, saying that the new system could be "sefl-powering if you put solar panels on it" and that it could "generate more power" than the system actually consumed to transport people. According to Musk, there's a "way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries," he said. "Yes, this is possible, absolutely." (The full hour-long interview, on the Hyperloop, as well as other subjects, is below. Musk begins talking about the Hyperloop at about the 45-minute mark.)

If the Hyperloop sounds pretty pie-in-the-sky, you haven't heard how fast Musk says it will be. The first Hyperloop would be a line between San Francisco and Los Angeles - ostensibly instead of the high-speed passenger rail. Musk has said a trip on the Hyperloop between the cities would be faster than the rail system, bringing people between downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco in under 30 minutes.

Additionally, the Hyperloop would cost about a tenth of the price of a high-speed rail system, at 6 billion for the first line, and "can never crash," according to Musk during his interview with Pando Daily. Other Musk-hyped qualities of the Hyperloop include that "it is immune to weather," "it goes three or four times faster than the... bullet train that's being built," "it goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do," "and it would cost you much less than... any other mode of transport."

How does Musk's supercheap, superfast, and crash-proof system of transport work? At the AllThingsD D11 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California this year, Musk said it was a "cross between a Concorde, a rail gun and an air hockey table."

So the best guesses are that the Hyperloop is a tube transport system, but unlike the Jetsons, passengers travel in capsules - possibly large ones the size of a train car or bigger - which are lofted with compressed air and/or moved via a partial negative vacuum pressure, though in a tweet about the Hyperloop, Musk added "Not a vac tunnel, btw."

Will publish something on the Hyperloop in about four weeks. Will forgo patents on the idea and just open source it. Not a vac tunnel btw.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2012

According to PCMag, the Hyperloop, to live up to Musk's hype, would have to move people almost at 700 miles per hour to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than 30 minutes.

Musk will publish something on the Hyperloop by August 12, and says that he will "forgo patents on the idea and just open source it." So we'll have to wait for about four weeks before we know just what Elon Musk has up his sleeve.