After much hype and speculation, billionaire inventor Elon Musk finally revealed what his revolutionary "Hyperloop" was. Musk released a long, semi-formal design paper on his Tesla Motors website describing "Hyperloop Alpha," the supposed "fifth mode" - after planes, trains, automobiles, and boats - of transportation.
The Hyperloop
The Hyperloop Alpha is Musk's first design of the revolutionary transportation system, which the famed industry disrupter says will be able to take people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just half an hour. Musk's Hyperloop hopes to challenge the "status quo," which is California's high-speed rail system that is estimated to cost $70 billion, but which Musk describes as "a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world," in the design paper he released on his website.
In contrast, the Hyperloop, claims Musk, will travel four times as fast (almost 800 mph at top speed), cost a fraction of the high-speed rail, and actually generate more power than it uses. To put the design in the simplest terms, the Hyperloop is a elevated transit system that uses tubes, air pressure, and "air bearings" to move capsules filled with people or cars (depending on the design) from one place to the next. Using low air pressure in the tubes to reduce drag - about 1/6th of Mars's atmosphere, according to Musk - and air bearings to provide low-friction elevation above the metal tubes, (much like how air hockey tables elevate the puck), Musk says the capsules can travel at high sub-sonic speeds without the kind of power usually required for fast modes of transport like planes.
The tubes would be above ground, resting on pylons, and would run along government rights of way - for example, right next to the interstate.
On top of the tubes would be enough solar panels to power the whole system.
Original?
FastCompany did some investigating after Musk thanked some predecessors of his design, including a system called ET3, and found that the inventor of that system had visited Musk previously. The ET3, a design by Daryl Oster based on an "Evacuated Tube Transport system" was supposedly capable of transporting people in pods that run inside tubes from New York to Los Angeles in 45 minutes.
The ET3 similarly uses low-pressure air in tubes, capsules the glide on air, and a series of accelerations to boost the pod's speeds until they reach ridiculous momentum, all like the Hyperloop.
While Oster has remained nebulous about the relationship between the Evacuated Tube Transport system and Musk's Hyperloop, FastCompany remarks that Oster licenses his ETT design under an open consortium model - which is like a software license, where anyone can buy the design. So Musk hasn't stolen anything, but he might have incorporated and improved upon others' designs in making the Hyperloop pitch.
In fact, Oster is glad Musk has brought attention to his own transport idea, so all seems well between the two. While the license for the ETT only cost $100, it also has a six percent royalty fee in case the design ends up making money. If Musk did indeed license the ETT design, and the Hyperloop is adopted by the state of California instead of the high-speed rail system, Oster will be making money.
And if the Hyperloop truly becomes a fifth mode of transport and revolutionizes the way we get from city to city? Six percent of an empire probably sounds just fine.
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