Hasta La Ideas

After a year of teasers, Elon Musk has officially unveiled the extent of the thinking behind his Hyperloop concept. In a Tesla Motors blog post, by interview with major media outlets, and via a 57-page proposal with images [PDF], Musk spells out how the vaunted high-speed transport system would whisk passengers from L.A. to San Francisco in a half hour. Many media predictions (including ours) about what the Hyperloop would be were wrong. Here are some of the surprises:

The Hyperloop will not be underground. Instead the proposal calls for an elevated track, presumably cheaper to erect than tunneling, and better than a surface-borne system as it leaves farmland largely intact. Conventional train tracks, in contrast, require bisecting the land and providing crossings that are miles apart.

It will not be a giant vacuum tube, nor one operating at normal atmospheric pressure. While the Hyperloop will consist of independent pods enclosed in a steel tube and riding on a cushion of air, it will be a low-pressure tube. Cheaper than creating a vacuum for the length of the tube, yet provides less friction than it would at atmospheric pressure.

(more…)