At a demonstration in the desert north of Las Vegas on Wednesday, Hyperloop One showed off a newly designed electric motor that’s capable of propelling a sled down a track for hundreds of feet, and that could someday help us travel as fast on the ground as airliners do in the sky.
Advertisement
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk was first to propose the futuristic idea, arguing it would be faster and more efficient than high-speed rail projects.
Hyperloop One is among several companies competing to bring to life a technical vision by Elon Musk, the founder of rocket maker SpaceX and electric vehicle company Tesla Motors, who suggested sending pods holding passengers and cargo inside giant vacuum tubes between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“When you think about passengers traveling on this, you will feel no more acceleration than you would on an airplane taking off”, BamBrogan said after the successful test.
The company also announced the Hyperloop One Global Challenge – billed as a chance “for individuals, companies and governments to develop competitive proposals for using the first Hyperloop One solutions on transport corridors in their regions”. Today, Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies) accelerated a test vehicle down a rail track at speeds of up to 300 miles per hour using the hyperloop’s propulsion technology. The test demonstrated that the frame for the pod, a small sled, could be propelled with electromagnetic energy.
One of the startups that jumped at the challenge is Hyperloop One, formerly Hyperloop Technologies, which will be testing its propulsion mechanism today.
The test under the Nevada desert sun was a step in developing a propulsion system that would give super high-speed motion to passenger or cargo pods gliding above magnetically charged rails enclosed in tubes.
Alon Levy, a mathematician who writes about mass transit for the blog Pedestrian Observations, said the cost estimates from hyperloop backers do not fully take into account difficulties such as engineering turns at jet speed or even digging tunnels.
The engine is the same one that would theoretically power a full-scale Hyperloop in the future. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced days ago that it had exclusively licensed passive magnetic levitation technology, which would allow the start-up to send humans and cargo inside pods in its vacuum-like tube system at up to 760 miles per hour.
Musk originally floated the idea for a Hyperloop back in 2013. “The thing about Hyperloop is that it does not exist until it actually exists”, Josh Giegel, vice president of design and analysis at Hyperloop One, tells the Technology Review.
A third company out of San Francisco is also working on its own system.
Advertisement
Deadline for entry is September 15, 2016, with the victor being announced in March 2017.
