When the idea was first released to the public in 2013 by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, also known for creating and running giant companies like Tesla Motors, SpaceX and PayPal, it was accepted widely by all American citizens who wanted something like this for a long time.
At first the idea sounded pretty much like something brought up straight from a science fiction movie so people were mostly sceptical about this concept. Today, as things seem to evolving, the concept will be made a reality by people who worked on a lot of Elon Musk’s projects and some enthusiastic young students and engineers.
Although the idea was accepted, the public was sceptical about this project because of the price of the project and the way it works. These things are not a problem at all, according to Elon Musk and the Hyperloop Technologies executive board. The current price set for the project’s realization is around 7.5 billion dollars for the route which will connect Los Angeles to San Francisco. This is far more cheaper than the speculated project of high speed railroads which is estimated around 68 billion dollars in California alone.
It has also been claimed that the physics is not exactly complicated because the way it works is similar to a cross between air hockey table, a Concord airplane and a Railgun rocket as it was first mentioned by Elon Musk himself. If we just consider the energy consumption of trains, cars and airplanes hyperloop is an ideal solution for the future of our travelling since it uses energy from the Sun, and acceleration in low pressure tubes which means it does not take much for the pods, capsules or whatever you like to call them to reach the speed close to that of the sound which is 1220 km/h. This is almost double the speed of aircraft today!
Engineers claim this way of transport provides much safer travelling because it is weatherproof, resistant to earthquakes and totally independent concerning power consumption. This means a much better, safer and faster alternative to current transport of humans, cargo and cars as well. People involved in this project predict that it will be up and running in commercial use by 2020 or 2021 at the current speed of progress.
Napisao: Denis Cvijanović