There are different modes of transportation we use and they have been evolving since the earlier days. The conventional modes of transportation these days are the road, rail, water, and air in which people have been able to invent and modify different vehicles for easy and fast transportation. With the growth of technology, people are prone to look for more and hence the concept of Hyperloop was invented. The concept of Hyperloop proposed by Elon Musk in his white paper presents the idea of having the fastest and safest mode of transportation that would connect cities in minutes which currently take several hours.
Hyperloop is a proposed mode of passenger and freight transportation that propels a pod-like vehicle through a near-vacuum tube at a very high speed. It consists of a low pressure tube with capsules that are supported by air bearings to help create an air cushion and magnetic levitation caused by the induction motor. Hyperloop is an open source project and has been sourced by many team of students and engineers who are working on bringing the concept to reality. Several companies have been founded since the announcement of concept of Hyperloop and these companies have been able to conduct tests for the scalability and reliability of capsule to transport passengers and cargo.
The Hyperloop is a broad concept and lots of investment and infrastructures is required to make this concept become real. Prototypes has been demonstrated and test track have been built where the capsule run away experiments have been conducted with fair amount of positive results. People are energized about the use of Hyperloop in day to day activities since it would reduce the travel time of an individual in huge amount in this busy world and minimize the congestion that stations and airports currently have.
The Hyperloop is an open source project which is proposed for the freight transportation of passengers in a sealed tube through which a pod may travel free of air resistance or friction at a high speed. The concept of Hyperloop was published in August 2013 by Elon Musk and a team of engineer from Tesla Motors and the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) proposing the fastest ground transportation that would exceed the speed of air and other modes of transportation. This concept proposed by Musk in his white paper has a futuristic vision of super high-speed transportation system that would see passenger pods move through a partial vacuum in steel tubes addressing the two key factors that slow down conventional vehicles: friction and air resistance (Cortese, 2018).
The Hyperloop concept brings the speed of airplanes to ground level. It operates by sending specially designed capsules or pods through a network of low-pressure tubes maintained at a partial vacuum. It reduces the time of people travelling from one place to another by huge amount. Musk believes that his concept of Hyperloop could reduce the eight hour bus ride, four hour train journey and convoluted three hour air travel experience between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 30 minutes. An American transportation technology company formed in 2014, Virgin Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies are the startup companies that are commercially adapting the idea of hyperloop into reality. Moreover, Musk through his company SpaceX, he organized the Hyperloop Pod Competition to support the development of functional prototypes and encourage energetic engineers and student teams to design and build the best high-speed pod (SpaceX).
The concept behind the Hyperloop originated in the late 17th century with the invention of the World’s first artificial vacuum, which led to designs for “underground rapid transit systems” powered by pneumatics, the pressurized air (Garfield, 2018). The atmospheric railway that moved carriage with pressurized air would create a vacuum and then the rail would be pulled forward providing a means of transportation at that time. Likewise, the Hyperloop concept operates in a similar fashion transmitting the capsules through a network of low-pressure tubes creating a vacuum that would travel in a very high speed.
Elon Musk, who founded x.com in 1999 which later became PayPal was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, mother Maye and father Errol. His mother was a Canadian born model and dietician and father was an electromechanical engineer in South Africa. After his parents got divorced when he was 10 years old, he and his siblings were brought up by his father who was very strict. His familiarity with programming started through the Commodore VIC-20, an inexpensive home computer when he was just 10 years old. He learned it so quickly that he could create Blastar – a video game in the style of Space invaders. Musk sold the BASIC code for the game to a magazine called PC and Office Technology for $500.
He moved to Canada at the age of 17 to avoid mandatory military service in South Africa. There he enrolled in Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and married Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer. He transferred to United States to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Wharton School. Musk joined Stanford University in California to pursue PhD which however ended up after two days of his enrolment. He started Zip2 in 1995, a web software company that would help newspapers develop online city guides along with his younger brother Kimbal. He became multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company Zip2 and he also made headlines in May 2012, when SpaceX launched a rocket that would send the first commercial vehicle to the International Space Station. He also invented the Boring Company in 2016 which is an infrastructure and tunnel construction company that would alleviate traffic and reduce the congestion in any city.
