Taking the Hyperloop Seriously

 

Sometimes tech sounds too good to be true, and that is certainly the case with the Hyperloop: Ultrafast, clean, efficient and convenient. So what’s the catch?

Imagine traveling the length of the United Kingdom—from London to Edinburgh, 400-plus miles—in under an hour. A journey from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take less than 30 minutes (five hours less than the average drive between the two cities). Your journey would be safe and comfortable, your carbon footprint almost non-existent.

Imagine traveling the length of the United Kingdom—from London to Edinburgh, 400-plus miles—in under an hour Click To Tweet

Passengers and cargo would be loaded into a pod, which accelerates gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube. The pod quickly lifts above the track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to ultra-low aerodynamic drag.

You could board directly from your office in London, shoot down a tunnel to join the main network, and after around 50 minutes traveling at speeds of anything between 600 and 1200 kilometres per hour (roughly 370-745mph) in a vacuum tube, arrive at your meeting in Edinburgh before heading back in the afternoon.

Getting a sense for whether it’s genuinely time to begin taking the Hyperloop seriously in 2018 requires talking to the people living and breathing the development Click To Tweet

Such is the promise of perhaps today’s most buzzed about transportation innovation: the Hyperloop.

Today, of course, this all sounds rather far-fetched, especially to someone used to spending over an hour on the 60-mile commute from London to Cambridge. So what is it exactly about this technology that has some of the world’s most influential businessmen and innovators—from Sir Richard Branson (whose Virgin Group recently acquired LA-based Hyperloop One) and SpaceX/Tesla visionary Elon Musk (who pushed the idea to begin with)—championing it? To borrow from Musk’s other high-profile initiatives, is Hyperloop destined to be another Tesla or will it be more like Mars colonization (something that, if not exactly impossible, is also not happening any time soon)? Could this fail entirely?

Getting a sense for whether it’s genuinely time to begin taking the Hyperloop seriously in 2018 requires talking to the people living and breathing the development. Luckily, there are quite a few people along for that ride these days.

Current Hyperloop hype all started in August 2013 when Musk first challenged startups and students to develop the concept Click To Tweet

Current Hyperloop hype all started in August 2013 when Musk first challenged startups and students to develop the concept, which he described as something like a cross between Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table.

Despite some positive praise since, there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical. To start, a real-world Hyperloop system would require a large network of vacuum tubes. As sharp turns are impossible, it will be difficult to obtain the space, especially above the ground in densely populated areas. That means the network is most likely to be built underground, and the high cost of tunnelling must also be factored in. It’s not hard to imagine a civic works project that escalates into the billions.

As the Hyperloop levitates in a vacuum environment, there is little resistance. Therefore, when the pod reaches speed, hardly any force is needed to maintain it Click To Tweet

Yet in the face of this widely-acknowledged difficulty, the Hyperloop project has captured public interest partially because it simultaneously provides (at least in theory) a solution to the very real problem of making travel sustainable, at scale. The global population is expected to top 11 billion by the end of this century, and much of this growth will be concentrated in cities—an estimated 2.5 billion people will be added to urban population numbers by 2050 according to a United Nations Report. Yet our roads, ports, and airports are already at capacity, and expanding existing infrastructure is its own incredibly difficult, slow, and expensive (if not downright impossible) process.

Grappling with this potential, skepticism, and doubt is something that Hyperloop One’s Chief Engineer Josh Giegel has become accustomed to.

“I sat in meetings where investors would say, ‘This is a waste of time, this will never happen’” he recently told Fortune magazine. Yet the LA-based company, which in October was officially rebranded Virgin Hyperloop One, recently managed to not only raise $85 million in funding, but to get Branson to join its board of directors. Admittedly, Giegel is a former Virgin Galactic employee and his partner Shervin Pishevar signed up for that company’s Future Astronauts program in 2012, but it is still a resounding endorsement to hear Branson talk of being “completely blown away,” when he visited their test facility in the Las Vegas desert.

Confidence from folks like Giegel largely stems from just how much work has been done given the relatively short lifetime of the modern Hyperloop industry. While things like the Usborne Book of the Future may have introduced many to the idea of maglev capsule trains running in vacuum tunnels, Musk essentially kickstarted the current crop of businesses as we now know it. That’s because when reintroducing the idea to the masses, Musk argued that he didn’t have the time to pursue it himself given his existing commitments to Tesla and SpaceX. Instead, he encouraged all interested engineers to publish open-source designs and invite critical feedback from other willing parties, essentially allowing the overall scientific and engineering communities to explore the technology and improve it collectively.

“We had reached the limits of how fast and how clean we can travel, and there’s a very straightforward physical reason for that: friction,” Maurits Houck, Technical Manager at Delft Hyperloop, told Ars during a recent trip to Holland. Simply put, going faster increases air resistance, so if you’re using wheels to move—as the majority of current transport systems do—that will also increase friction.

Hyperloops now offer a logical solution, he argues. The system removes both the air and the wheels from that friction equation. By having pods that levitate inside a vacuum tube instead, it’s possible to achieve frictionless high-speed travel that is also incredibly energy-efficient.

“As the Hyperloop levitates in a vacuum environment, there is little resistance. Therefore, when the pod reaches speed, hardly any force is needed to maintain it. This makes it faster and more sustainable than any other means of transport,” Houck explains.

This is the Hyperloop’s elevator pitch, and this enthusiastic young man is something of an authority on this subject. Houck’s student team at the Delft University of Technology—where he is currently finishing a degree in Applied Physics—were the winners of the 2017 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition. As we toured their busy workshop, preparations were already under way for the 2018 challenge in California.

As futuristic as the design sounds, this isn’t a system starting from scratch Click To Tweet

As futuristic as the design sounds, this isn’t a system starting from scratch—quite the opposite, in fact. “We already have linear motors, magnetic levitation, and vacuum pumps,” explains Marleen van de Kerkhof, who heads external affairs at Hardt Hyperloop, a commercial startup which spun off from the winning Delft University Hyperloop team. The challenge, she says, lies in connecting all the pieces of the puzzle and integrating it all into existing urban transport infrastructures.

“The idea is actually 100 years old,” Houck agrees. “Basically, the Hyperloop is a combination of airplane cabin and life support systems and a maglev train. The new technical challenges come with the high speed and artificial vacuum. At such high speeds, small inaccuracies in the track can cause significant vibrations in the pod. Therefore, a balance between investing in a very accurate track or a clever suspension system needs to be found. If we want pods to depart in quick succession after one other – so as to ensure high enough passenger capacity – we need to design a very reliable communication system between the pods and an efficient airlock, or a system to bring the pods from normal air pressure to vacuum in the tube.”

Read the full article on Ars Technica

 

 

Is it time to take the Hyperloop seriously? https://t.co/goqr7eDhlc

— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) March 4, 2018

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.