🚇 What Happened to Hyperloop?
And can Transpod finally make this futuristic transport method a reality?
It’s been almost 10 years since Elon Musk proposed the Hyperloop concept, so why are we not all whizzing around the country in vacuum tubes yet?
And can Transpod finally make this futuristic transportation method a reality?
Before we get to Transpod, let’s take a step back to understand what exactly is a Hyperloop?
Hyperloop consists of a tube at very low air pressure, close to a vacuum, with a capsule or pod as a passenger cabin. The capsule floats on a bed of air (or uses magnetic levitation) and shoots through the tube at around up to 1000 km/h.
This works similar to how pneumatic tubes were used to transport mail within and between buildings. Though if you are born after 1950, which you most likely are, you probably have no idea what I am talking about.
Essentially large offices used these tubes to carry inter-office mail, providing speed of communication in the pre-internet age.
Although they were generally only used to transfer mail and other small objects, as early as 1812 a man called G. Medhurst was exploring the idea of transporting people.
So even though Musk got most of the credit for the Hyperloop when he put out a paper in 2013, the original concept stretches back hundreds of years.
And some of the early sketches looked pretty amazing.
But what’s so interesting about Hyperloop anyway? Why not just take a train or a plane?
Well when Musk proposed this idea he heralded it as a potential alternative to the San Francisco to Los Angeles high speed rail, which remains under construction, and the cost has increased from an initial estimate of $33bn, to an eye-watering $113Bn.
In his initial concept note Musk laid out the case for Hyperloop, which goes as follows.
At the moment you have three main long distance transport methods; rail, car and plane. Each of these you can think about as a trade off between speed, cost and environmental impact.
Trains are expensive, slow, but generally have low environmental impact.
Cars are slow, quite inexpensive but have quite a high environmental impact.
And finally, planes are fast, expensive and also have a high environmental impact.
Hyperloop is the concept for a fourth option, one that could be cheaper (I think there is still a question mark here), better for the environment (they would not run on fossil fuels) and faster (hundreds of miles per hour). By removing as much air in the tube as possible, you can virtually eliminate friction and reduce the required force needed to reach high speed.
Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super-fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. ~ Elon Musk
After the initial concept note for the Hyperloop, there was a lot of excitement around the idea, so SpaceX started an annual competition where teams could design and demonstrate prototypes.
The competition ran from 2015 to 2019, with up to 30 teams competing and achieving speeds of up to 463 km/h (288 mph), not bad, but short of the 1000 km/h that has been hoped for. Nevertheless, things seemed to be going well, and Musk announced that the 2020 competition will be run on a much longer test track of around 10km.
However the COVID pandemic put the plans on hold, and there has been no announcement on when or if the competition will restart.
One competing company, Virgin Hyperloop, ended the development of its passenger service earlier this year, and layoffs of over 100 employees.
But it’s not all bad news. The Boring Company, another one of Musk’s companies, recently announced that Hyperloop testing would begin “later this year”.
However, the company that seems to be furthest along didn’t take part in any of the hyperloop competitions, but has quietly worked away the last few years on their own system.
The company, Transpod, has recently announced they raised $550m to start work on a hyperloop from Calgary to Edmonton in Canada, starting construction in 2025.
They call their capsule a Fluxjet, and describe it more as a ‘plane without wings’, and not a Hyperloop. The concept is essentially the same, but they will use magnetic levitation (maglev) as supposed to the bed of compressed air that the Hyperloop concept proposed.
The bits that stick out at each end of the capsule are the electromagnetic "levitation engines” - I think they look a bit like something from the Matrix.
With all these different companies, why is it taking so long to get to commercial readiness?
At the core, there are a number of technical and economic challenges, and many have proven more difficult to overcome than initially thought.
There is the difficulty of maintaining a vacuum, or near vacuum, in a tube for hundreds of kilometres - not a trivial technical feat by any means. And the process for creating and maintaining the vacuum uses a high amount of energy.
Whilst using maglev is not new, and Japan has had maglev trains for decades, they are very expensive - the Linimo HSST line, a low-speed suburban mag-lev line, cost around US$100 million per kilometer (0.62 miles) to build. To date, not one demonstrator has reached the hoped for speed of the Hyperloop (<1000km/h).
You also need to go in as straight a line as possible, to avoid it feeling like a roller-coaster for passengers. Existing high speed rail at speeds up to 400km/h (250mph), require curves to be 10km or more in radius. Hyperloop want speeds up to 1,100km/h (690mph).
Building emergency exit solutions is another challenge. Emergencies of various kinds could result in the capsule needing to stop and evacuate. How you do that in a sealed vacuum tube is not obvious. This is just one of several safety challenges that need to be addressed.
Perhaps trickiest of all is passenger capacity. The challenge is making it economically viable. Comparing Hyperloop to the UK’s High Speed 2 rail system provides an illustrative example. Capacity can be nearly 20,000 passengers per hour per direction ( 18 trains/hour, each with 1,100 seats).
To match this, Hyperloop would need an improbable 400 pods per hour at 9 second intervals (assuming 50 seats per pod).
Nevertheless, progress is being made on all these fronts, just not quite as quickly as many had hoped 10 years ago.
The original direction and vision for Hyperloop remains as compelling today as it did 10 or even 100 years ago - the dream of a greener, faster and cheaper alternative for intercity travel.
Whilst the technical challenges remain substantial, it’s clear that there are still at least a couple of companies taking this seriously.
Musk gave the idea of vacuum tube travel a huge boost in its public profile, spurring investment and experimentation, but it now seems possible that Transpod may have edged ahead in the race to bring this to full commercial deployment this decade.
Until next time,
Jamie
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