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Hyperloop Track Starts Next Year
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies will start construction of a five-mile section of full-on hyperloop track next year. Elon Musk's visions get tested in the real world, where they should be.
(Hyperloop track as planned)
The Hyperloop, detailed by the SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO in a 57-page alpha white paper in August 2013, is a transportation network of above-ground tubes that would span hundreds of miles. Thanks to extremely low air pressure inside those tubes, capsules filled with people zip through them at near supersonic speeds.The idea is to build a five-mile track in Quay Valley, a planned community (itself a grandiose idea) that will be built from scratch on 7,500 acres of land around Interstate 5, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Construction of the hyperloop will be paid for with $100 million Hyperloop Transportation Technologies expects to raise through a direct public offering in the third quarter of this year.
Fans of science fiction saw this one coming, or at least something like it, a long, long time ago. In Albert Robida's The Twentieth Century (1882) residents of 1950s Paris whizzed along inside of pneumatic tube trains.
(Albert Robida's pneumatic tube train)
Update 13-Jul-2017: Take a look at a pretty good approximation to the Hyperloop idea - the the air tunnel from Through the Air Tunnel (1929) by Harl VIncent. End update.
Via Wired.
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