matter of fact

In the 1970s, Swissmetro proposed a system of evacuated tubes that would conduct
trains at 500 kilometers per hour. In 2009, the project folded for lack of funding.

Hyperloop:
the Hyperloop’s friction- the straight
free movement would save road: Only when
dawdling in the
energy, operating costs

No Pressure
city can Hyperloop
would be lower, too. capsules handle more
Then Musk pulled out, than a gentle curve.
citing prior commitments
to his existing startups, Tesla Motors and SpaceX.
The vacuum train project will get But to encourage others to implement his proposal,
its first test track this year he had SpaceX organize an open design compe-
tition, whose first round—a design contest—was
scheduled to take place this month, as this issue
I n 2 01 3 , E l o n Mu s k h a d a n i d e a . He would propel was going to press. It attracted more than 1,200

I
passengers in a pod through an evacuated tube at registered teams, mostly of engineering students.
nearly the speed of sound, hurtling them from Los But the contest was no mere science fair. Now there
Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. It’s a lot are two startups—Hyperloop Transportation Tech-
quicker than the 2 hours and 40 minutes of the rival nologies (HTT), founded in 2013, and Hyperloop
technology, a proposed high-speed train. Technologies, in 2015.
He called this scheme the Hyperloop and said it would cost Yes, the idea is crazy. But not as crazy as you
US $6 billion to build versus $60 billion for the train. And because think, and not at all for the reasons you think it is.
HTT

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 To p t ech 2016

You’ve got to hand it to Elon. Actual folding skeleton of following the curvature of the Earth at high speed.
money has been raised, and this year actual wood: This model of Finally, the capsule would decelerate along another
a Hyperloop capsule
ground is to be broken, on HTT’s 5-mile was built by students linear motor functioning as a generator, to scavenge
(­8-kilometer) test track in California. All this at Suprastudio, part energy for reuse. Hello, other side of the world!
without any key breakthrough to brighten of the architecture By contrast, Musk’s capsule would travel at sub-
school of the
the outlook of what is a very old idea. In 1906, University of California, sonic speeds in a much softer vacuum, a conces-
future rocketeer Robert H. Goddard wrote a Los Angeles. sion that allows his pod to be borne on a cushion
sci-fi story on the idea for a college class (incor- of air (and still be propelled electromagnetically).
porating ideas that he later patented; see illustration, “A Rocket Man’s It’s a strategy many student teams in the design
Dreams”). The only new thing is the enthusiasm of Musk, a man who competition appear to be following, although HTT
has already made big promises and delivered on them. still prefers magnets. The air cushion would be fed
Musk managed to position the scheme as a modest proposal—this by the output of a battery-powered compressor at
is part of his genius—by sketching out specifications far less thrilling the front of the pod, another reason why the sys-
than those of Goddard and his successors. Robert Salter, for example, tem could work only at subsonic speed.
was a Rand Corp. analyst who imagined firing pods from New York One thing student teams and other enthusiasts
to Los Angeles in 21 minutes (as this magazine described in 1984). are supposed to do is find and correct errors in
Salter’s decidedly immodest proposal would put you in a capsule Musk’s sketchy proposal. It’s crowdsourcing, and
in New York or Japan, levitate you above a magnetic track to sidestep it’s working. For instance, after a temporary U.S.
rolling friction, accelerate you along a linear induction motor—essen- government shutdown forced some NASA research-
tially an electric motor rolled out flat—then let you coast losslessly ers to find something else to do with their time, they
through a nearly perfect vacuum at Mach Plenty. The top speed would tackled the Hyperloop’s turbine idea and found it
be cleverly limited so as to avoid a sense of weightlessness caused by needed tweaking.
HTT

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 matter of fact
In 1985, scientists at MIT used electromagnetic propulsion
to fire a Ping-Pong ball through an evacuated tube.

“Compressors won’t go beyond a certain speed” Other questions to be answered at the test facility include these:
unless you expand the cross-sectional area of the How would you—pardon the expression—evacuate passengers in
turbine’s intake in comparison with its payload, an emergency? What happens to followers if a pod up ahead has to
says Jeffrey Chin, an aerospace engineer at NASA stop short? How do you avoid pileups during the deceleration phase?
Glenn Research Center, in Cleveland. “Since you Restart the system once you’ve repressurized all or part of it? And
can’t shrink people, you must expand the tube.” how well will civilians bear the stress, with high-def screens sub-
Indeed, the most recent specs for the Hyperloop stituting for portholes to ward off claustrophobia and with g-forces
require a tube more than twice as wide as the pod. reminiscent of roller coasters?
About that last one, at least, some observers are squeamish. “It’s not
E v e n at a me r e 1 , 2 0 0 - p l u s kilometers per hour transportation; it’s a barf ride,” comments Alon Levy, a Stockholm­
(760 miles per hour) the Hyperloop would still be based mathematician who blogs on transportation.
far faster than existing airliners—and faster yet in HTT is facing this and other aerodynamic problems, says Craig
effective speed because, like trains, it would con- Hodgetts, the chief architect of the project and a professor at the Uni-
nect cities at their centers. But also like trains, versity of California, Los Angeles. Its evolving design is now rather
the Hyperloop couldn’t go just anywhere, so its different from the original Musk vision, which he says is one reason
technological sweet spot would be middle-range why HTT won’t participate in the SpaceX competition.
trips—such as the 560-km stretch from L.A. to “The artist’s sketches that accompanied
San Francisco. Musk’s proposal consider the capsule with
Musk, who holds a degree in physics from the Uni- a kind of sloping nose akin to that on high-
versity of Pennsylvania, got the science essentially “It’s not speed-rail trains,” Hodgetts says. “That’s
right. You can indeed maintain a nearly friction‑­free transpor- an appropriate configuration if you’re not
surface, either with air cushions—as the hover­craft tation; it’s in a tube, but in a tube the ideal shape is
people will testify—or with magnets, as the maglev a barf ride,” symmetrical all the way around. So we
people will affirm. Civil engineers can lay a very comments made quite a difference in terms of locat-
straight track. Linear accelerators work. Alon Levy, a ing the capsule in the tube.”
And you need pull only a partial vacuum. HTT Stockholm- Because HTT will suspend its pod mag-
is talking of a tube pressure below 100 pascals, based math- netically rather than pneumatically, it
which is a thousandth of an atmosphere. It’s not ematician will need a smaller frontal compressor
onerous at all, insists Carl Brockmeyer, head of who blogs turbine than originally envisioned, he
business development at Oerlikon Leybold Vac- on trans- says. That means the pod can get along
uum, an outfit based in Cologne, Germany, that portation with lighter batteries and cooling systems.
is collaborating with HTT. That weight reduction should minimize
“I’m tempted to say it’s easy, but better to just buffeting (and barfing). But work is still
say it’s very achievable—this will not be the big going on to figure out how passengers
technology difficulty,” says Brockmeyer. “We are will cope with acceleration.
most likely suggesting a displacement pump,” he “My sense is there will be fine-tuning at the Quay Valley installation,”
adds. “I’m not entitled to tell you how much equip- Hodgetts concludes. “Some of our research indicates that at full speed
ment we’re going to use, but it depends not only on it’ll pull 1.5 g’s in a 15-mile turning radius—quite a lot. That’s a big deter-
what’s necessary to keep vacuum—we also need minant in laying out a route. And it doesn’t look like it’ll be practical
a redundant system,” he goes on. “Maybe we’ll to slow capsules down to any degree in order to maneuver, so there
install an extra pump in case we need to exchange has to be a very sophisticated analysis of speed, route, and sensation.”
pumps or to not have to run them all at full speed.”
To answer these and other questions, HTT plans Le t ’ s s ay t h e e r g o n o mi c i s s u e s can be solved—and that, with
to begin constructing its 5-mile test track later enough backup systems, the safety challenges can, too. Now the
this year in Quay Valley, Calif., halfway between really big problem is, of course, money.
L.A. and San Francisco. By the way, that’s also Hodgetts asserts that building the tube itself is actually not a hard
the site of a proposed solar-powered city—which problem: “It’s several tiers down from building a skyscraper 1,000 feet
is convenient, given that Musk is now also mak- high, where you have unpredictable wind forces, possible seismic
ing battery storage for solar homes and because forces, shrinking concrete.”
his specs call for powering the Hyperloop with Other experts are a tad less sanguine. “This is a huge proj-
tube-mounted solar panels. ect that no one has ever done, and he [Hodgetts] is promis-

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 To p t ech 2016

matter of fact
SpaceX is building a test track in California with an
evacuated tube 1.8 meters high and 1.6 kilometers long.

trials must be run, more funding will be needed

to compete.
“We’ll build and design a test model to compete
in this winter’s competition,” says David Coven,
a mechanical engineering student who’s leading
the University of Washington team. “It won’t be
full size—more like 3 by 4 by 14 feet, like a Formula
One. We’ll also be building a test tube 1 mile long.”
Bigger fish may enter the competition in its later
phases. Chin, of NASA, hinted that he and his col-
leagues might want to give it a try. He is already
thinking of how the problem changes as you move
from the design to the testing phase. “The devil is
in the details, when it comes to moving to a bigger
system,” he says.

Le g a l a n d p o l i t i c a l o b s ta c l e s may eclipse
even the economic ones. New York City’s subway
system is supposed to open the first stretch of its
Second Avenue Line at the end of this year. The
relevant numbers: 3.2 km (2 miles), $4.5 billion,
and nine years. That’s how long it will have taken
to build, if you count from the day workers broke
ground (and 97 years if you start with the day the
line was first proposed).
True, Manhattan’s depths are riddled with pipes,
cables, maybe Morlocks. But the main impedi-
ments here were not metal and dirt but rather
even grubbier stuff: politics and lawyers. And the
same could be true for the Hyperloop. Musk has
argued that right of way could be had for a song
by building alongside existing power lines. Good
luck with that.
But when the day comes that public officials are
asked to approve a Hyperloop and pony up the
ing this thing at really a ridiculous cost, A rocket man’s funds, the merry pranksters of the Hyperloop will
not knowing if it will work,” says Leon dreams: Robert H. face serious opponents armed with spreadsheets
Goddard, father of
Vanstone, a postdoc who studies high-speed modern rocketry, of their own. Unless they go to a country where
aerodynamics at the University of Texas first envisioned the political leadership can be relied on to make
at Austin. a Hyperloop-like things happen.
system in 1906.
“If you fire it down at high speed, very small Maybe that’s why Dirk Ahlborn, the CEO and
deviations in the tube can cause buffeting,” founder of HTT, spent the tail end of the summer
Vanstone adds. “Even if you can get it quite straight in the first place, in Asia. When Spectrum caught up with him, in late
the ground moves, especially in California. It could be loud; it could September, he wouldn’t reveal exactly where he’d
been, but he did say where he was going.
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

be rattly.”
These problems will probably not dominate the open competi- “I can say for sure the first full-length track will be
tion this month. It involves design, not a trial run, so the registered in Asia, the Middle East, India, or Africa,” ­Ahlborn
teams have so far been able to make do with university funding, said. “They have bigger issues and no existing infra-
freebie modeling software, and the odd gift from corporations. structure, so a real need to build. A system like ours
Students who spoke to IEEE Spectrum said their research funding is way more interesting for them than going with
would likely be under $100,000—in the short term. When actual high-speed rail.” —Philip E. Ross

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