The Race to Create Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Heats Up

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Two years after the Tesla CEO crowdsourced the idea for the Hyperloop, his dream of a ‘fifth mode’ of transportation is quickly and quietly becoming a reality, but what’s his endgame?

ERE’S A FUTURE we’ve seen in science fiction for so long it almost seems like the past: people whisked from one place to another inside tube trains that crisscross the landscape.

But imagine you could board one and travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a half-hour. As you sit down in an engineless pod the size of a bus, your seat remembers you and adjusts the entertainment settings. The pod accelerates to 760 miles per hour, a velocity made possible by the near-vacuum inside the tube. There’s no engine noise—the nearest thing to an engine is the tube, a smart tube that measures speed and location. The pod has been pressurized to minimize the G forces; the trip is as comfortable as a flight. All of this is solar-powered.

There won’t even be time for beverage service

This is the dream billionaire inventor Elon Musk unleashed on Aug. 12, 2013, when he posted a white paper on the website of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., also known as SpaceX. Titled “Hyperloop Alpha,” the paper contained notes toward what Musk called the fifth mode of transport—the other four being planes, trains, automobiles and boats. California’s proposal for a high-speed rail project had offended Musk’s sense of the state that has historically dreamed up America’s future. After skewering the proposed system (“one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world”), Musk issued an open-source design challenge: a 28-passenger solar-powered pod capable of levitating through a system of tubes almost at the speed of sound, with a one-way ticket price of $20 and a total building cost estimated at $6 billion, less than a tenth of the budget for California’s high-speed rail project.

Reactions at the time ranged from excitement to skepticism to outright disbelief—Musk was even accused of sabotaging the high-speed rail project for profit, despite his statement that he had no plans to develop the Hyperloop commercially. Musk stepped back, essentially giving the field to the host of students, engineers and entrepreneurs who almost immediately answered the challenge. Musk spent the next two years tweeting support for any opensource Hyperloop developments. He remains close to members of both startups currently in the lead to produce the first working Hyperloop—Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, or HTT, and Hyperloop Technologies Inc., or HTI. But on Jan. 15th of this year, Musk shook up the field when he announced plans to build a Hyperloop test track and hold a contest in summer 2016 at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. The challenge? Create a functioning, half-scale pod. Specs for the test track’s tube were released in October, and in November, 318 teams from 162 universities and 16 countries submitted their final pod designs. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx will be the keynote speaker at the first event, a Hyperloop design weekend for the finalists at Texas A&M University on January 13th, 2016.

Why would Elon Musk open-source an idea this valuable, while also leaving the door open to step in himself? Musk was unavailable for comment but his position hasn’t changed since he published Hyperloop Alpha: He’s busy. In addition to being the CEO and chief technology officer of SpaceX, he is also the CEO of Tesla Motors and chairman of the board at SolarCity, a company founded by his cousins in 2006 with an idea of his and his blessing. Historically, Musk stays close to the ideas he gives away and it’s rumored that he will at some point choose one Hyperloop startup or another, and back it by lending his name and joining the board. But Musk is unwilling to be portrayed as having a favorite.

Source:WSJ