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Hyperloop One Hits a Milestone: 70 mph and 5.3 Seconds of Magnetic Levitation

posted by n1 on Friday July 14 2017, @09:09AM   
from the levitating-shopping-carts dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Hyperloop One claims that its prototype ultra-fast train has completed a first full systems test in a vacuum, reaching a speed of 70 mph. The sled was able to magnetically levitate on the track for 5.3 seconds and “reached nearly 2Gs of acceleration,” according to the company.

The test was conducted privately but Hyperloop One offered some video that included footage from testing. Based on that footage plus a few seconds of additional b-roll shared with media, a lightweight skeleton sled uses a linear motor to accelerate, levitates briefly, and then comes to a halt as the brakes are applied.

Hyperloop One was created as an answer to a challenge from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who wrote a white paper envisioning a mode of transportation that would send pods at speeds greater than 700mph using a low-friction environment and levitation using air bearings.

Source: Ars Technica

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Original Submission

• Re:high value freight Re:high value freight (Score: 2) by fishybell on Friday July 14 2017, @03:31PM (1 child)

  by fishybell (3156) on Friday July 14 2017, @03:31PM (#539151)

  like a giant version of the vacuum tubes used to move slips of paper from banks to the car teller lane

  I've yet to be convinced that the idea didn't come from Futurama [theinfosphere.org].

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• Re:high value freight (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @06:00PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @06:00PM (#539240)

  A magnetically levitated train traveling in an evacuated tube was being developed in Russia before the 1917 revolution.

  It is apparent that if we are to attain and maintain anything like the speed of a bullet we must remove the air and we must neutralize the attraction of gravitation, since it cannot be destroyed. If this is attained you need not expend energy to maintain the value of the velocity of the car — the principal waste of energy in all usual systems of locomotion — and you could travel indefinitely for nothing.

  A consideration of the subject led me to conduct laboratory experiments which show that it is possible to move a car at high speed in a tube from which the air has been partially exhausted — thus overcoming the obstacle opposed by air resistance — and to support that car, not on the usual rails but literally in space by means of electromagnets — thus neutralizing gravitation.

  - Boris Weinberg, 1917 [lingualeo.com]

  partial scan [wikisource.org]

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