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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday June 17 2015, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the zoom-zoom dept.

On Monday, SpaceX announced that it would be holding a Hyperloop pod competition, inviting universities and private companies to build passenger pods based on SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's open sourced Hyperloop design. The company said it would build a one-mile test track for the pods on a lot adjacent to its Hawthorne, California headquarters.

The Hyperloop has been described as high speed rail combined with an air hockey table: in the system, human-sized pods are propelled by linear induction, with magnets on the outside of the pod repelling the magnets lining the track, which is enclosed in a low-pressure tube (to reduce drag on the pods). The system is supposed to move humans and cargo at a rate of 760 miles per hour.

The impetus for the idea was Musk's disapproval of California's attempts to build a high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Musk detailed this in a 58-page document in 2013 (PDF), claiming that his Hyperloop idea could be built over the same stretch of land as California High Speed rail but for just $6 billion. (California's train system was estimated to cost around $68 billion as of this January.) But Musk decided to step back from the Hyperloop idea as soon as he put it forward. He made his designs open source and publicly said that neither SpaceX nor Tesla Motors, his electric vehicle company, would be building a Hyperloop.

Is a 1 mile long track long enough to test a train that goes 760 miles per hour?


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 17 2015, @01:27PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @01:27PM (#197241)

    It's been a day or three since I read the announcement, but I believe the it specifically mentioned that the test train would not be getting anywhere close to 760mph. I also think it was planned as a closed loop (oval?) track, though that might be mental interference from the "loop" in the name.

    It would make sense though - a loop would give the pods time to get up to speed and cruise for extended periods to test systems in steady-state, even if the lateral accelerations would put a definite upper limit on speed. There's a reason they don't test race cars on a straightaway after all.

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