The
promise of hyperloop ranks near the top of the
spectacular index:
A network of
tubes that will shoot people and their things from city to city at near
supersonic speeds. But even if you never clamber into a levitating pod, the
work being done now to make hyperloop a reality could make your future
journeys—whether by plane, train, or automobile—faster, comfier, and cooler.
The hyperloop
industry—if you can call a handful of VC-backed outfits an industry—got going
in 2013, after Elon Musk published a white paper on his idea of tubular travel
and said he was too busy to work on it. (The Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring Company
CEO changed his mind this year, and is now working on his own system.)
The essentials
are simple: A bus-sized levitating pod would be propelled down a nearly airless
tube. Zooming along at hundreds of miles an hour thanks to the lack of friction
and air resistance, it could get riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in
half an hour. And while the physics are sound, building and operating a
functioning hyperloop is a harrowing task.
Anyone who nails
down the engineering then has to take on tasks like building infrastructure on
a massive scale, which means wrangling with regulators and local politics. If
they can do that, they then get to figure out how to make money in a market
dominated by seasoned, streamlined competitors like airlines.
So, yeah, don’t
count on hopping into one of those tubes anytime soon. The good news is that,
even if hyperloop never takes over, the engineering work going on now could
produce tools and techniques to improve existing industries. Much like NASA’s
Apollo missions led to cordless drills, firefighting
equipment, and supercomputers,
hyperloop has the potential to spur significant transportation innovation if
research continues at its current pace. In fact, that crossover has already
begun.
“There’s a lot
of different areas where the technologies we’re developing can be used,” says
Dirk Ahlborn, the CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies,
which has plans to bring the tubes to India, Central Europe, and the Middle
East.
Take, for
example, magnetic levitation trains. The friction-free tech has been slow to
take off as an alternative to trains with wheels because of the high sticker
price, specialized track requirements, and maintenance cost. Ahlborn thinks a
proliferation of interest in this space could change the calculus.
“Never before
has there been so much research done on levitation,” he says. “Before it was
limited to two or three companies.”
Just look at the
work done by Badgerloop, a student-run hyperloop team out of the
University of Wisconsin–Madison. The group’s maglev design uses Halbach arrays
in a novel fashion, says technical director Justin Williams, allowing for
passive movement, as opposed to superconducting magnets that require a flow of
electricity to work. It could significantly reduce the amount of energy
required to propel a levitating train. The team won an innovation award at
Elon Musk’s hyperloop competition in January.
“We’ve been
talking to a lot of different train companies about how we could make their
systems better with our tech,” Williams says. “This would reduce the weight of
the vehicle, which could mean less friction.” And that might be enough to get
more players into the maglev train game, even if they don’t include the vacuum
tube, for extra speed.
Hyperloop-related
innovations could also help make the journeys of the future a little more
comfortable. Since hyperloop travel happens inside a windowless, potentially
claustrophobia-inducing tube, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is working
on “windows” that show riders a beautiful, but fake, view. It would use
eye-tracking technology to mimic the experience of actually looking outside a
window. Ahlborn says he’s negotiating with train companies to add those windows
to their rolling stock to enhance their passengers’ view or add a computerized
augmented reality layer to actual views.
The rise of driverless
cars could present another avenue for this tech. Riders might prefer looking at
Machu Picchu or the Mississippi River to the surrounding asphalt. “Imagine
looking outside of a window and you see Spider-man jumping around outside,”
Ahlborn says, offering a novel way to promote an upcoming movie. “The same
technology then can be used in trains, in cars, and there we’re already
partnering with several companies to make that happen,” he says. “It’s actually
one of our major strategies.”
The hyperloop pipe
dream might improve safety too. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is
developing a sensor-embedded carbon fiber structure for its pods, which it
calls “Vibranium.” Named for the material found in Black Panther’s suit
and Captain America’s shield, this stuff can
provide real-time data about the pod’s temperature, structural integrity, and
other metrics. It’s easy to imagine applications for cars and planes: Carbon
fiber is already light and strong—if it generates data, even better.
Most exciting of
all, perhaps, is hyperloop’s potential to bring space closer to Earth. The
challenges of flying through a tube will feel familiar to rocket scientists.
“It’s high-speed, high-vibration in near vacuum and even vacuum,” says Patryk
Radyjowski, who studies mechanical engineering at the University of
Texas–Austin and advises Guadaloop, a student-run hyperloop team. “All of these
things are very similar to a rocket launch.”
Finding better
ways to cool down electronics in a vacuum could someday help NASA or private
space companies operate long flights, Radyjowski hypothesizes. And with
augmented windows, space travelers could have a smoother, or at least a more
comforting, ride. There’s even an argument to be made that hyperloop makes more
sense for moving around on Mars or the Moon, where you don’t have preexisting
roads—an argument Musk himself has made.
Perhaps that’s
one reason Richard Branson just joined forces with one of the companies leading
the charge into the tube. The man behind Virgin Galactic is now the chairman of
the newly renamed Virgin Hyperloop One. Hyperloop might just be one more
adventure for Branson, but it could also be a way to advance his otherworldly
ambitions. And that’s potentially good news for the rest of us—even if we never
get that 30-minute ride down the California coast.
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