Rockets, electric cars, batteries... there's no doubt that Elon Musk and his team know how to stay busy. But there's another project in their repertoire, much more far-fetched than the rest: Hyperloop. The idea of connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco in half an hour sounds too promising; however, several companies are interested, and in an attempt to accelerate development, SpaceX has announced a competition to evaluate capsule designs, which includes a new one-mile track near its headquarters.
Commercial aviation no longer has supersonic flights. The Concorde is retired, and Japanese projects have fallen off the radar, but there are some advances in so-called 'business jets', a very interesting market to apply this technology. The alternative leads us to high-speed vehicles, like maglev trains, and this time, the Hyperloop system from SpaceX. Basically, the idea is to explore if it is really possible to do something like that. The biggest doubts about Elon Musk's announcement were focused on costs, and the supposed six billion dollars to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco might require an extra zero. Even so, the scale of Hyperloop can be altered, and with a reduced design, capsule transport could be viable in the medium or long term. Of course, first some things need to be confirmed, and with that in mind, SpaceX announced a competition.
Competition details
This competition will take place on the new one-mile Hyperloop track (1,600 meters) that SpaceX will build near its headquarters in California. There, the company expects organizations, universities, and companies focused on passenger transport to present their capsule designs 'at human scale', and evaluate the performance of each unit. For logical reasons, the capsules will not carry passengers during the tests, thus confirming the experimental nature of the competition. SpaceX announced that it has no relationship with the companies interested in Hyperloop technology, and once again reminded us that there are no plans to develop the system on its own.
The detailed rules for the competition will be available starting August 15 (the reduced version can be seen here), all participants must register before September 15, designs will be examined in January, and if all goes well, the capsule race will take place in June 2016. It's a small step for Hyperloop, but it's good to see that the project didn't remain a simple delusion.
