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Hyperloop Testing Starts Next Year
neanderslob writes: In 2013, Elon Musk told us about a theoretical transportation system he'd been thinking about for a while. It was called "hyperloop," and it was a tube-based system capable of sending people and things at speeds of up to 800mph. Now, a company called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies plans to start construction on an actual hyperloop next year. The idea is to build it to serve Quay Valley (a proposed 75,000-resident solar power city in Kings County, California). The project will be paid for with $100 million the company expects to raise through a direct public offering in the third quarter of this year. The track itself will be a 5-mile loop and won't reach anywhere close to the 800mph Musk proposed in his white paper — but it's a start.
Meaning the Boeing 747 became extremely popular while the Concord wound up eventually going to the dustbin of history because per passenger-mile, the Boeing 747 was cheaper than the Concord, despite taking much longer to move passengers from New York to London.
And that's the problem I see with the Hyperloop: sure, it may be technically possible to send passengers in a train in a tube with a vacuum at 800 miles per hour from Los Angeles to New York, but at the end of the day, its the cost per passenger mile that matters. And a large airplane traveling along at 500 miles per hour, which doesn't require 3,000 miles of dedicated hardware to travel through, is going to be far cheaper than buying a 3,000 mile strip of land and building a tube. across it.
Actually, it's the Return on investment (ROI) that matter in business. Or in other word, how many time it'll take to make enough profit to cover the cost of the initial investment. And in this case, the US$9.95 billion California High-Speed Rail is a huge example on how much money you can make on transportation.
If we take Elon Musk word, the ROI of the Hyperloop beat the crap out of any High-Speed Train project. But there's another term really important here, something we call Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL). Basically, this level told how much maturity a technology have reach. While HST is really high, Hyperloop on the other hand have a MRL really low. Meaning that nothing is proven about the real ROI of the Hyperloop and a huge R&D cost is needed to raise the MRL.
What I love about this is that they raised a sort of huge "kickstarter" to cover the cost of the R&D and raise the MRL to give us a real idea on the ROI of the Hyperloop. Only then we'll have an idea if Hyperloop will revolutionize the transport industry or not.
Elok
Have we decided whether it will be blue or gold?