It’s been ten years since Elon Musk dreamed of his high-speed trains and infected many people with them. The machines are still standing still today. And that’s despite the fact that many start-ups have jumped on the bandwagon – even basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal.
The idea of Shaq’s company was only recently buried, since hardly anything has happened in ten years.
Boring Company was interested
Do you remember Musk’s Boring Company? That was the company that sold flamethrowers for the little man. With his side company, the tech guru wanted to get into the Hyperloop trains – actually.
Instead, Musk dropped the idea, he already had several projects in the pipeline, most notably Space X.
What is Hyperloop?
The basic idea behind a Hyperloop are tubes in which there is a partial vacuum. Inside this tunnel are pods that magnetically levitate over rails. Because drag is greatly reduced, the pods whiz through the Hyperloop at incredible speeds to their destination.
Sounds pretty simple, but after Virgin built their own prototype, a number of problems arose, two of which were particularly serious:
- Safety concerns due to the vacuum
- Unprofitable passenger sizes
Human dog food cubes
The biggest problem is security. As soon as one of the Hyperloop tubes is damaged, physics takes over. It’s something like this when an astronaut’s space suit breaks in space: Within moments it crushes the trains to scrap metal like a sucked-out white sausage skin – and the people in it at the same time. This doesn’t look pretty:
link to YouTube content
Additionally, a test pod could only hold 28 passengers, a death knell for Hyperloop as a mass transit mode.
Vegas Loop statt Hyperloop
You don’t drive through the Vegas Loop in a vacuum and not in capsules, but in Teslas, not autonomously either, but with people at the wheel. Instead of hundreds of kilometers an hour, you only drive 50. It is true that no cities are connected with each other, but only 3 stops over a distance of about 3 kilometers, but the tunnel still wants to be expanded to a length of 50 kilometers.
Anyway.
Until then, Elon Musk will certainly have enough to do, such as converting Twitter into an online bank.
Elon Musk is known for his fantasies. Some work, like Space X and Tesla, while others starve to death like Hyperloop. Does that damage his reputation? Do you think that the Hyperloop project can still be implemented? Tell us in the comments what wacky sci-fi tech you wish for!
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