Elon Musk, head of Tesla Motors, says he will soon unveil plans for “Hyperloop” – a solar powered transportation system that will move people at over 1,000 kilometres per hour.
The Hyperloop concept was first mentioned last year by Musk and was described as being a cross between a Concorde, railgun and an air hockey table. Mr. Musk says a Hyperloop established between San Francisco and Los Angeles would cost around US$6 billion; ten percent of the price of a proposed high speed rail system.
In an interview with PandoMonthly last year, Mr. Musk said Hyperloop would take passengers “from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes.”
Instead of putting a patent on the system, Mr. Musk will publish Hyperloop as “open source”.
The solar connection was mentioned in a Bloomberg article in September 2012.
“What you want is something that never crashes, that’s at least twice as fast as a plane, that’s solar powered and that leaves right when you arrive, so there is no waiting for a specific departure time,” said Mr. Musk
Coming from anyone else, the Hyperloop idea may be disregarded as a pipe dream; but Elon Musk’s accumulated tech street cred has many eagerly anticipating the unveiling of the plans and the possibility of a highly energy efficient super-fast transportation system.
In addition to founding Tesla Motors, Mr. Musk is also the founder of SpaceX and is Chairman of SolarCity. SpaceX is a space transport company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. Last year SpaceX made history as the world’s first privately held company to send cargo to the International Space Station; which was executed using SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.
Mr. Musk was also one of the founders of PayPal; the world’s most popular online payments service.
