| The Hyperloop is much closer than people realize The craziest thing about Elon Musk's radical technological visions is how quickly they could come true. The latest example is the Hyperloop. Two years ago, when the billionaire behind Tesla, Space X, and Solar City proposed a tubular system that shoots pod-like capsules between destinations at rates nearing the speed of sound, it sounded like a fantasy. Today, the futuristic rail system is gaining interest from the public and investors alike. A few private companies are currently working on developing beta Hyperloop systems, with hopes of getting an operational system in two years. Musk recently announced that he was furthering the efforts by hosting a competition to see who could design the best passenger pods. This thing could actually happen—and soon.  A sketch of what the Hyperloop passenger capsule might look like, according to Musk.The 'fifth mode of transportation' Musk called the Hyperloop the fifth mode of transportation (after planes, trains, cars, and boats) in a 58-page white paper about the technology published in 2013. It was imagined as a better way to connect cities over land up to around 900 miles. For it to be worth the investment, the new system would have to be safer, faster, cheaper, and more convenient than the alternatives, while also being immune to weather, sustainably self-powering, resistant to earthquakes, and not disruptive to people along the route. “Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment,” Musk wrote. Musk's system would use solar-powered electromagnetic pulses to shoot passenger pods through a network of raised tubes at speeds of up to 761 miles per hour, enough to get from L.A. to San Francisco in 30 minutes. From the Hyperloop station, pods—some big enough to hold cars—would depart on an average of every two minutes or every 30 seconds during peak hours.  A rendering of what a Hyperloop station could like, as proposed by architect students at UCLA.If it sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, that’s because it basically is. “It has a very ‘Futurama’ feel to it, with everyone shooting around the city in tubes,” Jamais Cascio, a futurist and fellow at the Institute for the Future, told Tech Insider. “The Hyperloop has always struck me as a real effort to bring science fiction into real everyday life. So you have to give some props for that. You have to admire the audacity to try to bring something like that into reality,” he said.  How a Hyperloop track might look from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, according to the architect studio SupraStudios at UCLA.While Musk wasn’t the first person to propose a system like this (his white paper references work by inventor Robert Goddard, the Rand Corporation, and ET3), his proposal contained some innovations, like ways to reduce friction and improve airflow. What’s more, his proposal gave the idea the momentum it needed to move forward. When Musk and his SpaceX colleagues introduced the concept of the Hyperloop, Musk made clear it is an open-source transportation concept and invited people to contribute to the design process. Since then, thousands of people have taken Musk up on his invitation for collaboration and everyone from designers and university students to amateur hobbyists have shared their input on how the system could potentially work.  University of Illinois students working on their Hyperloop prototype.When it comes to building a real-life Hyperloop system, however, only two companies are close to making the dream a reality: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) and Hyperloop Technologies. The pioneers While neither Hyperloop Transportation Technologies nor Hyperloop Technologies have any affiliation with Musk or SpaceX, both of these companies are in the process of developing their own beta systems for the technology. “It’s a dinosaur industry,” Dirk Ahlborn, a German entrepreneur and CEO of HTT, said of the transportation industry. “Transportation is ripe for disruption and I think the current railways are very much still in the 1800s.” In February, HTT’s plans became more concrete when a California serial entrepreneur named Quay Hays donated land to the company in Quay Valley, California, to build a fully functional Hyperloop along a five-mile stretch running alongside the Interstate 5 Freeway. The deal enables HTT to perfect its Hyperloop concept in exchange for Quay Valley getting to keep the system for later use.  A rendering of what Hyperloop Transportation Technologies will look like in Quay Valley.Ahlborn’s company, which launched in 2013, has its blueprints ready and its planning team is filing all of the paperwork for the permits to start construction in 2016, Ahlborn said. “We start construction next year and so by 2018 we are thinking of opening up to the public,” Ahlborn said. “Once we have Quay Valley at a good point we will probably start construction for one of the full-length tracks.” Currently, several cities have expressed interest in bidding for a large-scale, regional Hyperloop, so the company may begin several projects at the same time after the Quay track is finished, Ahlborn said. These tracks will most likely be in Asia or the Middle East because there are a lot fewer regulatory hurdles in these countries as opposed to the US and Europe, he said.  Tubes for Hyperloop Technologies' track are delivered to its headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.Meanwhile, Hyperloop Technologies—which has been pretty secretive about its plans—has raised $8.5 million in VC funding and has plans to raise an additional $80 million later this year, according to a Forbes report. The company is negotiating with Anthony Marnell, a Las Vegas businessman who owns a rideaway stretching from Las Vegas to the outskirts of Los Angeles, about building a Hyperloop system along that route, according to Forbes. Tech Insider reached out to Hyperloop Technologies to learn more about its timeline, but a company spokesperson said the company was not willing to comment on future plans yet. Hyperloop Technologies revealed on Twitter that it is working on a Hyperloop development track. Pieces of its mock Hyperloop, including tubes, vacuum chambers, and other pieces, have been arriving to its headquarters for the last few months. Musk, being the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla, has made it clear that he has no plans to make a business of the Hyperloop—at least not yet. “It’s clear that Musk realizes there are many barriers to overcome. That’s why he said it’s all open source instead of trying to make money off of it himself,” Cascio said. “He has never been shy about trying to make money off of audacious things, but this may even be too audacious for him.” Whether or not Musk ever decides to take up the business of the Hyperloop, though, he continues to be a champion of the idea. “While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype,” a SpaceX spokesperson told Tech Insider. In June he announced a Hyperloop pod competition, which is aimed at students, to help him find the perfect design for the passenger capsule. The open-source challenge is sponsored by SpaceX and will be hosted at its Hawthorne, California, headquarters in June 2016.  The rocket company is building a one-mile test track for the contest alongside its headquarters and also plans to build its own passenger pod for demonstration purposes. Even though final guidelines for the contest won’t come out until mid-August, teams have been signing up in droves. The competition already has more than 700 entrants and counting. The promise One of the biggest appeals of the Hyperloop system is that it’s both energy and time efficient, but that efficiency translates to an even bigger social and economic impact. “You have to see it how it consolidates and affects a lot of other systems. And some of that is very unpredictable,” Craig Hodgetts, the architect and designer who led UCLA’s one-year program on developing the Hyperloop, told Tech Insider. For starters, being able to travel to and from cities in a matter of minutes could dramatically change personal and business relationships, Hodgetts said. For example, people could easily live in L.A. and work in San Francisco.  A map of where Hyperloop systems make the most sense in the US.More business deals could be done in person and more personal relationships could develop. Not to mention that shipping and emergency response could also be greatly improved, Hodgetts said. And given that the Hyperloop pods ideally would be taking off from stations every 30 to 120 seconds, there would an exceptional amount of foot traffic, meaning a big business opportunity. “There will be ancillary business development around it which will exploit those kinds of trains, kind of like all of the apps that came out for iPhone, which no one could have possibly imagined,” Hodgetts said. “A lot of this is not easy to anticipate, but there will be lots and lots of business repercussions.”  How the Hyperloop stacks up to other forms of transportation.These repercussions could be most felt in developing countries in Africa and Asia, where robust transportation infrastructure is lacking. Because these countries generally have fewer regulatory hurdles and a need for a more established transportation system, there’s a greater chance it will be adopted in these areas faster, Cascio said. “It’s a leapfrog technology. Think of it as a parallel to the mobile phone. Mobile phones took off in the developing world faster than they did in the United States and a bunch of Europe simply because there was an existing incumbent infrastructure,” he said. However, in countries like Kenya, South Africa, and Vietnam, where a stable landline did not exist, it was cheaper to install cellular towers everywhere. Cascio said he expects the same thing to happen with transportation technologies like the Hyperloop. But even if a full-scale network of Hyperloop systems isn’t widely adopted in the near future, the amount of research and development that goes into it will lead to significant other benefits. “We can’t lose. Either way it’s a great thing,” Cascio said. “I have absolutely no problem, no hesitation about checking this out because even if Hyperloop doesn’t work in the transportation model that Musk described, what we will have learned from researching and developing this whole genre will undoubtedly inform and improve a whole range of other technologies, transportation related and other ones.” Photos from Tesla, UCLA A.U.D. SupraStudio, SupraStudio, Mizam Rahman, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Hyperloop Technologies/Twitter, SpaceX, HTT/ JumpStartFund, UCLA A.U.D. SupraStudio. | 
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