Elon Musk, well known as the founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, is now also well known for his recent Hyperloop Alpha Proposal outlining what he calls a “fifth mode of transportation.” But is this fifth mode of transportation feasible from an engineering and construction view, and how can engineers improve upon it?
The hyperloop is like a muted, trackless version of a vactrain—a system to propel a vehicle along a maglev track inside a vacuum tube. Proponents claim the hyperloop could reach speeds of thousands of kilometers per hour. Similar vactrain and maglev ideas have been circulated and researched for years and touted by the likes of the RAND Corp. and ET3, a Colorado-based tube-transportation consortium. Musk gives a nod to each in his proposal. There are similarities between the hyperloop and the vactrain, the biggest being that neither has been tested at full scale.