History of Hyperloop System

FIRST PROPOSED BY Elon Musk

At its core, hyperloop is all about removing the two things that slow down regular vehicles: friction and air resistance. To do away with the former, you make the pod hover above its track, like a magnetic levitation train. Musk originally suggested doing this with air bearings, little jets of air on the bottom of the pod. Think of air hockey, he said, but where the air comes out of the puck instead of the table. Today, most hyperloop engineers have decided instead to rely on passive magnetic levitation. Where standard maglev systems are power hungry and expensive, this system uses an array of permanent magnets on the vehicle. When those magnets move over conductive arrays in the track, they create a magnetic field that pushes the pod up, no current required.

A complementary magnet system (think of two magnets pushing off one another) would give the pods a push every few miles or so—the near total lack of friction and air resistance means you don’t need a constant propulsion system. As for air resistance, that’s where the tube comes in. (Yes, tubes also just feel like the future, but that’s not the point.) The tubes enclose the space through which the pods move, so you can use vacuums to hoover out nearly all the air—leaving so little that the physics are like being at an altitude of 200,000 feet. And so, like a cruising airplane, a hyperloop needs only a little bit of energy to maintain the pods’ speed, because there’s less stuff to push through. More speed with less power gets you to where you’re going faster, greener, and—depending on energy costs—maybe cheaper too.