Hyperloop - the Future of Long-distance Ground Transportation?
Hard to say really ... a lot is going on in that space, obviously. A lot of buzz, too - and the concept as such sounds extremely appealing, but the engineering challenges are quite daunting still: maintaining a near-perfect vacuum in a steel tube hundreds of kilometers long, uneven thermal expansion behavior, ensuring maintaining the vacuum during passenger entry / offloading, potentially catastrophic consequences of decompression and - last but not least - securing the entire length of a line against terrorist attack, since such a system is clearly a target for the many lunatics out there.
But then again, humanity faced seemingly insurmountable technical challenges before and succeeded. I mean travelling to the moon and back just twelve years after the first satellite - come on, who would have believed that? And to the conspiracy theorists out there: yes; we were on the moon.
As an engineer, I have strong trust that this will happen here in some shape or form as well since we need fast and environmentally friendly transportation for large masses of people - and air travel is far from being environmentally friendly, and I wouldn't consider it convenient either.
So it's interesting to see that France is now entering the hyperloop race as well:
Elon Musk as the inventor of the concept and Sir Richard Branson have been in that race for much longer. Virgin Hyperloop One, Sir Branson's company for that sector, just announced a speed record in its DevLoop track in the Nevada desert:
Of course, Elon Musk's The Boring Company is heavily engaged as well
Then there's T-Flight, the Chinese supersonic train that's supposed to reach a whopping 4000 km/h:
So this is yet another of the many exciting technology advances we see right now in the world. I do hope though, that a large number of these also contribute to solving our environmental problems, since for example with news about the Gulf Stream measurably slowing down
we're clearly being told what's even more relevant than ultra-fast transportation from A to B.
Nonetheless, with that level of enthusiasm, activity and also competition around magnetic levitation (MagLev) trains in vacuum pipes, it seems save to assume that history will not repeat itself and this all ends like the ill-fated German Transrapid train, the first MagLev of its kind, which was decommissioned in 2012 now apparently is rotting away close to its previous test site:
A bit of a shame really, not only considering the potential of this technology, but also taking into account that German engineers with their patented work laid the foundation for MagLev trains, notably Alfred Zehden back in 1905 and Hermann Kemper beginning in the thirties of the last century.
Picture by Pixabay under CCO Creative Commons license