The Hyperloop: A revolutionary pipe dream

It’s an idea right out of science fiction, said The Economist, but Elon Musk is sure it could work. Musk, the high-tech entrepreneur who created PayPal and the electric-car firm Tesla, unveiled a 57-page design last week for a futuristic alternative to California’s planned high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco—a vacuum train nicknamed the Hyperloop. Passenger pods would hurtle through airtight tubes suspended alongside California’s highways, able to reach 800 mph due to the lack of air resistance. The trip from L.A. to San Francisco would take just 35 minutes. Musk says the solar-powered system would be easier to build than a railway and “cheaper, to boot”—he estimates a cost of $6 billion, less than a tenth of the rail line’s $68 billion price tag. Although Musk says the Hyperloop is just an “open source design” that he hopes someone else will build, said Megan McArdle in Bloomberg.com, his idea is worth serious consideration. Moving people from city to city this way “is potentially revolutionary.”

Dream on, said Tad Friend in NewYorker.com. Musk’s Hyperloop design is essentially a “napkin doodle” that engineers are already picking apart. It has some ingenious touches, but there’s “no conceivable way” this could be built for $6 billion, when testing, maintenance, and security costs are taken into account. The proposed route parallels the San Andreas Fault—think of the disaster film you could make about a collapsing Hyperloop—and would start an hour north of Los Angeles and south of San Francisco Bay, “which kills the whole point.” Even if the Hyperloop’s many problems could be solved, California’s state government isn’t likely to drop its high-speed rail system and throw billions at a “pipe dream.”

The Hyperloop may be a fantasy for now, said Samuel R. Staley in CNN.com. “But that doesn’t make the idea any less relevant.” Great leaps of technology are always thought to be impossible until someone makes them. The steam-powered locomotive “was considered the stuff of fancy” when William Murdoch built a prototype in the 1780s; just a few decades later, steam trains were commonplace. “We should be cheering Musk on,” said Joel Johnson in Gizmodo.com. To meet its environmental and economic challenges, America needs real innovation, not just tweaks of existing technologies. The Hyperloop may be just a pipe dream—but at least someone is daring to dream it.

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