MIT wins SpaceX?s Hyperloop competition, and Elon Musk made a cameo | The Verge
This is one more pet project by Elon Musk. Pods travelling at ultrasonic speed in steel tubes that are evacuated to near vacuum. He first thought it up while stuck for an hour in LA traffic on the way to a meeting. He mentioned his idea to the people he met and thought, nothing would come of it. However he underestimated the reaction to anything outrageous he say. People kept asking about it until he made some investigation and with SpaceX engineers concluded it is actually a viable new transport mode. Being too busy with the three companies he is already running he published his findings and made it public domain for anyone to use it. There are now two companies on the way to realize transportation projects.Musk first unveiled plans for "a fifth mode of transportation" in August 2013 in a white paper published on the SpaceX website. Under the plans, the Hyperloop would transport passengers in aluminum pods traveling as fast as 760 mph, mostly following the route of California's I-5. The estimated cost would be $6 billion for the passenger-only model, or $7.5 billion for a larger model capable of transporting freight.
Elon Musk is not involved in those. However he started a student competition to design transport pods that could travel in those tubes. Many universities in the US and some abroad participated. Last weekend the winning designs were announced. A number of subscale pods will be built by the designing universities and do competetive test runs in a track built by SpaceX.
The winning design is by MIT. Second is the university of Delft. The TU München and the university of Cairo among others are also invited to build the pod they designed and enter the competition.
US secretary of transportation adressed the participants. He said when he heard about the concept for the first time he thought that it is impossible. Just the same as every idea Elon Musk has ever come up with, they are regarded impossible until they are done. However today he is sure that Hyperloop will be built.
The university of Delft made a nice animation showing their design and how Hyperloop works in general.