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Keith_McClary wrote:

The Hyperloop concept is already beginning to pick up speed. A new start up group of engineering experts, who call themselves Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc., has stepped forward with the ambitious task to turn Elon Musk’s idea into reality. Today the team’s leading technicians, Dr. Marco Villa, former SpaceX mission director, and former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers Dr. Patricia Galloway, along with HTT interim CEO Dirk Ahlborn announced their plan to build a prototype Hyperloop system by next year.

HTT revealed its plans to build up a team of 30 to 50 people with the help of JumpStartFund to work on the Hyperloop design in the coming months. The team presented a rough timetable for the system’s upcoming milestones, starting with a research paper offering specific technical details that will be released in March 2014. Just three months after that in June, a prototype design will be presented for construction bidding.

A new firm, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, is developing plans to makes the tubes a reality - and it has recruited experts from around the world.

The crowdsourced firm has around 100 engineers on the projects, and nearly all of them have day jobs at companies like Boeing, NASA, Yahoo!, Airbus, SpaceX, and Salesforce.

Dirk Ahlborn, the CEO of the new company, says it seemed the perfect way to develop the plans, with a site called JumpStartFund that aimed to crowdsource ideas.

He got in touch with SpaceX, Musk's firm, and the work began.
The team includes about 25 UCLA graduate architecture students at a facility in Playa Vista, although most members work remotely.

Ahlborn hopes to have a technical feasibility study finished in mid-2015, according to Wired.
So far, the team has made progress in three main areas: the capsules, the stations, and the route.

Inside the tubes, hyperloop pods are mounted on thin skis made out of inconel,an alloy already used by Musk's SpaceX firm that can withstand high pressure and heat.

Air is pumped into the skis via small holes to make an air cushion, and each pod has air inlets at the front.
An electric turbo compressor compresses air from the nose and routes it to the skis and to the cabin.

Magnets on the skis, plus an electromagnetic pulse give the pod its initial thrust; reboosting motors along the route would keep the pod moving at just below the speed of sound so the system does not produce sonic booms.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2879730/The-Hyperloop-gets-closer-Elon-Musk-s-plan-shoot-passengers-760mph-LA-San-Francisco-30-MINUTES-shape-100-person-firm-starts-work-plans.html

The crowdsourced firm has around 100 engineers on the projects, and nearly all of them have day jobs at companies like Boeing, NASA, Yahoo!, Airbus, SpaceX, and Salesforce.

Timo wrote:I would much, MUCH rather see this built across our nation than pipelines for tar sands oil.

Newfie wrote:Just FYI, what problem does this purport to solve?

Newfie wrote:I can't decide if it looks more like a casket or a suppository.

Hyperloop, the ultra-fast tube transport dreamed up by SpaceX founder and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, could be ready for passengers in as few as 10 years.

In a 76-page report released on Dropbox on Thursday, a new startup called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies laid out plans for building Musk's futuristic transportation system, which could cut travel time between Los Angeles and San Francisco down to 35 minutes. The trip takes up to 12 hours by Amtrak train, and more than six hours by car.

The system would carry passengers in pods moving as fast as 800 miles per hour, according to the white paper. The plan laid out by Musk -- who has no involvement in the project, and did not help with the paper -- has broadened beyond the two California metropoles. Hyperloop Transportation has drawn up maps with lines connecting every major U.S. city.

Housed within a newly-launched crowd-funding company called JumpStartFund, the startup offered wildly varying estimates for the cost of the project -- anywhere between $7 billion and $19 billion.

Hyperloop CEO Dirk Ahlborn told The Huffington Post that the wide potential price range is due to the unpredictability of prices for materials and other expenses over the next decade. He said wealthy donors and investors are already approaching JumpStartFund, of which he is also chief executive, about pledging money.

He admitted his 10-year timeline might be ambitious. It does not account for the political opposition and regulatory hurdles that would undoubtedly dog a new form of public transportation being built up the coastline of the country’s most populous state.

“We’re working very close with the public and being very transparent,” said Ahlborn, a German-born entrepreneur based in Los Angeles.

If he finds it too difficult to build the inaugural Hyperloop in California, he may choose to build it in another country.

“For us, it’s mostly about building the Hyperloop,” he said. “We want to see it in the U.S., but if it makes more sense to do that somewhere else, then so be it. The goal is to build it.”

He said wealthy donors and investors are already approaching JumpStartFund, of which he is also chief executive, about pledging money.

pstarr wrote:How many hyperloopy threads do we need? They are tangled up and are going nowhere.

http://peakoil.com/forums/over-100-engineers-are-now-working-on-elon-musk-s-hyperloop-t70726.html