The internet is going crazy over this one tweet and Instagram post by legendary Elon Musk! The tweet showcases the Hyperloop pod run by team WARR, from Tech Univ Munich who have won the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.

The concept of Hyperloop was first envisaged by Elon Musk in 2013 in the form of high speed capsules that travel at the speed of the sound. Musk believes that Hyperloop will be the fifth mode of transport after planes, trains, cars and boats connecting cities that are ideally less than 1500km apart. When it becomes a reality, Hyperloop would replace the conventional railway system. with its medium-vacuum environment offered by the tube.

Hyperloop pod run by team WARR pic.twitter.com/ntaMsoxkZE

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 28, 2017

The competition which was organized between 25-27 August in LA focussed on the highest speed possible in the 1.2 km SpaceX tube. The WARR pod won the prize with a top speed of 324km/hour. If they do travel at the speed of sounds,  Hyperloop pods could make your journey from Munich to Berlin inside 30 minutes.

The WARR Hyperloop team at the SpaceX competition

The WARR Hyperloop team of 30 students from the Technical University of Munich

Another player Hyperloop One has a distance to time saved calculator which shows that if you had to travel from Delhi to Agar you could actually reach in just 16 minutes.

Also read: Hyperloop Alpha white-paper, written in 2012

While you might still be drooling over the video of hyperloop pod run, we would leave you with this quote by Musk at the event:  “The reason I love these things is that it makes me excited to wake up in the world”. “There are a lot of problems in the world and if we don’t have things that inspire us, what’s the point of living?”

Also read: With its recent success, where is Hyperloop One headed now?

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India runs on rails. Employing over 1.3 million employees and generating over 100 billion in net income, the Indian Railways is often termed the lifeline of the country. However, it is slow, often unreliable and is plagued with many other problems. The government is constantly trying to change things one at a time and has been looking at the option of higher speeds on popular routes. The two major companies working on Hyperloop, Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, are looking at this as an opportunity to set their camps in India.

Recently Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced that it is in talks with five Indian states to build a high speed network. It was also revealed that the company will raise USD 100 million to invest in the country and has already got local partners onboard. HTT Chairman Bibop Gresta shared that HTT will be ready to host passengers within 36-38 months after land and other permissions are taken care of.

But HTT isn’t the only one pulling strings and making moves here. The Hyperloop One Global Challenge invited teams from all over to send their proposals for using the technology in their region. As a part of the challenge, Hyperloop One hosted a showcase event in New Delhi yesterday. The event was attended by Minister of Railways and Hyperloop One shared its vision of how adopting the technology could be an important step forward for the country.

There is no denying that something like Hyperloop could do wonders for a country like India and both the companies see massive opportunity here. Clearly they are trying to do everything they can to get the attention of government and gather support from the masses. While HTT Chairman Gresta claimed that they are the only company the officials are talking to right now, Hyperloop One invited rail minister to their event to show what they are planning (and highlight that they are the only company building a ‘functional’ system right now). Things will only get intense as both the companies move forward with their developments. We hope this drives the final project even closer for us to experience.

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It is being called the ‘Concorde of modern commute’. When Elon Musk first conceived the idea of shooting people through tubes at a whopping speed of 700 miles per hours, the chances that we’d be around to see it happen were slim. Until now Hyperloop’s leading start-up which has been renamed as Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies) is showing that it’s not all hype.

The Los-Angeles based start-up first demonstrated its propulsion system yesterday. A day before the company had closed a phenomenal amount of $80 million as its Series B round of funding. The new investors on the bandwagon include 137 Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Fast Digital, Western Technology Investment, SNCF, the French National Rail Company, and GE Ventures.

Hyperloop’s CEO Robb Llyod mentioned in a blog post last December that Hyperloop would have its “kitty hawk moment” in 2016, referencing the North Carolina site of Wright Brothers’ flight. This was a much clearer reference to a full scale , two-mile test, which would happen later this year. Wednesday’s demonstration included a portion of the pod travelling for five seconds at over 300 mph–and crash landing into piles of sand, since the brakes haven’t been built yet.

Either way, the analogy isn’t a far reality, if successful. Hyperloop one’s rail could revolutionise the way people commute. It is said to give a fully functional system of magnetic pods by 2020 with $20 being the cost of a 400-mile journey; San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Hyperloop is imagined to operate in a near-vacuum tube, which will drastically limit air resistance. This would eventually limit air friction enabling the pod to float above the set of powerful magnets travelling at 760 miles per hour, just below the speed of sound.

Video: CNNMoney

Hyperloop’s yesterday announcements included partnering with SYSTRA, a public transportation engineering company. The two will work together to study high-speed systems in France, Russia, and the Middle East, according to a press release. It is said to start working with Nordic company FS Link to create a high-speed rail system between Sweden and Finland. At an event in Las Vegas, the company also presented a handful of other big-name engineering and transportation companies that it’s partnering with, including AECOM, Amberg Group, Arup, Bjarke Ingels Group, Deutsche Bahn, and KPMG.

The $100 million in funding will help, but Musk has said the project will cost $6 billion, and some experts think the final price tag will be far more. There also will be plenty of political glitches to jump through and land to purchase en-route to completing the 400-mile track. Musk called this “the fifth mode” of transportation — after boats, trains, motor vehicles and airplanes.  The Kitty Hawk moment might not be here yet, but it’s coming.

Source: Inc

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