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Fortunately for futurists and people who enjoy picking apart complicated plans, an El Segundo, California-based startup has taken Musk up on his challenge to develop and build the Hyperloop. JumpStartFund combines elements of crowdfunding and crowd-sourcing—bringing money and ideas in from all over the place—to take ambitious ideas and move them toward reality.
- The team is split into working groups, based on their interests and skills, that cover various aspects of the massive project, including route planning, capsule design, and cost analysis. They work mostly over email, with weekly discussions of their progress. Hierarchy is minimal, but leaders have naturally emerged, says Ahlborn. And if a decision needs to be made, as CEO, he makes the call. --- A lot of the work is being done by 25 UCLA students. The school’s SUPRASTUDIO design and architecture program partnered with JumpStartFund, and now the students are working on all the design solutions the new transit system would require.
- Ahlborn doesn’t expect to have the technical feasibility study finished until mid-2015, but he decided to show off what his team has done so far to coincide with the midterm break of the design group at UCLA. So far, the team has made progress in three main areas: the capsules, the stations, and the route. Here’s what we know so far about the Hyperloop JumpStartFund wants to build.
- The group working on finding a suitable route used algorithms that account for things like existing buildings, roads, and geography, and optimize the path for speed and comfort. That means keeping the line as straight as possible. Like in a plane, high speeds alone don’t lead to nausea, but if you start turning, you feel the g-forces. The route won’t be completely smooth, Ahlborn says, but contrary to the claim of one transportation blogger, “I don’t think it’s a barf ride.”
- Musk’s proposed Hyperloop route running from San Francisco to Los Angeles came under a lot of criticism: What about earthquakes? Right of way? Crossing the San Francisco Bay? How will you avoid the political struggles that have made the region’s in-development high-speed rail system something of a punch line? Ahlborn has the answer: Pick a different route. Los Angeles to Las Vegas is being considered, as are other parts of the US and the world. “We would love to see LA to San Francisco, but our primary goal is to build the Hyperloop.” Yes, there are political hurdles. But not everywhere. Not in Dubai.
- The UCLA students working on potential routes imagine networks criss-crossing the country, as well as Europe and Asia. This is where things get fanciful: we’re at least 10 years away from a commercially viable Hyperloop, and the idea of a national network is hard to imagine. They tacked on the idea of a “Mini Hyperloop,” which would offer shorter routes into and around cities.
- As the UCLA students imagine it, a passenger would arrive at a station and drop her luggage off with a Kiva robot (the kind Amazon uses in its warehouse). She would pass through security on what seems to be a moving sidewalk going under a metal detector, an idea that sounds tricky when you consider how often people in airports forget to take coins or various terrifying objects out of their pockets. But once through, she would be able to kill time in the lobby doing some shopping, grabbing a bite, using the bathroom, or renting a tablet for the trip. Then she heads to her platform, gets in her assigned seat, and is whisked away.
- So JumpStartFund and the UCLA students have made good progress, but there’s a lot to figure out before anyone gets to tackle the really fun parts like testing, permitting, and construction. Ahlborn says the questions of how to build the low-pressure tube and the pylons that support it have mostly been solved, and creating the capsules shouldn’t be too tricky. The hard part is moving the capsules within the tube, and seeing how fast they can go. To eliminate friction in the tube, Musk proposed using a compressor to create a pocket of air under the capsule. That’s the cheapest approach, Ahlborn says, but it has its drawbacks. His team is looking at the possibility of using magnetic levitation and other alternatives. “We want to find the best possible way to make this work.”
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