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Former SpaceX director Marco Villa joins Hyperloop development team
When it was unveiled a few weeks ago, Elon Musk's Hyperloop project sounded almost too good to be true. Dr. Marco Villa, former director of mission operations at SpaceX, was among those who didn't get the memo from the naysayers, as he's just joined a team set on elevating Hyperloop from fantasy to reality. The crowd-sourced startup platform JumpStartFund enabled the group's formation after the Hyperloop plans were posted there in August; since then, a handful of talented individuals, led by Villa, received permission from Musk to work on developing the project. Joining Villa on the mission to make your high-speed travel dreams a reality is Dr. Patricia Galloway, who once served as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers (and was, notably, the first woman to hold that title). While the rail line is still a long way away from fruition, Villa seems optimistic, stating, "There does not seem to be any technical issues on this project that we can't solve, even if we do not know right away, we will figure it out."
Elon Musk details Hyperloop: public transit via aluminum pods and electric motors
Elon Musk is into transportation, whether it's an electric car or a spaceship. Today, he detailed a plan to revolutionize a portion of public transit. It's called the Hyperloop, and it's meant to get folks from SF to LA (or any two cities less than 900 miles apart) in 30 minutes seated in aluminum pods that are hurtled to and fro at 800 miles an hour in a pair of steel tubes. To keep things safe, pods will be spaced five miles apart so that they can stop without running into each other, which means a total of 70 pods could operate simultaneously. Of course, the real question is how to get the pods moving at those speeds? One main issue with such transport is wind resistance (and associated friction) that increases as the speed of the pods inside the tube escalate. Naturally, one could operate the tubes in a complete vacuum to eliminate the problem, but keeping such a system free of air would be difficult over such long distances. Instead, the proposed Hyperloop system works as a low air pressure environment that is easily maintained with standard commercial compressors. Additionally, "an electric compressor fan on the nose of the pod that actively transfers high pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel" is there to relieve what air does build up at the front. This compressor fan would also generate an air bearing around the pod to keep it suspended in the middle of the tube, much as an air hockey table suspends a plastic puck. As for power? Well, that comes from external linear electric motors positioned every 70 miles to keep the pods humming along at subsonic speeds.
