Tube to the Future
Date Posted: April 29, 2019
Posted In: Projects,
From Columbia Business Times: Imagine it’s 1903 and a couple of brothers who sell and repair bicycles for a living keep pestering you to invest in their idea to develop a machine that would allow people to move from place to place without touching the ground. You’re convinced the only thing in their sky will be pie, not people. The next two decades will prove you wrong.
Now, it’s 2019 and people are talking about a California car builder putting a pod inside a vacuum tube that, using magnetic levitation, could blast occupants the 250 miles from Kansas City to St. Louis in about half an hour. Are you in?
A growing number of state officials clearly are.
Missouri House Speaker Elijah Haahr has put together a task force to study the potential for “vactrain” transportation — more commonly called Hyperloop — and how the state should be involved. This will include analysis of whether public dollars should be used to lure a vactrain project to the Missouri River Valley, presumably from the developers of Virgin Hyperloop One. That’s the effort begun in 2012 by Elon Musk, with the more recent financial support of British billionaire Richard Branson (hence, the name “Virgin Hyperloop One,” as in Branson’s Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic Airways).
Hyperloop (a name trademarked by Musk two years ago) engineers have been testing the technology in the deserts of California and Nevada, and Haahr told state capitol reporters he’s been a witness to those tests. “This is something I’ve been very excited about for a long time,” he said at a March news conference.
The pod reaches its impressive speeds in two ways: first, it uses magnetic forces to propel forward without touching anything and, therefore, without friction or drag; second, traveling inside a vacuum tube to eliminate wind resistance. While they’re not there yet, developers say land-based pods moving at jet aircraft speeds are possible. Last fall, the Kansas City-based Black and Veach engineering firm conducted a feasibility study of a Hyperloop system between Kansas City and St. Louis and concluded the system was buildable at a cost between $7.5 billion and $10 billion. “Obviously, the work Black and Veach did early on was very helpful in getting us to where we’re at now,” Haahr noted.