Elon Musk’s new ‘Hyperloop’ may be the next revolution in travel technology

SpaceX and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk is still working on the transportation methods of the future, and his latest idea may be to resurrect 100-year-old technology to make a personal transport that can get someone from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just half an hour.

We won't know exactly what Musk's idea is until August 12th, according to his Twitter account, but he's given some tantalizing hints about his 'Hyperloop' project so far, and it may involve a network of airless tubes connecting major cities, which people could travel through at incredible speeds.

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This kind of idea is already being developed, called Evacuated Tube Transportation Technology (ET3), which proposes to run six-person capsules through this kind of pneumatic tunnel.

It's possible that Musk may be involved with ET3, although it's doubtful he'd be so secretive if he was. Still, his idea does seem to fit with what they're developing.

"What you want is something that never crashes, that’s at least twice as fast as a plane, that’s solar powered and that leaves right when you arrive, so there is no waiting for a specific departure time," Musk said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek last September.

Still, while speaking at the D11 conference in May of this year, all that he said, definitively, is that his system is "a cross between a Concorde, a rail-gun and an air hockey table."

That doesn't give us a lot to go on, but given Musk's history of successes — PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors — it's a safe bet to take his ideas seriously. PayPal has revolutionized business by allowing fast payments over the internet. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft was the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station, at a fraction of the cost of NASA's missions. Tesla Motors is producing cool, luxury electric cars that may go a long way towards breaking our addiction to fossil fuels. If Musk puts his mind to something, chances are you're going to see spectacular results.

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Whatever Musk's idea ends up being (put August 12th on your calendar), it's going to be an 'alpha design', meaning that it will just be the start. He'll be looking for people to add feedback to his open-source design process, so if you have any ideas about this sort of thing, write them down and get ready to pitch them once his announcement goes live.

(Photo courtesy: Reuters)

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