Tag: Hyperloop

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Pacific Hyperloop keeps chugging along

An artist’s concept shows a Hyperloop pod parked at a transit station. (Hyperloop One Illustration)

Pacific Hyperloop is moving ahead with its concept for tube travel between Seattle and Portland, in hopes of riding in the slipstream of the Pacific Northwest’s growing interest in ultra-high-speed transit.

“If Seattle and Portland were just 20 minutes apart, what could we accomplish together?” Charlie Swan, a University of Washington senior who’s Pacific Hyperloop’s co-founder and regional engagement manager, said on Saturday during the TEDxSeattle 2017 conference.

Swan said sending magnetically levitating pods between the two cities would help knit together the region, resulting in a “type of human interaction like the world has never seen before.”

But turning that vision into reality isn’t totally up to Pacific Hyperloop, which Swan says currently consists of a five-person team. Estimates suggest that it’d take somewhere between $24 billion and $42 billion to create an ultra-high-speed system connecting Seattle and Portland as well as Vancouver, B.C. to the north.

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Elon Musk pushes ahead with his tunnel venture

Boring machine
The tunnel boring machine nicknamed “Godot” sits in a below-ground chamber. Elon Musk reportedly acquired the pre-owned machine from L.A. Metro. (Elon Musk via Instagram)

One of billionaire Elon Musk’s lesser-known ventures is taking the spotlight with word that The Boring Company is looking into digging a rapid-transit tunnel between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

That’s not all: Musk says the company is putting the finishing touches on a second tunneling machine, which will be nicknamed Line-Storm as a tribute to a Robert Frost poem. The first machine is named Godot, after the Samuel Beckett play. It’s being employed to dig a tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif., where Musk’s SpaceX rocket venture is headquartered.

Musk is even selling Boring Company hats. More than 6,400 of them, at last report.

In June, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla estimated that he spent only about 2 percent of his working time on The Boring Company, which focuses on lowering the cost of tunneling to facilitate high-speed underground transit. He must have saved up a lot of that time for this week.

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Virgin invests in (and rebrands) Hyperloop One

Richard Branson
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson dons a hardhat during his visit to Hyperloop One’s test track in Nevada. (Virgin Photo / Greg Rose)

British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group has invested in the Hyperloop One rapid-transit venture, which will soon be rebranded as Virgin Hyperloop One, the company announced today.

The arrangement was described as a global strategic partnership rather than an acquisition.

“For more than 20 years, Richard and Virgin have been at the forefront of transportation innovation, and a partnership with them feels like a natural fit,” Shervin Pishevar, co-founder and executive chairman of Hyperloop One, said in a news release. “Virgin is an iconic brand, and having Richard as an ally will help strengthen our mission to spread Hyperloop One throughout the world.”

In a Virgin.com blog posting, Branson said Hyperloop One was “just the latest example” of Virgin’s passion for innovation.

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Hyperloop One highlights 10 transit targets

Hyperloop One
An artist’s concept shows a Hyperloop transit tube heading toward a city skyline. (Hyperloop One Illustration)

A California startup that aims to turn tech pioneer Elon Musk’s Hyperloop rapid-transit concept into reality has chosen 10 winners in a global competition – including proposed routes stretching from Chicago to Pittsburgh, Cheyenne to Denver, Dallas to Houston and Miami to Orlando.

Other winners in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge include teams from Canada and Mexico, Britain and India – but no one from the Pacific Northwest.

Teams proposing a Seattle-to-Portland passenger line and a cargo route centered on Vancouver in British Columbia were among two dozen semifinalists in the yearlong contest that didn’t make the final cut.

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Germany’s WARR team wins Hyperloop race

Elon Musk at Hyperloop pod race
SpaceX founder Elon Musk looks over to the WARR Hyperloop team as he announces the group’s winning time in the second Hyperloop pod competition. The portal to the test tunnel is to the right of Musk. (WARR Hyperloop via Facebook)

The speediest team from SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s first Hyperloop pod competition has done it again: WARR Hyperloop from Germany’s Technical University of Munich won today’s second contest by sending its magnetic-levitation pod through a nearly mile-long test tunnel at a peak speed of 201 mph.

Musk announced WARR’s victory to a crowd in the stands at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., and on Twitter as well.

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Teams gear up for a Hyperloop showdown

Hyperloop test tunnel
SpaceX’s Hyperloop test tunnel stretches for a mile next to the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Teams from the University of Washington and more than 20 other universities and colleges around the world are converging on SpaceX’s Southern California headquarters this weekend for the company’s second Hyperloop pod competition.

Like many sequels, this contest could well be more intense than the original.

Hyperloop I, which was conducted in January, scored the contestants on multiple scales, including design and safety ratings. In contrast, the Hyperloop II competition on Aug. 27 will be judged solely on the basis of which team’s pod is the fastest.

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Elon Musk teases N.Y.-to-D.C. Hyperloop

Underground tunnel system
Elon Musk’s vision calls for building networks of underground tunnels to get around surface street congestion. (Boring Company Illustration)

Out of the blue, tech billionaire Elon Musk reported today that he’s received verbal approval from the government to build an underground Hyperloop transit system between New York and Washington, D.C., with stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore.

“NY-DC in 29 mins,” Musk said in a tweet.

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Hyperloop One celebrates full-system test

Hyperloop One pod shell
Workers hoist Hyperloop One’s prototype Pod shell at a Nevada test track. (Hyperloop One Photo)

Hyperloop One showed off the results of its first full-system test of a magnetically levitating rail vehicle in a vacuum environment, and said its next round of testing will target speeds of 250 mph.

The crucial test for Phase 1 of Hyperloop One’s development program took place back on May 12 at its 500-meter-long DevLoop test track in the Nevada desert, but the results were reported just today.

In a news release, Hyperloop One said the test vehicle coasted above the first portion of the track for 5.3 seconds, thanks to magnetic levitation. The car achieved peak acceleration of 2 G’s and Phase 1’s target speed of 70 mph, powered by the company’s proprietary linear electric motor.

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SpaceX sets Hyperloop II contest for August

Hyperloop pod racer
The UW Hyperloop team’s sleek pod racer is unveiled at an Eastlake lab building amid the glow of purple spotlights. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

SpaceX’s second Hyperloop competition for student-led teams is coming up in August, with the University of Washington’s crew listed among two dozen contestants.

Hyperloop Pod Competition II, set for Aug. 25-27 at SpaceX’s test track in Hawthorne, Calif., follows up on the first round of pod races that took place in January. The mile-long, low-pressure tube is designed to simulate high-speed transit trips on a scaled-down basis.

Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, came up with the Hyperloop concept four years ago as a means of getting from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles in just a little more than a half-hour.

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Pacific Hyperloop touts Seattle-Portland link

An artist’s concept shows a Hyperloop pod parked at a transit station. (Hyperloop One Illustration)

A fledgling venture called Pacific Hyperloop is kicking off its effort to win support for a high-speed transit link between Seattle and Portland, using the Hyperloop system envisioned by SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk.

The plan calls for creating a network of tubes capable of zipping passengers from the Jet City to the Rose City in 15 minutes, thanks to pods that travel at the near-supersonic speed of 760 mph.

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