Hyperloop One: First 760 MPH Hyperloop Transportation System To Run This Year

Hyperloop One are busy working on the world’s first hyperloop transportation system that is due to begin running later this year and have just released new images that show the hyperloop’s test site located in Nevada. While there are other companies that are also working on a hyperloop system, Hyperloop One, an LA startup, may end up being the first to deliver this super fast and new mode of transportation.

With a hyperloop system, passengers travel in shuttle pods inside a tube and move at speeds of 760 mph. The kind of transportation that Hyperloop One is looking to create may seem very much like science fiction and remind some of the mode of transportation that was used in the film Logan’s Run, which was able to shuttle passengers between the geodesic domes in the sealed utopian city its inhabitants lived in.

Further science fiction roots for Hyperloop One’s new system can be traced back to a 1965 comic strip called Our New Age, which was created by Athelstan Spilhaus. Spilhaus had hoped to get his readers interested in science by using his comic strip as a fun method of education for budding young scientists.

In one of his comic strips, he created his own futuristic method of travel which very much resembles a hyperloop transportation system similar to the one that Hyperloop One are currently working on, as Futurism report.

“In the U.S. there are plans to have exotic wheel-less trains in tubes traveling at hundreds of miles an hour! To solve auto traffic jams, city transport may move five or six passengers like peas in a pod, supported and blown along by jets of air through tubes small enough to pass right through buildings or stop in them.”

DevLoop, Hyperloop One’s test site in Nevada, is 1,640 feet long and is massive in size, weighing over 2.2 million pounds. The hyperloop system is due to be finished in around three months, and this system will run for roughly 1.86 miles. Hyperloop One will not be using passengers for tests at its DevLoop site, but once the hyperloop system is operational, we will be able to see how well the system works.

Excited for @HyperloopOne to come to the UAE? Check out this footage of the prototype under construction in the US pic.twitter.com/YIUSAzkHC4

— The National (@TheNationalUAE) March 7, 2017

Josh Giegel, the co-founder of Hyperloop One, described how the company’s test site in Nevada was once a dry and dusty stretch of land but has now been transformed into a busy bustle of technological work.

“Our team of more than 150 engineers, technicians and fabricators have been transforming what was, just over five months ago, a barren stretch of desert, into a hive of activity and now home to the world’s first full-scale Hyperloop test site.”

The hyperloop system is the brainchild of Elon Musk, and he first suggested this transportation project in 2012. Musk’s original suggestion was to bring about a super fast mode of transport between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Science Alert report that Elon Musk open-sourced his idea, which enabled numerous companies and academic research teams to begin working on this project, with all of them in a race to see who could create the world’s first viable hyperloop system.

At this point in time with the DevLoop test site, Hyperloop One are ahead of everybody else. Rob Lloyd, the company’s CEO, explained that there hasn’t been a truly revolutionary change in transportation since the advent of the airplane, as The Telegraph report.

“While technology is revolutionizing many facets of our lives, we have not seen a radical change in transportation since the Wright brothers introduced air travel over 100 years ago.”

How do you think Hyperloop One’s hyperloop technology will be on its trial run later this year and could you see this system becoming the norm for transportation if it works?

[Featured Image by David Becker/Getty Images]