Course laid in. Maximum warp. Punch It..!!

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the star-ship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before”. The great words by Captain Kirk followed by “Mr Sulu, Maximum warp, Punch it”, seems to have left a great excitement of the upcoming space travel.

After being touted as the “Space Age”, the 21st century still hasn’t seen any miraculous spacecraft for space travel. But if we take a closer look at the recent progress of a single bold man named “Elon Musk”, to revolutionize road travel feels like as if he took a page out of the science-fiction movies like Star-Trek. The thing that makes science-fiction mind boggling is the exploration of new heights in technology such as ships covering large distances in very times. “Hyperloop” has certainly made a mark on the start of the race to achieve a mode of transportation that travels the furthest and the quickest.

Hyperloop is a proposed mode of transportation for people and cargo from one place to another where a pod-like vehicle will be driven in a near vacuum tube. The Hyperloop will do insane average speeds of 600mph (~970 km/h) and a top speed up to 760mph (~1200 km/h). At this speed, travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles will be under 30 minutes. Let us compare the time taken by each transportation from Los Angeles to San Francisco (Total Distance = 360 miles):

1. Car: ~ 5 ½ - 6 hours

2. Train: 10 – 11 hours (California High speed rail)

3. Flight: ~ 1 ½ - 1 ¾ hours (Nonstop from one airport to other airport)

4. Hyperloop: ~ 30 -35 minutes

Let us take an example of a journey in India from Mumbai to Chennai (Total Distance = 830 miles):

1. Car: ~ 18 – 19 ½ hours

2. Train ~ 22 – 24 hours

3. Flight: ~ 1 ¾ hours – 2 hours

4. Hyperloop: ~ 1 hour

We can see that the Hyperloop can do the same work of transporting passengers from one place to another in 1/3 – 1/2 time as compared to the fastest available public transportation methods. With the augment of more Hyperloop tracks and automated ticketing system all around the globe, this mode of transportation will become cheaper and faster than flights. With more research and SpaceX’s Hyperloop competitions, more efficient designs and fast pods in the future will emerge to make our travels faster, quicker and smoother.

Some features of Hyperloop:

PROS:

1. No carbon dioxide emissions mean no harmful effects to the environment.

2. No worries for traffic jams

3. With the installation of solar panels on the track, it will make this mode of transportation energy efficient and a self-powering system.

With the dream and vision of Elon Musk for high speed pod travel through steel tubes amidst fluctuating price oil and clean energy crisis, we at AZLoop are striving to turn this dream into reality.