Musk’s Hyperloop near-supersonic rail to hit milestone

PanARMENIAN.Net - Elon Musk's vision of a Hyperloop transport system that carries passengers in pressurized tubes at near-supersonic speeds is on track to hit a milestone on Tuesday, May 10, AFP reports.

Musk outlined his futuristic idea in a paper released in 2013, challenging innovators to bring the dream to life.

Hyperloop Technologies, one of the startups that picked up the gauntlet thrown by Musk, is hosting a "sneak preview of the future of transportation technology" during a two-day event billed as involving a demonstration at a test site outside Las Vegas.

A series of tweets fired from the Twitter account @HyperloopTech teased "big announcements you don't want to miss" and included a video snippet of construction in the desert.

A caption in the video clip heralded a "milestone event"that would be live-tweeted from Las Vegas beginning Tuesday evening there.

Late last year, Hyperloop chief executive Rob Lloyd said in an online post that the team was working toward a "Kitty Hawk" moment in 2016, AFP says.

The post came with word of an agreement to use an industrial park in the city of North Las Vegas to conduct a Propulsion Open Air Test of the blazingly-fast rail system.

Lloyd described it at the time as a very important step on the way to realizing the full potential of Hyperloop Tech.

"Our 'Kitty Hawk' moment refers to our first full system, full scale, full speed test," Lloyd said.

"This will be over two miles of tube with a controlled environment and inside that tube we will levitate a pod and accelerate it to over 700 miles (1,125 kilometers) per hour."

He indicated in the post that a full-scale test might not take place until late this year, AFP says.

Hyperloop did not reveal what components of the system would be shown in a demonstration slated to take place Wednesday at the test site.

The Hyperloop project went live in 2013 on crowdfunding platform JumpStart Fund, which marries crowdsourcing expertise with crowdfunding.

That year, Musk unveiled a design for a super-fast transport system dubbed "Hyperloop" that could carry passengers in low-pressure tubes at near-supersonic speeds.