The Unbelievable Reality of the Impossible Hyperloop

By: Ryan Bradley

Narrated by: Joe Knezevich

The tube was out back, 11 feet in diameter, 60 feet long, the unfinished end spiraling into wide ribbons of steel - like a gigantic Pillsbury dough container with its seams gaping open. Behind the tube was a big blue tent known as the robot school, where autonomous welders wheel or crawl along, making the tubes airtight. The goal is to put tracks and electromagnets inside the tube and vacuum most of the air out. Ultimately, capsules are meant to scream through the center of such a tube at 700 miles per hour on a cushion of air, pulling themselves along with a fan and getting extra propulsion from the magnets - a way to get from A to B faster and more efficiently than planes or trains. At another site, in North Las Vegas, the first, partial tests of that concept, albeit on an open-air track, are already under way.

"The Unbelievable Reality of the Impossible Hyperloop" is from the July/August 2016 issue of Technology Review.

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