CLOSE Competing teams will be showing off their Hyperloop prototypes in a bid to see who can build the best, most viable system. USA TODAY 
 
 Elon Musk's SpaceX was the first to propose the notion of transporting people and cargo at speeds of 700 mph, a tech dubbed hyperloop. (Photo: SpaceX) 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO – The hyperloop wars are on. 
 
 On Monday, a crowdsourced enterprise led by NASA and Boeing veterans called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced it had licensed passive magnetic levitation technology to power its prototype system, which like other hyperloop templates, promises to shuttle humans and goods in a vacuum tube system at speeds up to 750 mph. 
 
 How fast is that? Zipping from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take 30 minutes as compared to a six-hour drive or an all-day train ride. 
 
 Hyperloop Technologies, one of a number of outfits pursuing hyperloop tech, plans to show off its prototype in the desert north of Las Vegas this week. (Photo: Hyperloop Technologies) 
 
 The announcement comes just two days before rival Hyperloop Technologies Inc. plans to showcase the evolution of its technology to investors and media in the desert north of Las Vegas. On its website, Hyperloop Technologies features photos and videos showing off large tubes that would house long pods for either people or cargo. Both HTI and HTT are based in Los Angeles. 
 
 Another player in the space is skyTran, located at NASA Research Park just south of San Francisco. The company recently unveiled a technology demonstration system showcasing how its two- and four-person vehicles will work, and are aiming to build a 30-mile track in Lagos, Nigeria. skyTran has raised $30 million and is operating in partnership with NASA. 
 
 Hyperloop technology offers the possibility of moving people and things at great speeds without using fossil fuels. The pitfalls include making such transportation reliable while mitigating for potential catastrophes unfolding at around the speed of sound. 
 
 And hyperloop remains more Buck Rogers than your next shuttle to work. 
 
 The foundations of its tech are familiar: the maglev, or magnetic levitation, principle that allows a vehicle to achieve great speeds by riding on air is already at work on high-speed trains in Europe and Japan. But hyperloop would face the same infrastructure and regulatory hurdles that vex high-speed rail projects and autonomous cars. 
 
 And that's not to mention the price tag. A tube system linking L.A. and San Francisco with hyperloop pods has been estimated to cost north of $6 billion. 
 
 It's ON! We're 1 day away from some big announcements. Live-tweeting starts tomorrow @ 5PM PDT https://t.co/tASsQqwMyy#hyperloop — HyperloopTech (@HyperloopTech) May 9, 2016 
 
 In its Monday statement, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies says its design will tackle the safety concerns with a passive levitation system, which will eliminate the need for power stations along the Hyperloop track and keep construction costs low. 
 
 "From a safety aspect, the system has huge advantages, levitation occurs purely through movement, therefore if any type of power failure occurs, Hyperloop pods would continue to levitate and only after reaching minimal speeds touch the ground," said Bibop Gresta, chief operating officer of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, said. 
 
 Also in the hyperloop race is SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who first popularized the idea of shuttling people and cargo in tubes in 2013. 
 
 In January, a team from MIT won an inaugural hyperloop competition sponsored by SpaceX. Similar to HTT's approach, the MIT team proposed placing magnets on the pods that react to passive coils in the tubes, thereby generating lift or levitation. 
 
 Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has announced that is licensing tech that would allow high-speed transportation at lower than anticipated costs when compared to existing magnetic transportation tech. (Photo: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies) 
 
 “The beauty of the system we designed is that it’s completely passive, an elegant property that will make our pod very scalable," team captain Philippe Kirschen, a master’s student in aeronautics and astronautics, told MIT News when the team won. 
 
 Musk has tweeted that SpaceX may build a test track for its emerging hyperloop tech, "most likely in Texas." 
 
 While SpaceX is backed by Musk's drive and billions and skyTran has government support, the other two entrants in the hyperloop sweepstakes —HTT and HTI — have taken radically different approaches to financing their efforts. 
 
 Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) is powered by financial donations and the know-how of space tech veterans donating their time to the project. In contrast, Hyperloop Technologies Inc. (HTI) has raised $37 million to date, and is co-founded by early Uber investor Shervin Pishevar and former SpaceX engineer Brogan BamBrogan. 
 
 HTT's passive magnetic levitation approach is based on science developed by the late physicist Richard Post of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, east of San Francisco. 
 
 By placing magnets on the hyperloop transportation pods and having them react - and cause lift - with coils in the transportation pods, one can avoid the costly approach currently used by maglev trains, which require pricey tracks laced with copper coils. 
 
 In 2015, HTT said it would be installing its hyperloop tech in a proposed 75,000-resident solar-powered city in Quay Valley, Calif., halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. In February, HTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn announced that it was in talks with the Slovakian government about possibly building a hyperloop route in the former Eastern Bloc nation. 
 
 Follow USA TODAY tech reporter Marco della Cava on Twitter: @marcodellacava 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1T7rZcp ||||| Elon Musk's Hyperloop Dream Has Its 1st Public Demo 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Hyperloop One Hyperloop One 
 
 Updated at 3 p.m. ET. 
 
 Out in the Nevada desert today, the world got a good look at the first public test of the Hyperloop — a concept that could someday become a new mode of transportation. 
 
 Don't call it a Wright Brothers' "Kitty Hawk" moment just yet, though. The demo focused on only one piece of a very complicated system. 
 
 The Hyperloop, envisioned by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, would move passenger-filled pods through special tubes at incredibly high speeds — as in possibly crossing the 400 miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles in a mere 30 minutes. Musk offered up his ideas in 2013, and others got to work trying to build it. 
 
 One of the startups that jumped at the challenge is Hyperloop One, formerly Hyperloop Technologies, tested its propulsion mechanism today. Take a look, via CNBC: 
 
 The Wall Street Journal wrote earlier in the day: 
 
 "The focus of the test will be more on the propulsion technology — whether it can actually move the sled — than the speed. The track is shorter and there will be air resistance, two slowing factors which will be eliminated in future tests." 
 
 On Tuesday, Hyperloop One announced new funding and new partners in transportation and engineering. One of those partners is Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Gizmodo says that Ingels, known for big public infrastructure projects, "will give some much-needed design direction for how Hyperloop One's projects might start to integrate with the cities they're meant to serve." Gizmodo also has this statement from the architect: 
 
 "With hyperloop we are not only designing a futuristic station or a very fast train, we are dealing with an entirely novel technology with the potential to completely transform how our existing cities will grow and evolve, and how new cities will be conceived and constructed." 
 
 Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd said in a statement that the company would work with these new partners "to redefine the future of transportation, providing a more immediate, safe, efficient and sustainable high-speed backbone for the movement of people and things." 
 
 toggle caption Joshua Caldwell of Cryptic Butterfly Photography/Hyperloop One 
 
 So will any of this actually work? NPR's Elise Hu asked the question when Musk announced his idea almost three years ago. Electrical engineer Marc Thompson told her it seemed that it would. But that's not the end of the story, said the Worcester Polytechnic professor: "The devil's in the details in terms of testing, safety, passenger safety, egress, vibration, all that engineering stuff." 
 
 Former U.S. Department of Transportation Assistant Secretary Emil Frankel also had reservations, which he shared with Elise at the time. 
 
 "To talk about these kinds of leapfrogging technology in a context when we can't really adequately maintain our existing infrastructure is really not terribly realistic. At least not in terms of the public policy debate," Frankel said. 
 
 Hyperloop One and competitor Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, or HTT, don't seem deterred. HTT is making progress, too, Wired notes: 
 
 "We think we will be able to demonstrate full Kitty Hawk capabilities by the end of this year." ||||| One small push for Hyperloop, one giant thrust for the future of transportation. 
 
 In the arid northern deserts of Nevada, far from the bright lights and towering edifices of Las Vegas, the Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One took a gamble and won, successfully testing its linear induction propulsion system. 
 
 A grandstand full of journalists and Hyperloop One supporters watched as a series of stators (basically electromagnetic blades) quickly powered up under the sled, which then flew by at about the speed of a fast car (115 mph or so). 
 
 Image: Hyperloop One/Mashable 
 
 The test, while fast, was, to be honest, somewhat underwhelming. After the initial countdown, the sled took off from the start position and whizzed by on a track at a measured 2.4 Gs of acceleration. Special grabbers underneath the sled then slammed into a sandpit, which effectively slowed the sled down to zero and ended the test. 
 
 Future tests on this track at the 39.9 acre facility will go much, much faster. 
 
 The Hyperloop One speed-by. Image: Hyperloop One 
 
 While the final Hyperloop One system will use permanent magnets to levitate the pods off the track, this sled actually sat on the metal rails, which probably future slowed it down. 
 
 The beginning 
 
 Image: Hyperloop One 
 
 "This is the first step in a long journey," said Hyperloop One co-founder and CTO Brogan BamBrogan 
 
 He's right. The electromagnet-based propulsion system is just one small part of the full transportation system that Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies) hopes to launch in the not-too-distant future. 
 
 Hyperloop One Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Shervin Pishevar makes a statement moments before the big test. Image: Lance Ulanoff/Mashable 
 
 Originally the brainchild of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, Hyperloop transportation consists of sealed pods traveling at subsonic speeds in a low-pressure tube that's elevated above the ground on pylons. It's intended to be a low-energy (solar) and low-emission system. It could also be a viable mass transportation alternative for traffic-snarled corridors like those between New York and Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles and San Francisco, completing the latter trip in as little as 35 minutes. 
 
 Musk produced a lengthy Hyperloop white paper and then open-sourced the concept in 2014. As a result, the Hyperloop race is on, and, with Wednesday's test, Hyperloop One may have just inched ahead of rival HTT. 
 
 The Hyperloop One propulsion system test sled. Image: lance ulanoff/mashable 
 
 Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd seemed elated by the short test's results and predicts that, with enough cooperation from local and state government bodies (the kind they've found in Nevada and Las Vegas), Hyperloop One will be moving cargo by 2019 and people as early as 2021. 
 
 As for what Hyperloop One has in store for the short-term, BamBrogan said, "a lot more of this testing." 
 
 Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. ||||| Transportation 
 
 Almost a year after Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors (TSLA) and SpaceX, first floated the idea of a superfast mode of transportation, he has finally revealed the details: a solar-powered, city-to-city elevated transit system that could take passengers and cars from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. In typical Musk fashion, the Hyperloop, as he calls it, immediately poses a challenge to the status quo—in this case, California’s $70 billion high-speed train that has been knocked by Musk and others as too expensive, too slow, and too impractical. 
 
 In Musk’s vision, the Hyperloop would transport people via aluminum pods enclosed inside of steel tubes. He describes the design as looking like a shotgun with the tubes running side by side for most of the journey and closing the loop at either end. These tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, and the pods inside would travel up to 800 miles per hour. Some of this Musk has hinted at before; he now adds that pods could ferry cars as well as people. “You just drive on, and the pod departs,” Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek in his first interview about the Hyperloop. 
 
 Courtesy Elon MuskAn artist's impression of the Hyperloop pod 
 
 Musk published a blog post detailing the Hyperloop on Monday. He also held a press call to go over the details. 
 
 Musk has built his entrepreneurial career attacking businesses he deems inefficient or uninspiring. He co-founded PayPal in a bid to shake up the banking industry, then used the fortune he made selling the startup to eBay (EBAY) to fund equally ambitious efforts in transportation. Tesla Motors, for example, has created the highest-performing, highest-rated all-electric car and a complementary network of charging stations scattered around North America. Meanwhile, SpaceX competes against entire nations in the market to send up satellites and resupply the International Space Station. 
 
 In the case of the Hyperloop, Musk started focusing on public transportation after he grew disenchanted with the plans for California’s high-speed rail system. Construction on the highly political, $70 billion project is meant to begin in earnest this year, with plans to link cities from San Diego to Sacramento by 2029. “You have to look at what they say it will cost vs. the actual final costs, and I think it’s safe to say you’re talking about a $100 billion-plus train,” Musk says, adding that the train is too slow and a horrendous land rights mess. 
 
 Musk thinks the Hyperloop would avoid many of the land issues because it’s elevated. The tubes would, for the most part, follow I-5, the dreary but direct freeway between L.A. and San Francisco. Farmers would not have swaths of their land blocked by train tracks but could instead access their land between the columns. Musk figures the Hyperloop could be built for $6 billion with people-only pods, or $10 billion for the larger pods capable of holding people and cars. All together, his alternative would be four times as fast as California’s proposed train, at one-10th the cost. Tickets, Musk says, would be “much cheaper” than a plane ride. 
 
 As for safety? Musk has heard of it. “There’s an emergency brake,” he says. “Generally, though, the safe distance between the pods would be about 5 miles, so you could have about 70 pods between Los Angeles and San Francisco that leave every 30 seconds. It’s like getting a ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland.” Musk imagines that riding on the Hyperloop would be quite pleasant. “It would have less lateral acceleration—which is what tends to make people feel motion sick—than a subway ride, as the pod banks against the tube like an airplane,” he says. “Unlike an airplane, it is not subject to turbulence, so there are no sudden movements. It would feel supersmooth.” 
 
 The Hyperloop was designed to link cities less than 1,000 miles apart that have high amounts of traffic between them, Musk says. Under 1,000 miles, the Hyperloop could have a nice edge over planes, which need a lot of time to take off and land. “It makes sense for things like L.A. to San Francisco, New York to D.C., New York to Boston,” Musk says. “Over 1,000 miles, the tube cost starts to become prohibitive, and you don’t want tubes every which way. You don’t want to live in Tube Land.” Right? 
 
 In the months since Musk first mentioned the Hyperloop, there has been plenty of speculation. Critics, dealing with limited information, have contended that the specifications laid out by Musk would be nearly impossible to achieve. Such a long, pressurized tube would require an immense amount of energy while also producing tons of air friction and heat. 
 
 Now Musk argues that the Hyperloop represents a type of middle ground that other people have yet to consider. Instead of being a complete vacuum or running at normal conditions, the Hyperloop tubes would be under low pressure. “I think a lot of people tended to gravitate to one idea or the other as opposed to thinking about lower pressure,” Musk says. “I have never seen that idea anywhere.” 
 
 Inside the tubes, the pods would be mounted on thin skis made out of inconel, a trusted alloy of SpaceX that can withstand high pressure and heat. Air gets pumped through little holes in the skis to make an air cushion, Musk says. The front of the pod would have a pair of air jet inlets—sort of like the Concorde. An electric turbo compressor would compress the air from the nose and route it to the skis and to the cabin. Magnets on the skis, plus an electromagnetic pulse, would give the pod its initial thrust; reboosting motors along the route would keep the pod moving. And: no sonic boom. With warm air inside the tubes and high tailwinds, the pods could travel at high speeds without crossing the sound barrier. “The pod can go just below the speed of sound relative to the air,” Musk says. 
 
 So, science, or science fiction? About a dozen people at Tesla and SpaceX have helped Musk with the design and checked the physics behind the Hyperloop. I briefed Martin Simon, a professor of physics at UCLA, on some of the Hyperloop details, and he declared it feasible from a technological standpoint: “It does sound like it’s all done with known technology. It’s not like he’s counting on something brand new to be invented.” 
 
 Simon points out that the acceleration methods proposed by Musk are used at amusement parks to get a roller coaster going. Other companies have looked at these techniques for passenger and freight vehicles. What sets the Hyperloop apart, though, is the use of the air cushion to levitate the pods. “He has separated the air cushion and the linear induction drive, and that seems new,” Simon says, adding, “It would be cool if they had transparent tubes.” 
 
 The critics of California’s high-speed rail may be dismayed to learn that Musk does not plan to commercialize the Hyperloop technology for the time being. He’s posting the plans and asking for feedback and contemplating building a prototype. “I’m just putting this out there as an open source design,” he says. “There are sure to be suggestions out there for making this better, correcting any mistakes, and refining the design.” Musk maintains that he has too much on his plate to deal with bringing the Hyperloop to fruition. “I wish I had not mentioned it,” he says. “I still have to run SpaceX and Tesla, and it’s fucking hard.” 
 
 Musk says he would support another person or organization that wanted to make the Hyperloop a reality. 
 
 “It is a question of finding the right person and team to get behind it,” Musk says. “Creating a prototype is not that expensive.” But if no one advances or acts on Musk’s ideas, he may come back to the Hyperloop in a few years’ time and pursue it as part of Tesla. “Down the road, I might fund or advise on a Hyperloop project, but right now I can’t take my eye off the ball at either SpaceX or Tesla.” ||||| First honed as a concept by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk in 2012, hyperloop is touted as the future of passenger transport. 
 
 For the uninitiated, hyperloop is a high-speed passenger transport system that involves a sealed tube through which high-speed pods move, slashing travel times. For example, the journey from London to Edinburgh - which takes more than four hours on a train - would theoretically take just 30 minutes. 
 
 Musk has since encouraged startup firms and student-led projects to create their own versions of hyperloop. The high-speed system uses a version of magnetic levitation, but what is it and how does it work? 
 
 What is magnetic levitation? 
 
 Magnetic levitation, or maglev, is when an object is suspended in the air using only magnetic fields and no other support. 
 
 Along with super-fast maglev trains, magnetic levitation has various engineering uses including magnetic bearings. It can also be used for display and novelty purposes, such as floating speakers. 
 
 How does magnetic levitation work? 
 
 Magnetic levitation’s best-known use is in maglev trains. Currently only in operation in a handful of countries, including China and Japan, Maglev trains are the fastest in the world, with a record speed of 375 mph (603 km/h). However, the train systems are incredibly expensive to construct and often end up languishing as little-used vanity projects. 
 
 There are two main types of maglev train technology - electromagnetic suspension (EMS) and electrodynamic suspension (EDS). 
 
 EMS uses electronically controlled electromagnets in the train to attract it to a magnetic steel track, while EDS uses superconducting electromagnets on both the train and the rail to produce a mutually repellent force that makes the carriages levitate. 
 
 A variant of EDS technology - as used in the Inductrack system - uses an array of permanent magnets on the underside of the train, instead of powered electromagnets or cooled superconducting magnets. This is also known as passive magnetic levitation technology. 
 
 How does Hyperloop use magnetic levitation? 
 
 In Musk’s original concept, the pods floated on a layer of pressurised air, in a similar way to pucks floating on an air hockey table. However, a more recent version of the technology from Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) - one of two companies leading the hyperloop race - uses passive magnetic levitation to achieve the same effect. 
 
 The technology has been licensed to HTT from Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL), which developed it as part of the Inductrack system. This method is thought to be cheaper and safer than traditional maglev systems. 
 
 With this method, magnets are placed on the underside of the capsules in a Halbach array. This focuses the magnetic force of the magnets on one side of the array while almost entirely cancelling out the field on the other side. These magnetic fields cause the pods to float as they pass over electromagnetic coils embedded in the track. Thrust from linear motors propels the pods forward. 
 
 HTT’s main rival, Hyperloop One is also using a passive magnetic levitation system where pod-side permanent magnets repel a passive track, with the only input energy coming from the speed of the pod. 
 
 For both systems, air pressure in the tunnels is lowered using air pumps in order to aid the pods’ movement. The low air pressure dramatically reduces drag so that only a relatively small amount of electricity is needed to achieve top speeds. 
 
 When will hyperloop launch? 
 
 The hyperloop system does appear to be progressing with Hyperloop One recently managing to shoot a passenger pod through a test tube at 192mph (309km/h). But while impressive, it still falls well short of its 250mph (402km/h) goal. 
 
 A student team from the Technical University of Munich recently managed to reach an impressive top speed of 201mph (324km/h) on SpaceX’s custom-built 1.5km test track in Hawthorne, California. The extraordinary achievement was part of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Pod Competition. 
 
 The first commercial hyperloop track could be built by Hyperloop One in the UAE, after the company agreed a feasibility study with the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA). The proposed system would connect Dubai and Abu Dhabi with a mere 12-minute journey. However, despite various proposed projects around the globe, critics claim that hyperloop infrastructure is far too costly to ever develop into a comprehensive transport system. ||||| Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF 
 
 In 2015, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies filed a permit to build a 5-mile prototype in Quay Valley — a utopian, eco-friendly community planned for Central California. And while we’re rooting for them to succeed with their test track, it still doesn’t change the Hyperloop’s largest challenges. Because the biggest hurdle isn’t the tech behind Hyperloop, it’s the land rights and every other bureaucratic obstacle that goes along with building enormous infrastructure projects. 
 
 Back in the summer of 2013, Elon Musk announced to the world that he had a revolutionary idea about the future of transportation. He called his concept the Hyperloop, and everyone was excited that they’d soon zip between distant major cities at 600 miles per hour. The tech press quickly picked apart the technical minutia of such a proposal, debating whether Musk’s idea was technologically possible. What so many reporters then and since have continued to ignore is that you can’t build a mode of transportation between cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles without rights to the land in between them. Not to mention the other challenges things like environmental impact reports or liability considerations. 
 
 “After over two and a half years of research and development our team has reached another important milestone. This will be the world’s first passenger-ready Hyperloop system,” Dirk Ahlborn, the CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, said in a statement released to The Verge about the plans for Quay Valley. “Everyone traveling on California’s I-5 in 2016 will be able to see our activities from the freeway.” 
 
 With every puff piece that’s published about companies like Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (not to be confused with competing company Hyperloop Technologies), everyone seems focused on the tech, rather than the real challenge: Land rights and bureaucracy. Assuming their permit is approved for Quay Valley, the idea of building a Hyperloop track between two distant cities remains a techno-utopian fantasy arguably as misguided as Quay Valley itself. 
 
 Josh Stephens makes this same point in a recent blog post: 
 
 And yet, this combination of enthusiasm and magnetism doesn’t buy farmland. It doesn’t ease eminent domain takings. It doesn’t blast through bedrock or relocate utilities. It doesn’t design station area plans. It doesn’t write [Environmental Impact Reports] or dismiss [California Environmental Quality Act] suits. Trains, whether propelled by steam, diesel, or a frictionless tube, are still terrestrial things. And what terra we have in California. The very same mountains, cities, canals, farmers, and habitats that complicate [High Speed Rail] also complicate Hyperloop. The more the Hyperloop people drop hints and make innuendos about zipping this way and that without addressing the monumental public policy challenges that they’re going to face, governmental cooperation they’re going to need, and money that it’s going to cost, the less it’s going to sound like Tesla for the masses and the more it’s going to sound like a lost chapter of “Atlas Shrugged.” 
 
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 None of this is new. Even before the official announcement back in August of 2013, I wrote a post raising skepticism that you’d be able to build a Hyperloop between San Francisco and Los Angeles without putting it underground or out in the ocean. And even then, you’d still have to get land rights and work with the government in myriad ways. 
 
 
 
 So we’ll wait with earnest optimism as Hyperloop Transportation Technologies to build a working Hyperloop prototype in Quay Valley, a planned community on virgin soil by sometime this year. But until we hear that any Hyperloop company has a legal and lobbying team as big as its tech team, we’re going to remain pretty damn skeptical that this will happen within our lifetime. 
 
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 This post was originally published on January 20, 2016. ||||| The company developing Elon Musk's 700mph maglev train has announced new details about the levitation system it plans to use. 
 
 Hyperloop Transportation Technologies said on Monday that it will use a passive magnetic levitation system developed by Lawrence Livermore National Labs in the US. 
 
 The Los Angeles-headquartered transportation company wants to build a system that involves firing a pod full of people through a low-pressure tube at speeds of up to 760 mph. It has been described by inventor Musk as a mix between Concorde, a rail gun, and an air hockey table that could take you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under 30 minutes. 
 
 Hyperloop Technologies said that magnetic fields in the tunnel will lift the pod before a "thrust force" is applied, accelerating the pod to speeds just shy of the speed of sound (767 mph). 
 
 The same thrust force is simply reversed to decelerate the pod. As the pod slows down, the system's battery is recharged through what Hyperloop describes as regenerative breaking. 
 
 "Utilising a passive levitation system will eliminate the need for power stations along the Hyperloop track, which makes this system the most suitable for the application and will keep construction costs low," said Bibop Gresta, COO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, in a statement. "From a safety aspect, the system has huge advantages, levitation occurs purely through movement, therefore if any type of power failure occurs, Hyperloop pods would continue to levitate and only after reaching minimal speeds touch the ground." 
 
 Critics have questioned whether Hyperloop will ever come to fruition, targeting cost and safety as potential major setbacks. ||||| The future sounds a bit like a witch crying over a dead cat. That spooky wail is the sound hyperloop makes—at least, the version of the high-speed transportation system designed by Hyperloop One, which just took a big stride toward the day it flings you between cities in near-vacuum tubes. 
 
 The Los Angeles company leading the race to fulfill Elon Musk’s dream of tubular transit tested its pod for the first time last weekend. That pod is 28 feet long and made of aluminum and carbon fiber. It looks a bit like a bus with a beak. 
 
 A fast bus with a beak. Once loaded into a 1,600-foot-long concrete tube in the Nevada desert, the pod hit 192 mph in about 5 seconds, using an electric propulsion system producing more than 3,000 horsepower. As the pod accelerated through the tube 11 feet in diameter, the 16 wheels retracted as magnetic levitation took over. Mag-lev—used by high-speed trains in Japan and elsewhere—reduces drag and the energy required to achieve near-supersonic speeds. It helps, too, that Hyperloop One’s engineers also pumped nearly all the air out of the tube, reducing air pressure to what you'd experience at an altitude of 200,000 feet. 
 
 "This is the dawn of the age of commercialization for the hyperloop,” says Shervin Pishevar, Hyperloop One's executive chairman and cofounder. 
 
 It's a big step, to be sure, but just one of many in the long journey ahead. The weekend test provided a nice proof of concept, but the challenge is not in making hyperloop work but in making it practical. For hyperloop to truly take off, it must operate cheaply enough to lure customers away from air travel or high-speed rail. And then there's the problem of loading people or, more likely, cargo without ruining that near-vacuum state, designing and building stations, getting an endless list of public agencies and players to agree to build the thing, and so on. 
 
 All that comes later, and chief engineer Josh Geigel says Hyperloop One is indeed working on cracking those myriad challenges. No one knows just how hyperloop will pan out, but at least we know what it sounds like. Creepy.
– The age of uber-quick "hyperloop" transportation had a milestone Wednesday: One of the companies hoping to turn the idea into reality successfully tested its propulsion system in the desert near Las Vegas, Mashable reports. So what's a hyperloop? It's the brainchild of Tesla's Elon Musk, and the general idea is to move people in above-ground tubes traveling about 750mph. A six-hour drive from LA to San Francisco would be cut to 30 minutes, though we're still at least a few years away from reality. Some essentials: Hold the champagne: NPR explains that Wednesday's demo by Hyperloop One focused "on only one piece of a very complicated system." Forget the technology—the real problem would be passengers' vomit, explains a post at Inverse. The Verge has an "everything you need to know" audio explainer here. "The lack of air resistance and friction of traditional transportation are what would allow it to achieve such high speeds." The Wall Street Journal has some more basics on the science. USA Today looks at two other startups in the "hyperloop wars." One of those companies, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, plans a "magnetic levitation system," and Business Insider has the nitty gritty on how it would work. One huge hurdle: Obtaining land rights for such a system. Gizmodo digs in. A new video game is based on the concept, notes SlashGear.