Inventor and “god emperor” of the nerds Elon Musk is attempting, with his HyperLoop project, to do for mass transit what he’s already done for cars, spaceships, and hair. Musk recently unveiled a video of a Hyperloop test pod achieving speeds of 201 MPH inside a near-vacuum tube, a good omen for a larger version of the vehicle that will eventually carry passengers. But, as always, people had questions.
https://twitter.com/ItchGrid/status/902088390404972544
How could Elon Musk, mighty brain-genius and human Big Bang Theory, possibly explain, in the space of a single 140-character tweet, the ingenious technical details of his next-generation transport system’s complex, proprietary stopping mechanism? This seems like a big, unreasonable, completely impossible ask for America’s foremost—
Brakes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 28, 2017
Oh. Well, sure. When you put that way.
Despite Musk’s hilarious, nonchalant response to the skeptics, there are still those who criticize the Hyperloop for being, essentially, a worse version of an idea that has existed in Japan and Europe for decades.
https://twitter.com/jakebackpack/status/902248716408688642
Musk believes the Hyperloop could reach speeds of 800 MPH, given a longer tunnel. The one used in this week’s test was less than a mile. We’ll see how his claims bear out in the next year or so, starting with a test of SpaceX’s pusher sled inside the tube. Don’t forget the brakes!
Will run the SpaceX pusher sled later this week and see what it can do
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 28, 2017