Today, in the sunburnt desert north of Las Vegas, a tech firm conducted a demo of a cutting-edge propulsion system. The firm is among a handful of companies and universities vying to build the first hyperloop.
Hyperloop is a futuristic transportation system that resembles a supersized version of a pneumatic tube at the drive-through window of a bank. Here’s how it would work. People hop into a pod, which would travel up to 760 miles per hour inside a tube. That’s a whisker shy of breaking the sound barrier.
This afternoon, a 10-foot-long sled zipped from zero to 60 miles per hour in one second. No tube for now, but the company says that a 200-foot-long one is getting assembled for a full-scale test later this year. Hyperloop One, founded by early Uber investor Shervin Pishevar and former SpaceX engineer Brogan BamBrogan, has raised $100 million to connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas with a hyperloop system by 2018.
That’s a lot of cheddar, but it raises a basic question: Is hyperloop safe?
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