Engineers for decades have dreamed of transit systems that
can go faster than ordinary MagLev and approach speeds of many hundreds of
miles per hour, like Elon Musk has proposed with this forthcoming Hyperloop
proposal. So why don't we have them yet?
San Francisco to Los Angeles in half an hour. Do the math
and you're zooming along at a speed of more than 600 miles per hour. That
expedient California commute is what Tesla Motors and SpaceX chief Elon Musk is
promising with his new project Hyperloop. At the moment, Musk is keeping mum on
just about everything but the name and the boast, promising the big reveal of
what he calls a "cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey
table" on August 12.