TRANSPORTATION
Virgin Hyperloop One, which recently received a $50 million investment, anticipates developing an operational system by 2021. Photo: Virgin Hyperloop One
While hyperloop holds worlds of promise, a dearth of dollars is expected to delay deployment. By Richard Massey Tube tests
Los Angeles-based Arrivo; and Musk’s own The Boring Company. So for now, it’s all about research and development, trial and error, and perhaps the biggest long-term piece of all — public awareness, and broad-ranging acceptance of, hyperloop as a viable form of transporta- tion. With the horizon filled with such promise, it should come as no sur- prise that Hyperloop One, founded in 2014, doesn’t have a problem recruiting some of the finest minds in the world.
It’s hard to imagine a world in which air travel has been all but re- placed, or to envision a Houston-Dallas super city of 18 million, or that someone could leave Edinburgh at 3 p.m. and be in London within an hour for tea. But in a pod magnetically levitating above a track and electrically propelled through a low-pressure tube at around 670 mph that just might be the far future of transportation for passengers and freight. Hyperloop, the dazzling mashup of existing technologies introduced to the world in 2013 by SpaceX and Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, is gain- ing global momentum through a leading developer of the system, Los Angeles-based Virgin Hyperloop One, also known as Hyperloop One. Its hopes bolstered by a recent record-braking test run at 240 mph, and rejuvenated by a $50 million cash infusion and the naming of invest- ment mogul Sir Richard Branson as chairman, Hyperloop One looks to have operational systems by 2021. But even as the company’s battalion of engineers works to turn today’s vision into tomorrow’s reality, a traditional obstacle, one seemingly as old as civilization itself, stands front and center — funding, or lack thereof. Even Hyperloop One concedes that the technology will out- pace the dollars. But that has stopped neither them nor their competi- tors, Los Angeles-based Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc.;
Look no further than Anita Sengupta, who joined the company last year. A Ph.D. in aerospace engineering, Sengupta spent 16 years at NASA, where, among other things, she led the Mars Curiosity Rover Supersonic Parachute Decelerator. A NASA astronaut finalist candi- date last year, Sengupta said her move to Hyperloop was made for a simple reason: “I was looking for a new challenge.” As the senior vice president of systems engineering, her role is to co- ordinate and understand the interface among the various elements of hyperloop — the system’s pod, vacuum tube, civil infrastructure, and regulatory compliance. Referring to the fact that hyperloop touches so many different areas — cities, governments, mega-regions, science, engineering — and that it has the potential to change the world, Sengputa said that hyperloop is an exciting challenge in that it is “far more complicated” than sending spacecraft to Mars.
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csengineermag.com
april 2018
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