Elon Musk's Hyperloop Would Launch Pod Cars from San Francisco to LA at 700 MPH

The wait is over: Hyperloop's here. As promised, Elon Musk, everyone's favorite superhero entrepreneur, released the open source plans for what he has deemed a "fifth mode of transportation." He claimed the Hyperloop would be radically different than planes, trains, boats, and automobiles—and, famously, that it could get passengers from LA to San Francisco in half an hour. Oh, and it would cost just one tenth of California's high speed rail project.

How does it stack up, at first glance? Well, it's different, all right.

The Hyperloop is essentially a giant elevated system that hurls aerodynamic pod-like capsules through an enclosed steel tube at subsonic speeds.

Musk suggests building the system along Interstate 5, and his finalized schematics say that it could move 840 people per hour—that means 30 pods taking 30 trips per hour, one way. The system would be powered by solar arrays that line the top of the tube.

According to the plan, the passenger pods will hold 28 people each. They'll be fired off at a distance so there's always 23 miles between the last. Propulsion will be provided by linear accelerators that are placed at various points through the tube—the "rail gun" part of Musk's famous comment that the Hyperloop was part Concorde jet, part rail gun, and part air hockey table.

The passenger pods will ride on skis, and the entire system will be kept at low pressure. The pods. In an interview with Businessweek, Musk explained how this would work.

"The pods will ride on air bearings. The pod produces air, and it’s pumped out of little holes on these skis," he said. "You can move huge, heavy objects with very low friction, using air bearings. In the consumer sense, people would be familiar with air hockey tables, except in this case the air bearings are being generated by the pod itself, as opposed to the tube."

So the pods themselves are the air hockey tables. Musk elaborates:

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 this setup, the most expensive part of the system would probably be the pods themselves—Musk imagines each one costing $255,000. Of course, even at 1/10th the cost of high speed rail, it would be a monster to fund, and it's totally new territory here—the big question is if some deep-pocketed company will consider bankrolling this subsonic monster.

There's a lot to take in here—the Hyperloop document Musk released is 57 pages long—so consider this a preliminary summary. John Gardi got quite a few things right in his epic prediction published here on Motherboard.

So what does the Hyperloop's "best guesser" have to say about the plans?

"Well, that's it then! Hyperloop Revealed…and it's better than I thought!" Gardi wrote me in an email. And stay tuned for Gardi's post-game analysis; we'll see what he makes of the supremely ambitious transit plan.