Billionaire visionary Elon Musk is known for taking on big, complicated projects. Space travel, solar energy, building fully electric cars, etc.
But when it comes to the Hyperloop, well, Musk said that is one of the easier projects he’s come up with.
“I know there are various companies that are trying to create the Hyperloop and honestly I think it is a lot easier than people think. Blueprints are always kind of complicated and yes there is math, but it’s really not that hard,” Musk said in a CNN Money interview published Thursday.
The Hyperloop is Musk’s vision of a transportation system that can travel at nearly sonic speeds in a vacuum tube. While Musk himself is not pursuing the Hyperloop in any commercial capacity, his company SpaceX is hosting a Hyperloop Pod competition next year to find the best design for a passenger capsule for the proposed system.
“It’s like a tube with an air hockey table, it’s just a low pressure tube, with a pod in it that runs on air bearings, on air skis. With an air compressor on the front that is taking the high pressure air built on the nose and pumping it through the air skis. It’s really, I swear it’s not that hard,” Musk said.
Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla Motors, proposed the Hyperloop concept in 2013 as a means of travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco. But Musk said during the interview that he actually has a better idea for travel over 500 miles.
“The most important thing I think needs to happen is the transition of transportation to electric. The ideal, long distance, transportation mechanism is a supersonic vertical landing supersonic electric jet. And then there’s the special case of cities which have a lot of travel between them, below about 500 miles distance, where I think the Hyperloop would be useful,” Musk said.
“It is a special case solution because once the distances get long, then the amount of time that it takes an aircraft to ascend and land, which is most of what it does in a 500 mile trip that percentage declines and then it is better to just use aircraft.”
Watch the full interview below.
