UK Edition
London to Manchester in 18 minutes - Meet the Brits behind Elon Musk's Hyperloop
London to Edinburgh in half an hour. Manchester to London in 18 minutes. London to Stoke in 14 minutes. This is the promise of the Hyperloop, a futuristic mode of transport that was first conceived by billionaire Elon Musk.
As the story goes, Musk was late for a speaking appearance back in 2012 when the idea for a “fifth mode of transport” struck him. A year later, he published a 57-page plan outlining a transport system made up of levitating pods that can travel at speeds of up to 700mph in a vacuum.
Rather than setting up his own company and funding the moon shot idea, Musk proposed a competition and called for entrants to start working on the project. The move was out of character for Musk, whose other radical ideas have led him to found SpaceX and Tesla but he relinquished the germ of an idea to a host of academic and private researchers.
The competition has spawned thousands of start-ups and research groups around the world. From the Silicon Valley venture-backed Hyperloop One, which has raised $160m to date, to the internet group rLoop, engineers who met on Reddit and have developed a prototype with $100,000 and a subscription to the messaging service Slack.
About 60 organisations have been invited to test their prototypes on the SpaceX test track, and the UK has two competitors in the race to create a working prototype.
Manchester-based Ilyas Vali was one of the founding members of rLoop, which Musk has invited to demonstrate on the SpaceX test track this weekend. The University of Edinburgh has backed a student team called HypEd, which is taking part in a second round competition on Sunday following the rLoop demonstration.
Vali’s interest in the Hyperloop began in 2013 when he read the white paper on a train from Manchester to London. It was 2013 and he made the two and a half hour journey twice a week as part of his role as director of energy firm Touch Solar.
“The idea for a fast train was awesome but the completion time for the HS2 route I wanted to take was 2035 and the journey time would have been cut by only about 40 minutes,” says Vali. “I read Elon Musk’s white paper and thought ‘If you’re going to spend billions of pounds and years creating a faster and potentially cheaper transport service, you may as well use new technology’.”
After struggling to form a UK-based team, Vali became one of the founding members of rLoop, a group of engineers, designers and technology experts from 59 countries who have developed their prototype over Slack. The community has attracted hundreds of people since it was founded in 2015 out of a Reddit thread about Musk’s proposal.
“As we gained traction more people heard about rLoop and wanted to join,” says Vali. “Today we are a global organisation from 59 countries with more than 2,000 engineers.”
The members work on the project as volunteers in their spare time. In addition to his full-time job at Sustainable Equity, the 37-year-old Vali spends up to 60 hours a week on rLoop.
“It’s a full-time job,” he says. But he doesn’t mind. “It’s like Elon Musk: he separated from his wife because he was just working too many hours, which is fine.”
rLoop has raised about $100,000 through its sponsors and a crowdfunding campaign, which has been put towards building its prototype. Its prototype pod is the first to levitate outside of the SpaceX tube in a standing position.
Vali says rLoop has formed a partnership with a leading UK manufacturer to develop a Hyperloop tube.
“We are hoping to build a test track in the UK to demonstrate the prototype and also to lead future research and development from here,” he says.
The University of Edinburgh’s HypEd team is also hoping the UK can play a big role in the development of the Hyperloop. Adam Anyszewski was just 19 when Musk published his proposal. But the engineering student, now 23, claims he and his father had talked about the concept a decade before. “At the age of 10 or 12 my father and I talked about super-fast travel in tubes,” says Anyszewski.
When Musk called for competition entries in 2015, Anyszewski, who is from a small village in central Poland, was in his second year of an electrical and mechanical engineering degree at Edinburgh. He joined a team of seven students and started HypEd.
With Anyszewski as president, HypEd swiftly became a 60-person team of design and engineering students from Edinburgh College of Arts and the university. About 25 work on HypEd full-time.
Like Vali, Anyszewski works on the project alongside his studies, often spending a minimum of 20 hours a week and sometimes up to 60 hours on it. “It’s busy as hell,” he says. “My girlfriend loves me but she hates the project.”
The University of Edinburgh has funnelled £30,000 into HypEd, matched by a further £30,000 from other supporters. HypEd is hoping to double this investment next year as it develops its prototype.
“Our pod starts on tiny wheels and then it takes off. As long as it’s moving the levitation system will never fail. In case of a power cut or some failure it will carry on gliding,” says Anyszewski. “We have magnets that are literally capable of crushing skulls.”
The scaled-down prototype is designed to reach speeds of up to 360kmph, but Anyszewski isn’t planning to hit that this weekend.
“If we get it to autonomously start, levitate and brake safely with grace and dignity, without crashing or exploding, I think I might cry,” he says.
Earlier this month, Musk said he had government approval to build a tube network between Washington DC and New York for a Hyperloop that will travel at 600mph.
Reclaiming Musk’s stake in the venture, his tunnelling firm, the Boring Company, then committed to building a tunnel between the two US cities. It was last week given approval for a test tunnel 44ft under Los Angeles.
It is still not clear if it is the future of transport. But the organisations competing for Musk’s approval are dedicated to making it work.
Hyperloop teams are notoriously competitive. But Vali and Anyszewski agree on two things: the end goal and how to respond to sceptics.
Neither is that concerned by the idea that the Hyperloop will never materialise, and both say they are working on it out of passion rather than for money. And they both have the same response to doubters.
“Imagine we’re having a conversation 100 years ago and me saying ‘we’re trying to develop something that will fly like a bird and go over oceans in hours instead of months’,” says Vali. “You would have been baffled.”