SpaceX’s second Hyperloop Pod Competition ended last weekend and WARR team won with a top speed of 201 mph (324 km/h) achieved in 0.8 mile in SpaceX’s 1-mile long near vacuum tube.
Now Elon Musk shows what a machine built by Tesla and SpaceX can do in the same hyperloop.
They built what they call a “pod pusher” in order to give a boost to the pods that need it, like those with a passive maglev system.
Now they wanted to see what it can do on its own.
Musk wrote:
“We took the SpaceX/Tesla Hyperloop pusher pod for a spin by itself a few days ago to see what it could do when not pushing student pods (some need a push to get going, e.g. passive maglev).”
He shared a quick video of the test run on Instagram (click on the arrow on the right of the image for the video):
https://www.instagram.com/p/BYckipugds5/
He says that the vehicle got up to 355 km/h (220 mph) in the short distance, which is actually a little faster than the winning team, but he also highlighted that it isn’t even optimized to do that – describing it as “kind of like racing with a tugboat.”
With some tweaks, he believes the same pod pusher could reach a speed of 500 km/h (about half speed of sound) next month.
But that’s just for this machine in SpaceX’s 1-mile long tube. In a full-scale system, Musk believes that they could even reach 800 mph (~1,300 km/h).
As we recently reported, Musk has mostly stayed away from building his own hyperloop through Tesla or SpaceX while other startups unaffiliated with him have launched their own efforts, but he is now showing more signs of wanting to build his own system to work with The Boring Company’s tunnel projects.
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