By Garrett Cabeza Moscow-Pullman Daily News, Moscow, Idaho
A person may be able to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 35 minutes for $8 at some point in the future.
It would be accomplished by placing passengers in a capsule and sending them rocketing through a vacuum tube at speeds topping 700 miles per hour.
It currently takes about an hour and 20 minutes to fly that distance, although that doesn't include time to get through security at the airport.
Driving? That 381-mile trip would take nearly seven hours.
While such travel may not be available in the near future, Jeremy Ornan-Stone, acting chief officer and vice chairman of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc., said it may be possible one day.
Ornan-Stone spoke on the topic Thursday afternoon as part of the Robert A. Cheatham Engineering Management Lecture Series at Washington State University.
Ornan-Stone said the proposed means of transportation is an unprecedented opportunity.
"If the Hyperloop works, it's going to create some really remarkably disruptive changes in the way people live, commute and work," Ornan-Stone said.
Inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk, who unveiled the transportation concept in 2013, has called the Hyperloop "the fifth mode of transport" after road, rail, water and air.
If the Hyperloop turns into a means of transportation, it will be the fastest and one of the cheapest modes of transportation in existence.
Although Ornan-Stone said the $8 ticket is a preliminary number, the Hyperloop could travel at a speed of 760 mph, according to Hyperloop's website.
Ornan-Stone said Hyperloop Transportation's goal is to test the first passenger commercial Hyperloop system in 2019 on a test track, but he admitted that might be an unrealistic goal.
Hyperloop Transportation, based outside Los Angeles, submitted a permit to build a demonstration track in Quay Valley, Calif., and it has system agreements in Slovakia, Ornan-Stone said.
He said it would cost at least $200 million to build a quality testing track.
There are many challenges Hyperloop Transportation is facing with the project, including how to prevent potential nausea and vomiting caused by the high rate of speed. There are also issues with decelerating, going up steep grades and taking sharp corners. Stopping might be the biggest challenge, Ornan-Stone said.
Placing people in a closed 8- to 12-foot cylinder is not a natural experience, which is why the company is working on creating virtual windows that could help prevent nausea and vomiting, he said.
The windows would have tracking cameras that analyze eye movement and the motion capture technology would create a realistic perspective for passengers as they look out the windows.
One member of the audience asked about the safety of the Hyperloop. Ornan-Stone said Hyperloop Transportation has an experienced safety team.
"Taking a car is not a particularly safe means of transport but we don't articulate that to ourselves," Ornan-Stone said. "We get in the car daily and we accept that risk."
He said it is statistically much safer to fly in an airplane than drive a car.
"The system here has to work in such a way that it is at the same level or better than commercial aviation," he said. "Anything less than that is going to cause, I think, major breaches in public confidence."
Ornan-Stone said he reminds colleagues that an airplane crash usually kills more than one person and that it's a public event.
"If we kill somebody on this system, we're probably out of business because this will be a very, very public event," Ornan-Stone said.
©2016 the Moscow-Pullman Daily News (Moscow, Idaho) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
