Elon Musk Reveals Design for High-Speed Transit System Hyperloop

"Pulled all nighter working on Hyperloop (as did others). Hopefully, not too many mistakes."

That tweet from Elon Musk's personal Twitter account was today's first inkling about a potentially revolutionary way to travel. Musk released the plans for the much-acclaimed Hyperloop, a high-speed transit system linking Los Angeles and San Francisco, on Twitter this afternoon.

Musk has described the Hyperloop as "a cross between a Concord, a rail gun and an air hockey table." The actual plans show that his original description wasn't too far off. He published the 57-page design plan on both Tesla Motors's and SpaceX's blogs as a PDF available for download.

The abridged version is that Hyperloop is a large pneumatic tube, and travel would be similar to the way the Jetson family moved between rooms in its futuristic cartoon household.

One of the stumbling blocks of developing a pneumatic tube system is the Kantrowitz limit, an esoteric aerodynamics formula that says how fast a pod can travel in a tube. Effectively, it's an issue of pressure.

"If the walls of the tube and the capsule are too close together, the capsule will behave like a syringe and eventually be forced to push the entire column of air in the system," the proposal reads. "Not good."