Serial entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk unveiled design plans for his Hyperloop -- a superfast transport system that could cut the travel time from Los Angeles to San Francisco to 30 minutes, and cost a fraction of the currently proposed high speed rail project.

Musk, a co-founder of PayPal and the man behind commercial space transport firm Space-X and electric car maker Tesla (TSLA), said up to 1,000 employees from both Tesla and Space X worked to come up with the idea, which is basically an elevated tube which moves travel pods at nearly the speed of sound.

In a technical paper published Monday, Musk said his idea is similar to the "old pneumatic tubes used to send mail and packages within and between buildings," but would operate under much less pressure to save on energy.

The cars would be pushed or pulled through the tube by a series of electric motors, possibly similar to the ones used by the Tesla Model S. Each car would be mounted with a fan in front to move the air out of the way. The air itself would then be directed underneath the car, forming a cushion on which it would ride. The entire thing would be powered by solar panels mounted on top of the tube.


The tube itself could be built above ground, roughly following California's Interstate 5 highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Musk said it could cost less than one-tenth of the planed high speed rail system in California -- a project that's estimated to cost $70 billion. It would also be six times faster.

In fact, it was the high cost of the California train that prompted Musk to research the Hyperloop in the first place."How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL -- doing incredible things like indexing all the world's knowledge and putting rovers on Mars -- would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world," he wrote.

Experts say Musk's idea is technically feasible, but will be hard to implement primarily due to the cots of developing a demonstration project and the time it will take to get all the permits.

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In my opinion, this is one of the coolest feasible transport system ideas I've ever seen. Its the future, really. I think this is how we will travel long distance in the future.

But, here is my problem with the world:

Experts say Musk's idea is technically feasible, but will be hard to implement primarily due to the cots of developing a demonstration project and the time it will take to get all the permits.

The fact that permits (PAPER) stand in the way between us and the future is mind-blowingly disappointing to me.