I heard about this on the new yesterday because the infamous Elon Musk has thrown his support behind it. It is a new high-speed transportation method that primarily depends on an evacuated (or partially evacuated) tube to reduce air friction.
I was going to do a quick study on it, but Rhett Allain at Dot Physics has already done a preliminary analysis on it, so I'll just point to his page.
As someone who works with vacuum/ultra-high vacuum systems, all I can say is that this thing will need a lot of huge vacuum pumps, although for what it intends to do, I think all they need is to get into probably just the milliTorr pressure range, just enough to be below the viscous flow regime.
Zz.
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