Longmont's ET3 aims to turn tubed, airless travel into reality.

• Author: Dano, Mike
• Position: TRANSPORTATION - Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies

When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk proposed his Hyperloop technology earlier this year--machinery he said could revolutionize long-distance travel--he sparked a worldwide wave of interest in the possibilities of reduced-friction, tube-based transportation. But lost in most of the hype was the fact that a Colorado operation is months away from starting construction on a prototype that uses almost the exact same technology.

Daryl Oster of Longmont has been pushing the idea of an elevated, airtight travel tube for nearly two decades. He founded ET3 (Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies) in 1997 to create a global business platform to build a series of interconnected tubes that would allow people and materials to travel from one place to another at speeds between 370 mph and 4,000 mph.

Much like Musk's Hyperloop, the technology behind ET3 would allow car-sized capsules to travel through airless, elevated metal tubes. Electric motors would accelerate the capsules, which would then coast through the tube's vacuum for the remainder of the trip using no additional power. The result, proponents argue, is travel that is 1/10th the cost of high-speed rail with the capacity of 32 lanes of freeway.

It's "space travel on Earth," Oster says.

Naturally there is plenty of uncertainty around a completely new and potentially very expensive method of travel. To prove his technology, Oster is spearheading the construction of three...