Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Musk envisions the Hyperloop as an alternative to California's proposed $70 billion high-speed rail system, which he regards as too expensive, inefficient and slow. He thinks a Los Angeles-San Francisco Hyperloop line could be built for about $6 billion and deliver a much better travel experience to passengers. Tickets would be much cheaper than seats aboard a train or airplane, for example, and crashes would be extremely rare. "It's not like it's going to fall out of the sky, nor can it be really derailed, as a train can," Musk said. The bulk of Hyperloop's cost would come from building the tube, which in California would primarily parallel Interstate 5 through farm country. Because the pods are designed to be light, the tube would be mounted above ground on pylons, reducing construction costs, improving earthquake safety and easing right-of-way issues, Musk said. I-5 Section of proposed Hyperloop route. The preliminary route is shown in yellow. Bend radii are shown in red. (Image credit: Elon Musk/SpaceX) Musk released his "alpha design" today in the hopes that the global community of inventors and engineers can tinker with and improve it. If somebody with the means and the talent took the idea and ran with it, he said, the Hyperloop could be carrying passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in as little as seven to 10 years. Musk said last week that he likely won't be able to devote much time to the Hyperloop in the near future, since running Tesla and SpaceX is so demanding. But today he said he's interested in building a subscale demonstration model of the technology to help get it off the ground. That would likely involve the creation of yet another company, he added. "If somebody else goes and does a demo, that would be really awesome, and I hope somebody does," he said. "But if it doesn't look like that's happening, or it's maybe not happening in quite the right way, then that's when I might allocate some time to this." "I'd like to see something like this happen," Musk added. "I don't really care much one way or the other if I have any economic outcome here. But it would be cool to see a new form of transport happen."