![Hyperloop concept [image courtesy Camilo Sanchez wikimedia commons]](https://staticr1.blastingcdn.com/media/photogallery/2018/2/19/660x290/b_502x220x82/hyperloop-concept-image-courtesy-camilo-sanchez-wikimedia-commons_1842995.jpg "Hyperloop concept [image courtesy Camilo Sanchez wikimedia commons]")
While everyone is focused on Elon Musk’s space ventures, thanks to the recent launch of the Falcon Heavy, work on another of his ideas, the Hyperloop, proceeds. One route that has received an approval to start boring a tunnel to contain a line between Washington and New York has won a vague approval. Another hyperloop plan that seems to be moving forward is a line in India, between Mumbai and the town of Pune.
However, the most intriguing route that is being developed for the transportation line that shoots people and cargo through a nearly airless tube in is Texas.
Hyperloop Texas is planning a line that would like the cities of Dallas, Houston. Austin, and San Antonio with a cargo line to Laredo on the Mexican border. If and when the line gets built, someone in Houston could journey to Austin in 26 minutes and to Dallas in 46.
However, one potential line for the Texas Hyperloop seems to be absent, which is a surprise, considering Elon Musk’s space-faring plans. No line for the futuristic transportation system is planned for between Houston and Brownsville.
Why the extra Hyperloop line?
Brownsville is a small town on the Texas Gulf Coast near the Mexican border. It is also near a spaceport that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is constructing at Boca Chica. The first significant activity planned for the spaceport will be hop tests of the giant, reusable rocket ship called the BFR or, as is decorously called, the Big Falcon Rocket.
In three to four years, if all goes well, the BFR will start flying into low Earth orbit. Shortly after that, the rocker will begin taking people and cargo to the moon and then Mars. Clearly, the spaceport is going to be a busy place starting in the mid-2020s and will need a transportation link with the rest of Texas, especially Houston, to support all of that activity.
Travel to the spaceport in the 2020s.
Houston, as all the world knows, is the home of NASA’s Johnson Spaceflight Center, where the astronauts work and train for space missions. The fact that a spaceport from which people will be traveling to space five-hour drive or one hour flight away would make JSC vitally crucial to the sort of space missions Elon Musk is planning.
The NASA center has all the facilities that SpaceX would need to train its astronauts, both employees, and passengers, before rocketing off to the moon or Mars. A Houston to Brownsville Hyperloop would thus link the Johnson Spaceflight Center and the Boca Chica Spaceport with a quick transportation option for the effort to expand human presence beyond the Earth.
