Elon Musk, entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors, has taken to Twitter to tell the world that he’ll be revealing plans for his Hyperloop transportation system on August 12^th.

The Hyperloop system makes a huge claim—this new form of transportation will be able to take riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in half an hour. That’s just about 380 miles, and takes drivers roughly five and a half hours, depending on traffic. Checking time lapses on flights between the cities yields results that are just over an hour. And that’s not taking into consideration the preparation of arriving early, checking bags, and going through security.

Will publish Hyperloop alpha design by Aug 12. Critical feedback for improvements would be much appreciated.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2013

At the Dll conference, Musk briefly touched on the topic, but said Hyperloop would be a “cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table.”

In an interview with Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily, he was a bit more specific: “This system I have in mind… how would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, it goes 3 or 4 times faster than the bullet train… it goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You would go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less than an air ticket than any other mode of transport. I think we could actually make it self-powering if you put solar panels on it, you generate more power than you would consume in the system. There’s a way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries. Yes, this is possible, absolutely.”

Musk compared the Hyperloop system to a “Jetsons tunnel” but doesn’t plan on putting a patent on it, stating on Twitter that it would be an “open source” project and that “feedback is greatly appreciated.”

@schadlu I really hate patents unless critical to company survival. Will publish Hyperloop as open source.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2013

Brian Dodson, a writer who holds a PhD on physics and , told CNET that “the loop could be a series of pneumatic tubes that move individual passenger capsules along a river of air (hence, the air hockey reference) at subsonic speeds.

This isn’t the only transportation model that seems crazy, or at least too good to be true. Musk also founded Spacex, the space xploration company that aims to transport humans as efficiently as possible from Earth to Mars, in 2002. “Mars is a fixer-upper planet,” said Musk. “But we can make it work.”