Will the United States have a hyperloop? The answer is: maybe. The dream of stuffing people like sardines into an underground space shuttle and shooting them into airtight tunnels at unimaginable speeds may seem strange (and even highly undesirable) to people like you and me, but A group of scientists, businesses and tech billionaires still think this is the future of travel for some reason.
This week, that dream is one step closer to reality. According to the Associated Press, a company called Hardt Hyperloop has announced that it has achieved a milestone in testing this strange new transportation system. The company has been testing its vehicle at the European Hyperloop Test Center and said it had successfully “leveraged” its vessel and zipped it through the center’s 420 meters of underground tubes.
“Today, with the first successful test, we were able to levitate the vehicle and turn on the guidance system and propulsion,” Marinus van der Meijs, director of technology and engineering at Hart, told The Associated Press. system.
However, the developers would eventually like to see the ship travel at speeds in excess of 435 mph, but it doesn’t go very fast. In tests, it traveled about 18 miles per hour, which is equivalent to a very slow train, Van der Meijs said. There was no one in the tube either, which meant that all that really happened was that the tube managed to pass through the tunnel.
Roel van de Pas, commercial director at Hardt, said: “To build Hyperloop into a mobile system, we face a very complex problem that requires technology, requires policy, and requires public-private cooperation, and this is what we need most.”
Hyperloop development has struggled in the past. Hyperloop One (formerly Virgin Hyperloop), one of the major companies supporting the development of transportation systems, closed in December after years of developing the technology. The company has suffered a number of financial setbacks in recent years.
It’s worth noting that while the Western world has struggled with the development of hyperloop, China appears to already have a working hyperloop that is breaking speed records. It’s not clear why we are worse than our Asian competitors in this regard, but if I had to guess, I’d bet that the “public-private partnership” that Vanderpas mentioned may actually be the problem. The Western world’s development model relies on profit-driven companies that must abide by fairly limited market incentives (i.e., to make money); China, meanwhile, built its trains with government money.
Elon Musk is often credited with popularizing the idea of Hyperloop, although he didn’t actually come up with the idea and admitted in one conversation that he never had any actual interest in developing it. Musk hasn’t been talking much about Hyperloop lately. No, the oligarch has been busy turning Tesla into a robotaxi company, buying and destroying Twitter, helping re-elect Trump as president, implanting chips in monkey brains, and more. He was a busy man—apparently too busy to devote any serious time or energy to solving a problem as real as America’s transportation woes.
