Nearly 50 years after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, another race between the US and the former Soviet Union has begun. It still involves men travling long distances in capsules, but this time, the race will take place on land—in hyperloop pods—instead of in outer space.
The starting pistol was fired in that race today when Hyperloop One, one of the companies developing the underground transport system, announced it had signed an agreement with the city of Moscow that could see a network of hyperloop tubes added to the city's existing transport infrastructure.
The agreement is little more than a memorandum of understanding, and the company did not announce financial terms of the deal nor when construction could begin. But Hyperloop One also has a similar agreement to develop a hyperloop cargo system for the port of Los Angeles, and there are rumors of a potential hyperloop link between that city and San Francisco.
Its chief competitor, meanwhile, is operating in Moscow's backyard. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) is planning a network that could one day join the former Soviet-controlled cities of Bratislava and Budapest with Vienna. In a sign of the publicity-stunt-cum-technological-marvel nature of the hyperloop race, HTT recently named the composite material that will protect the exterior of its capsules "Vibranium," after the shield Captain America carries in Marvel's Avenger movies.
And Hyperloop One, which counts many former NASA engineers among its staff, performed the first public demonstration of its electric propulsion technology last month. The test only lasted a few seconds, but judging by the hundreds of international journalists who descended on the test track in the Nevada desert (see video above), it may have well been an alien landing or the start of a manned mission to Mars.
The electric propulsion is only half of the Hyperloop equation; engineers have yet to conduct tests of the passive magnetic levitation system that will suspend the pods as they hurl through the tubes at speeds similar to a commercial jet.
As part of the agreement between Hyperloop One and Moscow, those tubes and much of the other infrastructure would be built by a third party, the Summa Group. One of Russia's largest infrastructure conglomerates, it certainly has the expertise—and probably the necessary political clout with the Kremlin—to forge ahead on the project.
Meanwhile, alternative intercity transportation is largely stalled in California. Though $9 billion was set aside for high-speed rail in 2008, the trains could still be decades away. Even Hyperloop One, which is based in Los Angeles, has run into challenges. It turned to the less populous Nevada for its tests because of what its CEO Rob Lloyd described as a regulatory environment that "wants to see this happen."
In Russia, however, the company is thinking bigger. "Hyperloop can improve life dramatically for the 16 million people in the greater Moscow area, cutting their commute to a fraction of what it is today," Hyperloop One co-founder Shervin Pishevar said in a statement. "Our longer term vision is to work with Russia to implement a transformative new Silk Road: a cargo Hyperloop that whisks freight containers from China to Europe in a day."
In other words, the hyperloop race is on. Its first passenger had better start thinking of a speech to rival the eloquence of Armstrong's "one small step."