Hyperloop One

Hyperloop One, known as Virgin Hyperloop until November 2022, was an American transportation technology company that worked to commercialize high-speed travel utilizing the Hyperloop concept which was a variant of the vacuum train. The company was established on June 1, 2014, and reorganized and renamed on October 12, 2017. Hyperloop systems were intended to move cargo and passengers at airline speeds but at a fraction of the cost. They were designed to run suspended by magnetic systems in a partially-evacuated tube. The original Hyperloop concept proposed to use a linear electric motor to accelerate and decelerate an air bearing levitated pod through a low-pressure tube. The vehicle was to glide silently at speeds up to 760 mph (1,220 km/h) with very low turbulence. The system was proposed to be entirely autonomous, quiet, direct-to-destination, and on-demand. It would have been built on elevated structures or in tunnels, free of at-grade crossings and requiring less right of way than high-speed rail or highways. Virgin Hyperloop made substantive technical changes to Elon Musk's initial proposal and chose not to pursue the Los Angeles–San Francisco notional route that Musk envisioned in his 2013 alpha-design white paper. It demonstrated a form of propulsion technology on May 11, 2016, at its test site in North Las Vegas. It completed a 500 m (1,600 ft) Development Loop (DevLoop) and on May 12, 2017, held its first full-scale test. The test combined Hyperloop components including vacuum, propulsion, levitation, sled, control systems, tube, and structures. On November 8, 2020, after more than 400 uncrewed tests, the firm conducted the first human trial at a speed of 172 km/h (107 mph) at its test site in Las Vegas, Nevada. However, in February 2022, the company abandoned plans for human rated travel and instead focused on freight, laying off more than...