Hyperloop high-speed travel is coming ... fast

Imagine travelling 1000km/h in a tube, going from Sydney to Melbourne in under an hour.

An artist’s impression of VicHyper’s Hyperloop, a finalist in the global SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition.

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s Hyperloop could make its way to Australia, with the Melbourne to Sydney corridor serving as the testing ground for the futuristic high-speed transportation system.

With its promise of commuter and freight pods zipping across low-pressure tubes at speeds of more than 1000km/h, Mr Musk’s high-speed rail on steroids could potentially shake up the transportation industry and it might be here sooner than we thought.

Mr Musk got the ball rolling on Hyperloop in 2013 but he was too busy building electric cars and sending people to Mars, so the blueprint was released to parties willing to get it off the ground.

Los Angeles-based firm Hyperloop One, which secured $80 million in May and publicly demonstrated its propulsion system, is the closest to bring Mr Musk’s vision to life and the company’s vice-president for worldwide business development, Alan James, says Australia is on its radar for testing the technology.

“We’re very keen to explore the potential for doing proof of operations in Australia and the reason for that is there’s a clear long-term need for ultra-fast transport on the Australian east coast,” Dr James told The Australian.

“Melbourne to Sydney is the third busiest air corridor in the world and we can give you Melbourne downtown to Sydney downtown in 55 minutes.

“So we would be looking, either in NSW or Victoria, or possibly in ACT, to develop the first section of that route, to prove the operation of Hyperloop, to get regulatory approval.”

Hyperloop One, led by former Cisco executive Rob Lloyd, isn’t the only outfit exploring the technology with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which boasts engineers from NASA and Boeing, working on “passive magnetic levitation technology” to propel its efforts.

Despite the progress made by both firms, the technology is still more theoretical than real but Hyperloop One is keen to change that.

“We will have all of that fully operational at full scale at our test site in the Nevada desert in the first quarter of 2017,” Dr James said. “This is not a ‘10 years away story’, this is not a ‘five years away story’, and literally months from now the world will be able to touch, smell and see an operational Hyperloop.”

Australia’s sorry history with high-speed rail is likely to be a boon for Hyperloop One, according to Dr James.

“There’s no sunken investment in high-speed rail and nobody has yet committed themselves to that technology, so the field is open for a better and more strategic solution,” he said.

Local venture capitalist Phillip Kingston says the time is right to build a Hyperloop in Australia and he’s backing Hyperloop One.

Mr Kingston likens the Hyperloop to the transformative nature of the internet and says it could give Australia a rare chance to be at the forefront of technological innovation and to transform our cities and rural areas in the process.

“There hasn’t been much innovation in transport for a long time, and most of the systems we use are pretty ancient. This is a breakthrough, it’s a totally new thing, and it works,” he said.

Mr Kingston says his firm Trimanitium Capital wants to help fund Hyperloop and help get the necessary political stakeholder support to embrace the technology. He says as a long-term nation building project it’s just about as good as anything else we’ve got.

“I hope it doesn’t get politicised like the NBN did, where it became more about the politics of the day — we would hope this could be a privately run, privately funded enterprise,” he told The Australian.

“The good thing is a lot of the land that is needed is available and you could run it alongside the Hume Highway, it’s not a major land reclamation project.”

Any multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project obviously would have to involve multiple tiers of government, and Victorian Small Business, Innovation and Trade Minister Philip Dalidakis was more circumspect about the project’s potential. He said while he was excited about what it could offer, he saw the Hyperloop as still something for future governments to grapple with.

“I think with a project of this size and scale you’d have to involve federal government in it. Nearly every piece of major infrastructure, especially transport, has at some stage received significant funding from the government,” Mr Dalidakis said.

“I think Hyperloop has extraordinary potential but at the same time I think we’re still a few years away from looking at the technology in a meaningful way.”

One man who’s not waiting around is RMIT University student Zac McClelland, who’s leading a team of students, VicHyper, competing in the global SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition. They’re the only remaining finalists from the southern hemisphere from more than 1000 applicants and will test their human-scale pod prototype in January. The winner is whoever achieves the highest speed.

“Our team is now up to 28 people and we’ve just finished the design and we’re about to start building it,” Mr McClelland told The Australian. “We’ll have a 3m long prototype we’ll transport to Los Angeles and test on a specially designed test track there.”

Mr McClelland said the Hyperloop would revolutionise Australia, and we had been moving people inefficiently for too long.

“We have all the resources to build this; the expertise, the people, the minerals,” he said.

“Hyperloop will happen. It’ll revolutionise the way we travel. I can’t wait to see Hyperloop in Australia.”