At the age of 5, the hyperloop industry continues to make noise

If you are not in El Puerto de Santa Maria for the beaches or the annual sherry festival, you are probably there for history. The old town of Cadiz Bay, in Spain, 100 km northeast of the Rock of Gibraltar, is full of churches, fountains and corridors dating back centuries, some of which are still in use.

Today, however, Dirk Ahlborn is in El Puerto to see the future, or at least imagine it. At a ceremony this afternoon, the CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, one of the many companies committed to realizing Elon Musk's dream of high-speed rail travel, unveiled the first complete capsule for passengers of his company. Built in southern Spain and painted in white, gray, black, red and shimmery blue, the "Quintero One" could one day scream between cities at an almost supersonic speed.

More than 100 feet long and weighing five tons, the capsule also serves as a birthday present to the startup: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is also celebrating its fifth anniversary.

Like most big ones, this fiesta is reminiscent of the passing of time. In this case, you should think that, whatever the future, it is always subject to the immutable laws of physics – and the equally stubborn rules of bureaucracy and infrastructure.

Ahlborn's company was the first to form in response to Elon Musk's suggestion, formulated in August 2013, that someone would try to build what he called the hyperloop. , a sort of train combining levitation lugs and almost airless tubes to eliminate friction and drag, which speed of travel with a relatively low energy consumption. HTT started with a crowded approach: full-time engineers in places like Boeing and NASA were working on different parts of the problem in their spare time, in exchange for equity.

HTT now has more than 800 engineers. It has established partnerships with a group of established engineering companies, including the vacuum manufacturer Leybold, the Aecom engineering design firm and the Spanish technology company Airtificial. She has signed agreements to investigate hyper loop networks – determining where the thing could work, who could use it, how much it should cost, how to build it with a minimum of complications, and so on. – the United States, France, the United Arab Emirates, India, Brazil, China, South Korea, Indonesia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Ukraine. He is working on regulatory, legal and insurance frameworks for this new means of transportation.

This is not the only company trying to deliver today whoosh of tomorrow. Virgin Hyperloop One (founded in June 2014 under the name Hyperloop Technologies and supported by Richard Branson) has a similar assortment of technical partners and agreements, as well as a 1,600-foot long test track in the Nevada desert. He presented his own full module in Dubai earlier this year. Arrivo, headed by a former Hyperloop One executive whose legal name is Brogan BamBrogan, is working with Colorado on a "hyperloop-inspired" system, without the tubes. Elon Musk regularly organizes student competitions on the test track he built at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles, but is now interested in filling tunnels with electric skid vehicles (also the SEC).

None of these companies, however, have built a true hyperloop. Not the one that transports people, or even goods, between real destinations for real money. As a result, the once frenzied hype has been appeased. The media, including WIRED, reiterated their coverage of this young industry. But that does not mean that the loop dreams of these engineers have failed.

The physical characteristics of moving the tubes without friction are strong – you just have to do a lot of engineering work to put a concept into practice. Add regulatory questions on how to prove that such a system is safe. The policy of building new infrastructures. The cost and the time to do it. And besides, the hardest of all, the question of how to make superperforming financially competitive with the current forms of long-distance travel. Railways and airlines may not earn money, but they are well established, both as a business and as a reliable and efficient means of travel. And they have already spent decades amortizing the infrastructure that supports them. Any new hyperloop company will have to pay the cost of building a whole new world of tubes.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is slowly attacking these problems. He sends his brilliant new capsule to his R & D center in Toulouse, France, and company president Bibop Gresta said the pod would be "fully optimized and ready for passengers" next year. Not that there is nowhere to use it

Eventually, someone will build a hyperloop, somewhere. And it will be charming, whisking and beating passengers and their luggage from one city to another, or from the airport in the backcountry to downtown in minutes. But you can count on a few more birthdays before you can cut your frequent flyer card and go from the tube in the sky to the one on the ground.

Biggest cable stories