At two minutes after midnight on May 12th, the hyperloop became a little bit less of a pipe dream and little bit more of a reality. On that day, the Los Angeles-based startup Hyperloop One conducted the first full-system test of its technology in the desert north of Las Vegas. As several dozen of the company’s engineers and executives watched an array of monitors nervously, a metal sled accelerated to 70 mph (112 km/h), achieved levitation, and flew about 500 feet (152 meters) down the length of a 1,600-foot (487-meter) steel tube that had most of the air sucked out of it.

On the surface, it seemed like a nondescript event, but nonetheless the group broke out into ecstatic cheers. Hyperloop One co-founder and chief engineer Josh Giegel nervously fumbled with a bottle of champagne as he thanked his wife, while executive chairman Shervin Pishevar wiped away tears.

A little more than two months later, Giegel and Pishevar sat down with me in a private club in midtown Manhattan to talk about that day — and more importantly, what comes next. The elation of that moment had worn off, and both men were eager to get back to work on their dream of building the world’s first hyperloop system. The concept of nearly supersonic travel through hundreds of miles of vacuum-sealed tubes will always seem outlandish to most people. But then again, most people haven’t heard of Hyperloop One.

Congrats on the test. Explain the significance of what happened on May 12th and what it means for the company.

Josh Giegel: It’s the first time we put together the whole system and tested it all. So, vacuum, propulsion system, control system, levitation, into basically an integrated hyperloop. And that was effectively the culmination of two and a half years worth of work, and at that point, the last 10–11 months have just been focused on getting that prototype to that level. So it’s basically everything we set out in the garage to start this. This was like the hinge point for us — proof of technology, prototype-driven demonstration. And that is the catalyst to move to the next level.

“the hyperloop works and Hyperloop One has actually built it.”

Shervin Pishevar: What Josh and the team accomplished, in record time, to reach that milestone is pretty incredible. As further proof that these types of moon shot ideas can happen faster than we might be used to. And that gives us a lot of faith going forward from this moment in the desert of Nevada, and showing the world the hyperloop works and Hyperloop One has actually built it. Unveiling the pod, the XP-1, and we’re going to go into the next phase of testing now. But the implications tie back to the founding vision that we’ve had of turning cities into metro stops, changing the meaning of where you live and where you work, unlocking economic opportunity in areas that might be currently locked away by lack of infrastructure or lack of transportation solutions. Also making the world a cleaner place. If you look at the way current transportation solutions are provided, and also if you look at the shipping world, where the top 15 shipping [companies] in the world pollute the world more than all the cars in the world combined. Our vision has always been to do cargo and people. And what we’ve shown are the beginning steps of that.

Can you break down some the tech behind the full-system test? You unveiled the pod in addition to conducting the test, but you didn’t use that pod in the test. It looked like a version of the sled we saw last year.

JG: Over the last few years we did this phased, methodical testing approach where we went through all the components in the LA facility. Then the test that we did last May, which was a propulsion test, did have a similar-looking sled. That’s basically analogous to the frame of a car. And if you look at it, it kind of looks like a Formula One car. It has a suspension system. Instead of wheels, it has levitation and guidance. We basically finished the pod last week, the actual shell of the pod. We’ve done a fit-up of that. Basically that’s the next part of the test. Even though there’s very little air in there, that’s where aerodynamics come into play, how effectively we deal with the blockage ratio. If you look at the pod, very specifically you’ll see little holes on it, and those are for taps, pressure sensors, so we can validate a lot of the models. And that’s coming in the next couple weeks.

You talk about going up to 250 mph. Will you be using this new pod, the XP-1, for that test?

JG: Yes.

When’s that going to be? This year?

JG: Oh, yeah.

SP: We can’t say the exact dates. But building, testing showing — we’re very focused on that.

There was the open-air test last year. Remind me of the G-force?

JG: That was around 2 Gs.

So you got the same amount of force for this test?

JG: The big difference between those two tests, the test you saw last year, that motor wouldn’t work in a vacuum. So if you and I are sitting this far apart in open air, it would take about a million volts to cause an arc here. But in a vacuum it’s maybe 300 or 400 volts. You need to have a really well-designed, really well-insulated motor to make a lot of this work.

SP: No one’s done that before.

JG: And we’re not just building one of them. We had to build hundreds of units of this, we had to develop a manufacturing process. The first ones you saw last year were handcrafted. But now this is a full, automated manufacturing process.

“this is a full, automated manufacturing process.”

How is this different from the SpaceX hyperloop test earlier this year? Some have said that was the hyperloop’s Kitty Hawk moment.

JG: There’s a couple of key differences. Their tube diameter was about six feet or so. We ended up achieving a pretty low-level vacuum. I’m not sure exactly the vacuum they achieved. But we exceeded our targets. It bodes well for the production side. And then the big difference is how the propulsion works. In the SpaceX test, they had a little pusher, which was like a modified Tesla that they put inside the tube to push their pods. In our case, in a production level, you can’t have a car that pushes it, and then have the next one coming up from behind. So here we had to develop the motor, the control system tied into the electrical grid. And their’s was a little more isolated, pusher-system. It’s great though, we hired — shoot, man — we hired 20 or 30 people over the last few years that were involved with [that competition], fresh out of graduate school, so it’s been a great place to grab talent.

You guys have been traveling the world, selling the hyperloop to different foreign governments. How are things going in terms of identifying global partners, and moving this to the next stage, which would be building this in the real world?

SP: It’s going quite well. There are a number of feasibility studies around the world. At the end of the day, Hyperloop One is very focused on building, and you can’t build a hyperloop without the support of governments around the world. We’ve been very pleased that Hyperloop One has captured the imaginations of people around the world. In many ways they see the hyperloop as a new form of transportation, but also analogous to the adoption of broadband technology, which required the support of governments to do that. We’re very pleased with the progress there and hope we’ll have news in the future to announce about projects that will break ground and have working hyperloops around the world. Hopefully by 2020. But again this is a multi-decade effort. It’s an entirely new form of transportation. It’s going to take decades. So you have to have a patient strategy, but at the same time, we’re pretty impatient in our execution. We’re building things in two and half, three years. But you need to have that patient strategy when working with governments.

“this is a multi-decade effort.”

Does that make fundraising more difficult? Since this is such a long-term project and so expensive?

SP: We’re in a phase where many partners around the world and governments understand these types of moon shots that might have taken a lot longer in the past actually can happen faster and more efficiently. The implications of that are, at this nexus, that we’ve seen where now private companies are doing what nations used to do. You have the SpaceX example, where obviously that also requires partnerships with governments. You’ve seen what SpaceX has done with NASA. But also there was that interesting evolution where Elon [Musk] and SpaceX had to finance SpaceX over time. And that wasn’t always easy. So the question is, could they have accomplished that faster with less pain in this era? My answer to that would be yes.

How important is it for governments to put up money for the hyperloop, or is this something can be financed with private investments?

SP: That’s a great question. Strategically it was important for us to privately fund the company from the beginning so that we can get things going as fast as possible. And we’ve done that. As you begin to go from what we’ve just shown you, here’s this 2 million-pound structure that actually works at full scale, and that then begins the next phase, where you’re going to need the partnership and support of governments around the world to enable these types of solutions to spread in their countries. You can’t build the hyperloop without the government saying “we want this in our country.” We want to build it the right way. We’ve seen this throughout history. Obviously, if you look at the history of rail in the US, it took courageous entrepreneurs to have that vision of connecting the whole nation from east to west.

A lot of those rail companies went bankrupt.

SP: They did. And we’ve never said being first in the strategy. For us we’re very focused on the [intellectual property]. Proving that this works, and then enabling partners around the world and governments to work together in spreading that. These types of examples of new types of transportation, the Wright Brothers for example, created a lot of companies. Their company... unfortunately they weren’t successful. You’re not flying a Wright Brothers plane today. We want that ecosystem to be thriving. We want a successful company with a mission and a purpose that’s sustainable and lasts multiple decades, and with many other companies created around it.

Josh, I saw your speech after that test. But has the euphoria worn off? What’s next?

JG: That day was very emotionally intense. It was exciting at the same time that it was routine. We’d done enough tests to get up to that spot. But you have to have presence of mind to know that moment was a salient moment for us. We had to keep it quiet for a bit, get our ducks in a row. This is what we’ve hinged the last two years of the company, showing the proof of our technology. Now, to me, it’s changed to: how do we scale this? How do we move this in the right direction so that it can be around for decades, hundreds of years? How do we make this design upgradeable, how do we make it future-proof? How do we know what the trends are in tech so that in five, 10 years, we don’t get passed by, kind of like the Wright Brothers did? They used wing warping and they didn’t use ailerons, like a lot of planes do now. So how do we develop processes to take this to certification? And it’s different than being this scrappy little startup to get here. No, we have to be scrappy to get it certified.

You called this the hyperloop’s Kitty Hawk moment. Were you pissed that Larry Page named his flying car startup Kitty Hawk?

SP: Nah, I have a lot of respect for Larry.

What do you think about that? Talking about innovations in transportation technology…

“The hyperloop will be a digital network.”

SP: I think VTOL, vertical take-off and landing, there’s a whole ecosystem in transportation that will come together. Look at what we’re building. It’s digital switches. The hyperloop will be a digital network. That’s why we say we look at transportation as a new form of broadband. You build out those switches, and you build that network, it can actually be compatible with many forms of transportation. So the ultimate end-to-end vision should end up in a place that supports autonomous vehicles, autonomous pods that can actually go into the hyperloop network, get connection between cities, then have those pods continue on, partner with the Didis and the Ubers of the world and many others in that ecosystem. At the same time, you’ll see pods once they come into a city center, pending on the actual design of cities, we can have scenarios where there’s pods that also support VTOL, vertical take-off and landing pods. You get to a city, you hop to the building you want to go to.

You’re making it really hard to face riding the shitty subway every day and not be completely disappointed with what the current infrastructure has to offer.

JG: That’s like the summary of why I became an engineer: re-create the world around us.