Marco della Cava

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — You certainly can't accuse the folks at Hyperloop One of thinking small.

The Los Angeles-based startup has bold dreams of creating a 21st-century Silk Road linking Asia to Europe in a work-day ride, a radical step beyond the 100-yard demo of its existing technology that unfolded in the desert north of Las Vegas last month.

Hyperloop One, which is among a few companies looking to pioneer the pod-in-tube transportation system popularized by Elon Musk called hyperloop, announced Tuesday that it has partnered with a Russian firm to explore building transcontinental routes and replacing Moscow's ailing subway and train network.

“We are excited for the partnership between the Summa Group, the Russian Government and Hyperloop One to construct a Hyperloop in Moscow,” said Hyperloop One cofounder Shervin Pishevar in a statement that described the partnership as a "memorandum of understanding."

Who's ready to ride a hyperloop?

Summa Group oversees sectors such as port logistics, engineering, construction, telecommunications, and is integral to oil and gas production services in the Russia. The company signed its agreement with Hyperloop One at the recently concluded St. Petersburg (Russia) International Economic Forum.

Pishevar noted the two companies and the city of Moscow were eager to explore how hyperloop transportation —which in its perfected state promises to whisk goods and people at up to 800 mph in pods inserted into vacuum-sealed tubes — could "improve life dramatically for the 16 million people in the greater Moscow area, cutting their commute to a fraction of what it is today."

He added that Hyperloop One's long-term goal is to "implement a transformative new Silk Road: a cargo Hyperloop that whisks freight containers from China to Europe in a day.”

That transcontinental goal seems to square with the technology's need for long and straight runs in order to get the pods up to speed. Using hyperloop as a replacement for a snaking subway system doesn't because you can't achieve fast speeds if the pod has to slow down for curves.

In fact, Summa Group owner Ziyavudin Magomedov honed in largely on freight opportunities presented by hyperloop, which would have a greater possibility of paying for the tech over time than passenger travel.

“The implementation of Hyperloop technology provides tremendous benefits to the Russian Federation in terms of the geopolitical development of the intracontinental transit potential and building of an economically attractive alternative to the existing global logistics flows,” he said.

The idea of traveling at 800 mph along an energy-efficient network seems like a sci-fi dream, and indeed has more questions than answers to date. These include the impact on human health, the durability of vacuum tubes, and the expense. When Tesla CEO and tech visionary Musk wrote his white paper about hyperloop a few years ago, he surmised that a route linking San Francisco to Los Angeles in an hour would likely cost around $6 billion.

INTERNATIONAL HOPES

But either way, it makes sense that Hyperloop One is exploring launch opportunities outside the U.S., where it may be easier to overcome regulatory hurdles for large infrastructure projects.

Hyperloop One's Pishevar, a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Uber, took up the hyperloop tech gauntlet after his friend Musk suggested in a conversation that he was too busy to pursue the idea given his pressing interest in travel to Mars.

Hyperloop One has raised more than $90 million to date, much of it from Pishevar's Sherpa Capital. The company's two other key figures are former SpaceX engineer Brogan BamBrogan and ex-Cisco exec Rob Lloyd.

Hyperloop competitor aims to solve urban commute

On Tuesday, the company also announced that it had selected judges for its Hyperloop Global Challenge, a competition that will identify and select teams with the best proposals to help make Hyperloop a reality.

Those judges are Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation; Bassam Mansour, an international railway industry advisor; Clive Burrows, a respected transport engineer; Alan Berger, professor of landscape architecture and urban design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Ulla Tapaninen, senior advisor for economic development for the city of Helsinki.

The panel will review the entries towards the end of 2016, with winners announced in March 2017.

Hyperloop One currently has feasibility studies underway in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Dubai, Los Angeles and the United Kingdom.

Follow USA TODAY reporter Marco della Cava on Twitter: @marcodellacava