How Elon Musk's hyperloop dream is moving from sci-fi fantasy to reality

Traveling from L.A. to San Francisco in a half hour? It might really happen.

Hyperloop Alpha.
(Image credit: (Elon Musk))

When inventor-entrepreneur Elon Musk hatched his idea for a new type of high-speed travel in which passenger pods hurtle through tubes at the speed of sound, it sounded straight out of the pages of science fiction.

But a little more than three years later, there's nothing fictional about it. Two companies are in a fierce race to develop the technology for what Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, termed the "fifth mode" of transportation: the hyperloop. And one of them, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, recently reached an agreement with Slovakia to explore building the first hyperloop system there; one possible route could connect the capital, Bratislava, with Vienna and Budapest.

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Alexis Boncy is special projects editor for The Week and TheWeek.com. Previously she was the managing editor for the alumni magazine Columbia College Today. She has an M.F.A. from Columbia University's School of the Arts and a B.A. from the University of Virginia.