Ep. 17 | The Maiden Voyage of Virgin Hyperloop with CTO Josh Giegel

Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits

As CTO and co-founder of Virgin Hyperloop, Giegel is a mechanical engineer, former aerospace researcher, and a transportation revolutionary.

Hyperloop transportation has always been a bombastic proposal. Virgin Hyperloop aims to provide ground transportation up to 670 miles per hour. At those speeds, you could step into a hyperloop pod in New York City at noon and step out of it in Los Angeles in time for dinner five hours later, requiring 10x less energy than an airplane.

A robust hyperloop transportation infrastructure would change the way we travel forever.

As Giegel puts it, being one of two of the very first "hypernauts" was something akin to a Roman architect standing underneath an arch he designed. He put his very life into the hands of the engineers he leads, trusting them to hurl him 500 meters in 15 seconds—the initial test of Virgin Hyperloop's test track.

Hear Giegel talk about the vision behind his company's goals of creating a fully-electric, high-power, autonomous maglev system. (Spoilers: As it turns out, a hyperloop is just one of the ways their technology stands to change the transportation world.) You'll hear a fellow engineer discuss the technical elements of hyperloop creation that have long made experts think hyperloops are science fiction.

Would you know history if you were standing in the middle of it? Learn how much closer we are to the age of the hyperloop than you probably realize.