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Subject: Elon Musk's vision of a Hyperloop transport system that carries passengers in pressurised tubes at near-supersonic speeds is on track to hit a milestone
Excerpt: English text from the archived bilingual edition · Chinese edition
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Elon Musk's vision of a Hyperloop transport system that carries passengers in pressurised tubes at near-supersonic speeds is on track to hit a milestone
Musk outlined his futuristic idea in a paper released in 2013, challenging innovators to bring the dream to life
Hyperloop Technologies, one of the startups that picked up the gauntlet thrown by Musk, is hosting a "sneak preview of the future of transportation technology" during a two-day event billed as involving a demonstration at a test site outside Las Vegas
A series of tweets fired from the Twitter account @HyperloopTech teased "big announcements you don't want to miss"
Late last year, Hyperloop chief executive Rob Lloyd said in an online post that the team was working toward a "Kitty Hawk" moment in 2016
The post came with word of an agreement to use an industrial park in the city of North Las Vegas to conduct a Propulsion Open Air Test of the blazingly-fast rail system
Lloyd described it at the time as a very important step on the way to realising the full potential of Hyperloop Tech
"Our 'Kitty Hawk' moment refers to our first full system, full scale, full speed test," Lloyd said
"This will be over two miles of tube with a controlled environment and inside that tube we will levitate a pod and accelerate it to over 700 miles (1,125 kilometers) per hour."
The project could connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes in a low-cost alternative to a high-speed rail network planned for California
Musk has said he has no plans to build the system but offered the "open source design" to allow others to pursue a venture
Jon Favreau, director of "Iron Man," has referred to Musk as a modern-day "Renaissance man."
In an article for Time, Favreau said he and actor Robert Downey Jr. modeled the main character in the movie -- "genius billionaire Tony Stark" -- after the Silicon Valley star
South Africa-born Musk has become one of America's best-known innovators, having launched a payments company, electric carmaker Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity
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