Terminal Velocity

While a Los Angeles engineer was locked out of the Hyperloop database on New Year's Eve, a Chinese missile contractor was breaking records 6,000 miles away.

[Speaker 1]: It was New Year’s Eve, 2023. A Sunday. And depending on where you were in the world, the mood was… drastically different. [Speaker 2]: In most places, people were getting ready for parties, popping champagne, watching the ball drop. [Speaker 1]: Right. But in an office park in the Arts District of Los Angeles, the lights were off. The company was Hyperloop One. For a decade, they were the ones promising to shoot us through vacuum tubes at the speed of sound. LA to San Francisco in thirty minutes. [Speaker 2]: And on that New Year's Eve, instead of celebrating a breakthrough, they were liquidating. [Speaker 1]: It wasn't just a quiet closing. It was abrupt. There’s this one detail that really sticks with me. An engineer who had been working there-someone who believed in the mission-described working frantically on code until the very last second. And then, about thirty minutes before the final all-hands meeting… their Git access was just revoked. [Speaker 2]: Locked out of the database. [Speaker 1]: Locked out. One minute you’re building the future of transportation, the next minute your password doesn't work. The $450 million dream was over before the clock struck midnight. [Speaker 2]: But here is the thing we need to look at. At that exact same moment, six thousand miles away in Datong, China, the lights were definitely on. [Speaker 1]: And they weren't packing boxes. [Speaker 2]: No. A team at CASIC-that is a state-owned missile defense contractor-was pressurizing a low-vacuum tube. They were prepping a magnetic pod to hit 623 kilometers per hour. That’s nearly 400 miles per hour. [Speaker 1]: So, the American version dies in a liquidation sale, and the Chinese version is breaking speed records using the exact same physics. [Speaker 2]: Exactly. And that split-screen moment tells us a lot. It raises the question: Did the technology actually fail? Or did we just try to build it with the wrong checkbook? Because China is sprinting right now, but they might be running toward a financial cliff that makes the Hyperloop One collapse look like a rounding error. [Speaker 1]: Come with us as we try to figure out what happened to the speed race. [Speaker 2]: This is The Angle. [Speaker 1]: I think to understand why the silence in that LA office matters so much, we have to remember how loud the noise was at the beginning. [Speaker 2]: It was deafening. Go back to 2013. Elon Musk releases the "Alpha" white paper. [Speaker 1]: Right, the PDF that launched a thousand startups. [Speaker 2]: The concept was seductive because it was theoretically simple. You have two enemies when you want to go fast: air and the ground. Air creates drag; the ground creates friction. [Speaker 1]: So the solution is… get rid of both. [Speaker 2]: Put the pod in a tube, suck the air out so it’s a vacuum. Then use magnets to levitate the pod so it never touches the floor. Zero drag, zero friction. [Speaker 1]: And for a while, it seemed like it was happening. You had Richard Branson getting involved, you had test tracks in Nevada. But then… something shifted. I remember seeing the news in February 2022. Virgin Hyperloop-which was the big player-announced they were pivoting. [Speaker 2]: That was the beginning of the end. They said they were stopping work on passenger transport to focus exclusively on cargo. [Speaker 1]: Which feels like an admission of defeat. "It’s too dangerous for people, so let’s move Amazon packages." [Speaker 2]: It was an admission that…