The Proudest Day to be Part of Virgin Hyperloop
Behind the scene of the world’s first passenger hyperloop vehicle test in a vacuum tube
“Oh my god! It’s you!” My friends took a picture of me on the big screen from our Las Vegas test site and sent it to me. It was the pre-show before Virgin Hyperloop launched its second hyperloop vehicle, the XP-2, which stands for “Experimental Pod Number 2”.
Back in 2017, Virgin Hyperloop unveiled the XP-1, which is the world’s first full scale hyperloop vehicle. We conducted hundreds of tests and achieved the maximum speed of 240 miles per hour. The primary constraint of not being able to achieve the maximum hyperloop speed was because of the length of the tube (500m).
XP-2, which our company unveiled yesterday (November 8th, 2020) in our test site in the Nevada desert, is the world’s first passenger hyperloop vehicle. It’s a milestone that will be remembered in the history of hyperloop. Why? Think about moon landing. You cannot just throw two astronauts onto a rocket, shoot them to the moon, and call it a day. The biggest challenge is to figure out how to bring them back alive. Safety is the highest priority in our company, so XP-2 is the testimony of it.
The project for the XP-2 is called “Pegasus”. It was the most confidential project in our office in the last 18 months. We were not even supposed to say the project name loud in the office because we had visitors coming to our LAHQ (Los Angeles Headquarters) on a daily basis. Only Virgin Hyperloop employees, our investors, and the consultants who worked on the project knew about it.
Although I am not part of the Pegasus team, I did participate in the passenger volunteer selection program. It was open to all Virgin Hyperloop employees and it was a rigorous process. I did my first interview in October 2019 and was moved to the second step. However, due to schedule conflict, I was unable to continue the pursuit. The whole selection process including on-site trainings took almost a year. Last month, when our CEO Jay Walder announced in the All Hands that Josh Giegel and Sara Luchian would be the first passengers for the XP-2, I couldn’t be happier about the decision!
Josh Giegel is the co-founder of Virgin Hyperloop, and also my boss’s boss. To me, he may become the next Iron Man, but with a much better personality than Tony Stark. In November 2019, we went to the Autodesk University in Las Vegas together. While my boss and me were delivering the keynote for the Transportation Summit, he was at the Expo Hall signing the historic MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with Andrew Anagnost, the CEO of Autodesk. The next day, Giegel presented at the AEC (Architecture, Engineering & Construction) keynote stage about the Future of Transportation. It’s one of my favorite keynote speeches and his voice is still echoing around my ears.
Sara Luchian is our Director of Passenger Experience. Although we are on different teams in different buildings, but because of my role as an in-house architect, I do have the opportunity to work with her. One of my primary responsibilities is to define design criteria for our passenger portals. It’s a daunting task because there is literally no precedent examples to follow. It’s like you had to imagine how an airport would look like while the Wright brothers were still in the sky of Kitty Hawk. Because we want our hyperloop trip to be an experience instead of just a daily routine, Sara’s knowledge, insight, and attention to details really take a heavy burden off my shoulder. We did an interview with DesignWanted earlier this year. She’s one of the smartest persons that I’ve ever met.
I wanted be there to witness this historic moment in person, but because of the ever-worsening COVID-19 situation in the United States, I decided to leave California for good in July and I’ve been working remotely from Hong Kong for a few months. Going to Las Vegas to attend the live event and coming back to HK will trigger another 14-days of mandatory quarantine. I survived it once in July when I first arrived at HK and it’s something I hope that I will never have to do it again.
Knowing that not everyone can make it to the live event, especially when we are still in the middle of the pandemic, our company provided a link to all hyperloop employees, selected media, and potential partners to join the event remotely. Even watching it from my laptop in my hotel room gave me goosebumps, I cannot imagine the exhilarations of those who were witnessing that historic moment live in the desert!
When Elon Musk released the Hyperloop Alpha whitepaper and made it open source in 2013, I was working on the Metro Regional Connector Transit Project in Downtown Los Angeles, a 1.9-mile alignment with 3 underground stations. For someone who already dedicated his career to transit architecture, the idea of hyperloop really excited me, made me hoping that one day I could become part of this mass transit revolution. I’ve been following hyperloop news ever since. When Virgin Hyperloop decided to hire it’s first in-house architect in July 2018, I knew that the wait was finally over.
“My name is Min-Tak Cheung. I am the best transit architect at my age here in Los Angeles.” In order to get the attention of the group of engineers who spent every minute trying to revolutionize public transportation, I decided to tell the biggest LIE in my life. Lucky me, because it’s Virgin Hyperloop’s first architectural opening, there was no architect in the room to prove my bold statement wrong.
Even though there was no in-house architect at that time, my research showed that Virgin Hyperloop had worked with star architectural firms like Bjarke Ingels Group and Foster Partners Group on multiple global projects, so those hyperloop employees in the interview room were no strangers to good architecture. I didn’t know what candidates I was competing against, but I knew it was an uphill battle and I only got one shot.
Telling a lie is easy. Making it sound like the truth is the most difficult part. In order to do that, I prepared an one hour presentation to convince them. Little did anyone realize that the one hour presentation took me more than a month to prepare and rehearse. Every slide had to be intentionally designed; every sentence had to be logically structured; every word had to be carefully picked; and every potential question had to be anticipated in advance.
English is my fourth language. I didn’t know how to say ABC until I was 10 years old. It’s a huge disadvantage compared to native English speakers, but I wouldn’t allow it derail my transit dream. For the whole month of August 2018, I spent every single waking minute to rehearse and fine-tune the same presentation speech for my on-site interview. I rehearsed it while I was driving; I rehearsed it while I was washing dishes; I rehearsed it while I was taking shit. I recorded my speech using my iPhone and replayed it to check which word I had too much foreign accent. There is nothing called “over-prepared” if you want something really badly.
It’s been more than 2 years since I joined Virgin Hyperloop, saying that I am proud of being part of the company is just an understatement. With the successful launch of the word’s first passenger hyperloop vehicle yesterday, we are ready dive into our next milestone project tomorrow - the Hyperloop Certification Center in West Virginia! Please stay tuned because the world is changing rapidly in hyperloop speed!
