Virgin Hyperloop: An Open Letter to Tom Cruise
Dear Tom
We’ve held our breath while you cavorted around the world’s tallest structure, Dubai’s mighty Burj Khalifa. We searched for any trickery involved when you hung on to the exterior of an Airbus military carrier in flight. Searched in vain, I might add, it turns out you were really hanging on. No green screen behind you. Just blue sky. You’ve leapt across buildings in the cause for our entertainment, snapping your ankle in the process. And we have been drip-fed some spectacular awesomeness from your next Mission Impossible chapter.
Therefore, on the eve of the release of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, may we interest you in an idea?
It’s called the Hyperloop. Hear us out, Tom. For the sake of any further Mission Impossible movies, You’re going to love what we have to tell you.
The race has been on to develop the first Hyperloop – a concept first uttered by, you guessed it, Elon Musk in 2012. And the first company to successfully trial the Hyperloop was, you guessed it again, Virgin.
Tom, if Burj Khalifa excited you enough to bring the next level of excitement to the big screen, well. The Virgin Hyperloop is now already under construction in Saudi Arabia. It will be the fastest form of transportation on earth that, well, the world has ever seen.
Over 1000km/h. A speed attained by travelling through a vacuum.
That’s breath-taking on a few different levels.
The Virgin Hyperloop will take you from Jeddah on the Red Sea across the Arabian peninsula to Abu Dhabi on the Persian (aka Arabian) Gulf in an hour and a half. That’s an hour, repeat one hour, faster than Etihad flight EY3202 on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
How on Earth does it do it?
Well, it doesn’t run on rails for a start. The Virgin Hyperloop will glide on an electromagnetic field above rails. It operates in a 98% vacuum as well, which means that there’s neither friction from rails nor a gas-rich atmosphere it’s cleaving at near supersonic speeds.
As Sir Richard Branson is wont to do, he paints a picture of the unfamiliar and extraordinary, then grounds it in stuff we can relate to, such as what to expect in terms of creature comfort while travelling. And it almost certainly never materialises as it’s portrayed. Yes, the comfort levels you will see on any promotional material will be accurate for Upper Class passengers. For the rest of us, it’ll be high-yield A380 economy standards.
However, the rest of us don’t care. We’ll be moving faster and safer than anything we’ve travelled in before.
Perhaps I should have mentioned something upfront, rather than leave it to the tail end of this explanation. The Virgin Hyperloop is electric and therefore, emission free.
But back to you, Tom. I have no doubt that you and your working partner Christopher MacQuarrie can magic up an incredible world-threatening plot, rooted in zeitgeist and with the Virgin Hyperloop forming an integral part of the plot whilst being pivotal to THE NEXT GREAT TOM CRUISE STUNT.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced you guys are already thinking about it.
Yours sincerely (and hoping for a credit in a future Mission Impossible film),
The team at Inside Telecom
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