The first ride with human passengers of Hyperloop, the supersonic train of the future

Designed by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group and Kilo Design, Virgin Hyperloop’s Pegasus capsule makes history in the Nevada desert, successfully transporting its first passengers.

The Pegasus capsule made by Virgin Hyperloop after a year of close collaboration with the architecture studio BIG and the design studio Kilo, has carried out its first travel test with passengers on board. Held at Virgin Hyperloop’s DevLoop site in 500 meters of Las Vegas, where the company has already performed over 400 tests in unoccupied capsules, the demonstration was supervised by the ISA (Independent Safety Assessor) certificate, and its success marks a historic moment in the transportation industry, as Pegasus officially becomes the first manned and fully functional system for Hyperloop travel.

Hyperloop is a new technology, fast and sustainable, based on the transport of goods and passengers inside low pressure pipes, a proposal originally born in the United States thanks to research carried out by the South African entrepreneur Elon Musk. The type of vehicle tested by the Virgin company allows to reach a speed of over 1,000 km/hour. The role of BIG and Kilo in Pegasus was to design for the first use of the capsule, while defining the design language and characteristics of the future Virgin Hyperloop vehicles. While the production vehicle will be larger and will accommodate up to 28 passengers, this 2-seater capsule was built to demonstrate that passengers can actually travel safely in a Hyperloop vehicle.

“Virgin Hyperloop can radically transform the way we travel. The immediacy of an elevator in a modern skyscraper combines with the speed and distance of air travel to create an on-demand system that transports passengers at supersonic speeds,” says Bjarke Ingels, Founder and Creative Director of the BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group. “Virgin Hyperloop with our Pegasus capsules changes the experience of moving across a country or even a continent to that of a metro system - one that could eventually cover the entire globe and push global travel in a more sustainable direction.”

Project:
Virgin Hyperloop Pegasus
Architects:
BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group
Co-Designer:
Kilo Design
Fabrication and Engineering Support:
Aria Group
Client:
Virgin Hyperloop
Location:
Test Site in Nevada, Las Vegas
Pegasus Pod Size:
12 smq

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