Often called a real Tony Stark of the 21-st century, Elon Musk started his way with a popular PayPal service and nowadays regularly astonishes people with popularizing electrocars and even launching them into space. One of his latest highly-advanced transportation projects, Hyperloop, may appear in Ukraine.

This winter, Minister of Infrastructure of Ukraine Volodymyr Omelian announced a launch of the new project HypeUA, aimed at the development of transportation technologies in Ukraine. This is how Hyperloop may find its home in Ukraine among other countries. Let’s see how it works. Hyperloop is a superspeed transport technology, developed by Elon Musk.

The concept is pretty simple: instead of train cars, passengers will use special capsules which move in a vacuum tube at the speed of 1200 kilometers per hour. In 2016, the system was successfully tested in Nevada desert. There are already several locations where Hyperloop is planned to be installed in future: the USA, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain and India.

As for Ukraine, building Hyperloop is an initiative of Ministry of Infrastructure. Volodymyr Omelian stated that the project would have three stages: technology development with the involvement of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, construction of test launch area in Dnipro, and, finally, launching Hyperloop as a regular transport. Ukrainian Institute for the Future presented a detailed analysis, which shows that Hyperloop may be the fastest high-speed transport in Ukraine — thus, route Kyiv-Odesa will last 31 minutes.

As for the price, estimates vary from UAH 518 to UAH 4384, latter being currently higher than plane ticket tariffs.

According to Volodymyr Omelian, construction works to build a test area in Dnipro may start in a year.