Test facility for Elon Musk’s 750 mph transportation system to be built in Nevada this month

A California company Hyperloop will start construction of the test facility in southern Nevada, AP reported. Some half a mile (one kilometer) track will be built at the Mountain View Industrial Park in North Las Vegas, with testing planned to start early next year.

The startup of the radical transportation concept will include a 50-acre facility, which will test a linear electric motor at speeds up to 335 mph, about half the speed aimed for a full-scale system, Hyperloop Technologies Inc. and the Nevada governor’s office said.

If developers’ plans are fulfilled, their intended 400-mile route between Los Angeles and San Francisco will take some half an hour. The company said their goal is to have a commercially viable, fully operational transport system ready by as early as 2020, to first transport cargo, and passengers later on.

The decision to launch the first tests in the upcoming months “represents another major milestone in our journey to bring Hyperloop to commercial reality,” the company CEO Rob Lloyd said in a statement.

The idea is to transport passengers in pressurized capsules through nearly-vacuum tubes, powered by magnetic attraction and solar power. Unlike the final concept, the first trials, called the Propulsion Open Air Test, will have a track open to the air, rather than in a tube.

The hard to believe concept of public traveling at nearly the speed of sound (which is 767 mph) was introduced by the famous SpaceX and Tesla owner and product architect Elon Musk in 2013.

READ MORE: Inventor Elon Musk reveals new super-fast ‘Hyperloop’ transport

“The physics of it works,” aeronautics and astronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology John Hansman told AP, adding that “the real question” is whether the project “will be cost-competitive with other means of transportation.”

Hyperloop Technologies takes its name from Musk’s proposed invention, but is not associated with the billionaire. To construct the testing facilities, the company has raised $37 million from investors and expects to obtain $80 million more in bond financing, it said, without disclosing the full cost of the test. No tax incentives were involved, local authorities said.

The California-based firm is just one of the companies vying to bring Musk’s concept of futuristic travel to life. A separate company, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) is also working on a test track north of Los Angeles, with its construction scheduled for next year.