I have been thinking a lot more of it since President Trump won the election.  But once the news started leaking out of Mar-a-Lago from people who would know, my thinking about it grew into genuine excitement.  My ideas about Monroe, Ohio, becoming the focal point of a new hyperloop terminal, grew some serious legs.  Most of the people involved probably don’t know what a hyperloop is, so I put together a pitch video to explain it to them and get some conceptual faculty behind the thought.  After all, why would little ol’ Monroe, Ohio, be such a hot spot for one of the great emerging technologies on Earth?  Once I learned that Jon Husted would be appointed as the Senate seat replacement for J.D. Vance, all the elements started clicking into place.  I like Jon because of a mutual friend we have, and I know he is very pro business.  However, it only got better once I learned that Trump was very concerned about the next governor of Ohio and wanted to clear the decks for a pick he wanted after DeWine was done in a few years.  After a few years of D.O.G.E., Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to be governor, which is pretty much a slam dunk on the election process.  And I know a lot of mutual friends regarding Vivek.  And, of course, his relationship with Elon Musk then became very important.  After all, J.D. Vance will be in the White House, and economic stimulation will be very important to the Trump/Vance White House.  It was likely that Vance would be in the White House for the next 12 years, 4 with Trump, then 8 with his own administration because people won’t want Trump to go away.  And things started to get hot on my idea.

A few days before all this information emerged out of Mar-a-Lago, Musk proposed a 20 billion dollar Hyperloop connection between New York and London.  Hyperloop is something I have supported for a very long time.  I even hired a few engineers from the University of Cincinnati open source program who worked at SpaceX to develop the emerging technology so I could learn all I could about the pitfalls of the technology.  And I realized what I needed to know.  Hyperloop is a very advanced high-speed transportation system that blasts passengers in a train-like pod at 700-1000 mph conceptually through a cushion of air through a tunnel with all the air removed, almost duplicating the vacuum levels of space to remove wind resistance.  Using magnets to pull the craft along, passengers can travel much faster than a commercial airline.  This trip from New York to London would happen in just a few hours instead of much of the day and would travel under the ocean through tunneling technology from one of Elon Musk’s companies, The Boring Company.  To many people, this all sounded like crazy science fiction from Musk.  But he’s serious.  They are already building a hyperloop in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates.  They have also built a preliminary tunneling system in Las Vegas as a kind of test bed.  China is also hard at work as it has stolen the idea from Musk.  So far, nobody has had success, but it’s not because the science is wrong.  It’s because doing such a thing takes enormous political will.  Musk has all the money in the world.  What he doesn’t have is what was forming in Ohio in the Monroe area, the political will to pull it off, from President Trump himself, who wants to do something big during his presidency with a new highway system effort that would rival what we did in America during the 1950s under Eisenhower.  Hyperloop had the opportunity to be bigger than America’s national highway system, and once that was started as a massive infrastructure project, it happened very fast and became normal. 

Monroe makes sense for the first national terminal because if there is a line for 20 billion dollars from New York to London, another 500-mile hyperloop from Monroe to New York could feed the country’s interior to the east coast with a trip that would take about 45 minutes.  And Monroe is only an hour’s drive from Columbus, Indianapolis, Lexington, Louisville and is between Cincinnati and Dayton.  Many people can drive a short distance to Monroe, where they could pick up a few hyperloop lines that would take them to places like Las Angeles, Vegas, and Orlando within a few hours.   And with such a hyperloop hub comes massive economic activity, which would feed the economically deprived hometown of J.D. Vance.  An economic goal that the Trump administration has for many such cities in America, especially along the Rust Belt.  With Governor Ramaswamy in Ohio, many good things can happen with a revitalized Trump economy that could pay down the debt and still generate several hundred billion dollars for something on this scale.  Elon Musk is working with them all to do such a thing, and the technology of The Boring Company makes it all possible.  While there are technical issues to solve, the rate of innovation isn’t the problem.  Political support is, and under the conditions described, Monroe, Ohio, suddenly looks to be the best place in the world for such an effort.  It would revitalize Middletown, Ohio, nearby Hamilton, and, of course, Dayton.  All areas that had been husked out to globalism.  Suddenly, a lot was possible for a relatively small investment. 

Musk knows how to solve this problem, which he needs to do before humans colonize the Moon and Mars.  Living on other planets will require tunnels to protect people from large doses of radiation on planets struggling with their own atmospheres until they are terraformed into habitable planets through science.  Developing a hyperloop on Earth would give The Boreing Company the experience to perform the same on other planets.  So, such an effort has value beyond the convenience of high-speed travel between long-distance destinations on Earth.  As I was talking to my good friend Senator Lang about all this, we shared an intense desire to bring more technology and aerospace imprint along that particular section of the I-75 corridor to make Ohio one of the most business-friendly places in the world.  A hyperloop terminal would go a long way to making that instantly happen.  And suppose there was a President Vance in the White House, a Governor Ramaswamy in the Ohio governor’s mansion, and the wealthiest person in the world who would do anything to get to Mars. In that case, there are a lot of dots that are getting connected if the right people help steer the ship.  So this isn’t a typical article for my usual audience, but for the powerful people I know who read in the background and can help unify everyone behind this effort.  The first thing I thought of as soon as Trump gave his acceptance speech the night of the election was, “Now we have the kind of president who can make the hyperloop possible.”  For many years now, I have considered Monroe, Ohio, the premier place to build such a terminal in the large amounts of land behind the outlet mall.  It would look techy and destination-driven, like Space Mountain from Disney World, only much larger, and impressive.  And suddenly, America would do something that would improve the lives of everyone on earth for centuries.  If only we could align the politics, which is entirely possible based on how things are shaping up. 

Rich Hoffman

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