Josh Giegel has come a long way from his childhood working on cars with his father in the garage of their home near McDonald, Pennsylvania.
Mr. Giegel, 32, still works on cars, but now as one of the founders of Hyperloop One, the cars the West Allegheny High School graduate works on can travel 700 miles an hour on a cushion of air inside a low-pressure tube. Mr. Giegel is also president of engineering for Hyperloop, the California company that last week chose a proposed Pittsburgh-Columbus-Chicago route as one of 10 projects that will continue developing their proposals to implement the emerging technology.
Not bad for someone who expected he might someday manage a small engineering firm.
Mr. Giegel got his interest in engineering naturally because his parents are engineers, father David with Mitsubishi Electric in Cranberry and mother Tommilea with the Beaver Valley Power Station in Shippingport. After getting his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Penn State — don’t remind his parents, both Pitt grads — and his master’s from Stanford, he was contemplating continuing on for his doctorate when he landed an interview with Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
“There’s nothing I think I’d never want to do less than spend four years in academic research,” he said Friday in an interview from London. “Grad school really opened my eyes to what was possible. You don’t have to live in the world you live in. You can live in the world you create.”
At SpaceX, he worked to develop rocket technology for the private company owned by Elon Musk, a billionaire who also owns the high-end Tesla car company, among other ventures. After 3½ years there, he worked for two smaller companies before joining Hyperloop — formed by other Musk veterans — when it launched in a California garage in 2014.
“I wanted to do something I could ride or something I could use,” he said. “I wanted to make something for Johnny Everyman.”
Hyperloop reached its “wow” moment Aug. 2, when a prototype pod reached 192 miles an hour in 1,000 feet in a test tube built in the Nevada desert, the first display that its concept would work.
“When we started this … the comments we got back were, ‘This is never going to happen,’ ” Mr. Giegel said. “Now it’s near reality. The thing I think about most is we found as a company we could get together with 300 other people and galvanize them for one goal.
“For a pretty analytical guy, [the successful demonstration] was pretty emotional moment … that shared experience everyone has at the same time.”
Now that Hyperloop has proven its concept works, Mr. Giegel said, the next steps are to continue refining and simplifying the technology so that it is practical and affordable. He’s convinced advances in manufacturing technology and electronics will allow that to happen quickly so the company can reach its five-year goal.
“That’s the billion-dollar question,” he said. “We’re building the airplane, the airport, the runway and the sky all at once. I think we can build a Ferrari for the price of an Audi.”
Mr. Giegel said he’s happy to see his home area is part of the Midwest Connection proposal that’s moving forward. He’s from a family of huge hockey fans and when they attended a Penguins playoff game in Columbus last spring, he dreamed that making the trip in a hyperloop in about 15 minutes would allow Pittsburgh fans to fill Nationwide Arena.
“The more we started looking at the connection between these three cities, the more we started to see how it makes sense,” he said. “You take two industrial cities (Pittsburgh and Columbus) and a money city (Chicago) and put in the Hyperloop to connect them in a half hour, those three effectively become one mega-city.
He’s also noticed a change in Western Pennsylvania. When he left in 2003, many of his friends and classmates were leaving, too, but many have started returning with the emerging high-tech economy, he said.
That brings him back to the lessons he learned growing up in an engineering family and working in the garage with his father, where he was amazed at how much his father knew about vehicles. When he reached middle school, Mr. Giegel realized his father really didn’t “know” that much but used his curiosity as an engineer to try things until he found something that worked.
Family vacations were usually two-week trips that inevitably ended up visiting a science museum along the way. He pokes fun at himself and his wife, Stephanie, also an engineer, by telling the story of their wedding night spent in bed looking at a live engineering feat on a laptop.
It’s all part of what led him to have what Hyperloop calls an “unmatched background in thermodynamics, heat transfer, compressible fluid mechanics, power cycles, turbomachinery, and nonlinear structural analysis.”
“If ever there’s a fish in water, it’s me,” he said of being involved in developing revolutionary technology.
“One of the things [my father] taught me was the only thing standing between you and what you want to do is you.”
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