Pittsburgh native ‘couldn’t resist’ working on hyperloop project

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It’s a long way from Rob Ferber breaking things and fixing them as a child in the garages of his family’s homes in Washington Heights and Chatham Village to leading the development on a project that could change transportation as we know it.

Or maybe not so long, considering Mr. Ferber is the son of an engineer who encouraged his childhood exploits. He’s now the chief engineer for Virgin Hyperloop One, the company that has developed the first system to transport people and cargo in vacuum tubes at speeds of more than 500 mph and hopes to be in commercial operation by themiddle of the next decade.

“My father let me play with things until I broke them and had to put them back together again,” he said. “I really learned a lot doing that.”

As a result, after completing a doctoral program at California Institute of Technology without a bachelor’s degree, he became what his Virgin Hyperloop biography calls “a serial entrepreneur and inventor.” He has started 15 of his own companies over the years, mostly in e-commerce logistics and battery technology, where systems installed and attributable to his inventions have provided more than 10,000 megawatt hours of power around the world.

Another Pittsburgher, Josh Giegel, is a founder and president of engineering for Virgin Hyperloop, but he and Mr. Ferber hadn’t met before Mr. Ferber was hired.

Mr.Ferber is passionate as he describes his role and the need to control the drive of fellow engineers to invent or create things for hyperloop when it can be just as effective to use existing products such as vacuum pumps and carbonfabric from jets for the frontof the hyperloop pod.

“We don’t need to invent another pencil,” he said.

Mr. Ferber was a founding team member at Tesla, the electric car developed by billionaire Elon Musk. He claims he may be the only top staffer to work on the project notto be sued by Mr. Musk.

“A lot of people who have worked for Elon don’t want to do it again,” he said.

After several intervening projects, he has been working on hyperloop since November 2016. The system is based on a concept proposed by Mr. Musk, although he’s not an investor or participant in the project.

“I couldn’t resist,” Mr. Ferber said of working on hyperloop.