... could travel anywhere in the world in 1-2 hours

Is this the future of hypersonic transportation? Russia's version of Elon Musk thinks so.

Destinus

You can't eliminate distance, but in near-space, where there's little air resistance, you can move pretty dang fast. In laymen's terms, that's the founding principle of a company that's developing a hypersonic hydrogen-powered vehicle capable of moving cargo between continents at unheard of shipping speeds.

Destinus SA, based in Switzerland, is on a mission to build near-space vehicles and related infrastructure, and the company just got a big boost in the form of a seed round of 26.8 million Swiss francs ($29 million). Founder and CEO Mikhail Kokorich is akin to Russia's Elon Musk, a serial entrepreneur who invented (and actively holds patents) on innovative enabling technology in newspace. His previous company, Momentus, is now one of six Y Combinator companies to become public.

"We are excited about the broad support for Destinus, says Kokorich, "which further validates the potential for clean, hypersonic travel to anywhere in the world in 1-2 hours. We plan to use the funding to continue the development of our hydrogen airbreathing and rocket engines and test the first supersonic flights powered by hydrogen engines in the next 12-18 months. We have already made significant progress and have designed and filed patents for the unique subsystems, such as a hydrogen active cooling system, enabling a highly reusable hyperplane flying at almost the speed of a rocket."