SpaceX Asks: Can Your School Design the Hyperloop?

Student design competition created to engineer and test Elon Musk’s Hyperloop.

Concept drawing of Hyperloop pod. Courtesy of Tesla Motors.

Concept drawing of Hyperloop pod. Courtesy of Tesla Motors.

This coming January, Texas A&M will host a competition to design Elon Musk’s dream: the Hyperloop transit system. The SpaceX competition will be open to both university students and independent engineering teams.

Right out of “Futurama,” Musk’s Hyperloop consists of passenger pods traveling through an infrastructure of pressurized tubes. According to Musk, these pods should be able to move at an impressive 800 miles per hour.

The designs will be judged by SpaceX officials. By the summer of 2016, these designs will be tested on a one-mile track that will be near SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Concept picture of Hyperloop track. Courtesy of SpaceX.

Concept picture of Hyperloop track. Courtesy of SpaceX.

“Competitions such as these bring out the best in our students,” said Dr. M. Katherine Banks, dean of engineering. “Given that innovation is the essence of engineering, partnering with SpaceX is important to provide students with the hands-on experiences needed to prepare them to make an impact in today’s increasingly technological world.”

Concept Image of Hyperloop pod seating and hull. Courtesy of Tesla Motors.

Concept Image of Hyperloop pod seating and hull. Courtesy of Tesla Motors.

Banks isn’t kidding. Getting such a revolutionary and controversial transit system to work safely would change the world and have significant ripple effects on the economy.

Currently, SpaceX and Elon Musk do not own, or have affiliation with any company aiming to make this “pipe-dream” a reality. The competition signup page notes that it is designed to accelerate the vision through prototype creation.

The current rules on the competition’s intellectual property protection have yet to be released. Therefore, is this Musk’s way to find the best ideas and act as an angel investor down the road? Or are his fingers in too many pies at the moment to give the Hyperloop his full attention considering his involvement with Tesla Motors, Powerwall, Gigafactory and SpaceX?

The deadline for applications for intent to compete is Sept. 15, 2015 and can be found here. For a complete list of rules follow this link.

Will you be competing? Do you think the Hyperloop is feasible or a disaster waiting to happen? Let us know below.

Written by

Shawn Wasserman

For over 10 years, Shawn Wasserman has informed, inspired and engaged the engineering community through online content. As a senior writer at WTWH media, he produces branded content to help engineers streamline their operations via new tools, technologies and software. While a senior editor at Engineering.com, Shawn wrote stories about CAE, simulation, PLM, CAD, IoT, AI and more. During his time as the blog manager at Ansys, Shawn produced content featuring stories, tips, tricks and interesting use cases for CAE technologies. Shawn holds a master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Guelph and an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.