Elon Musk’s Future of Transportation Competition
Elon Musk's SpaceX hopes that by next summer, the world will get a glimpse of how his idea of a high-speed ground transportation system, the Hyperloop, will really work.
Elon Musk hopes that by next summer, the world will get a glimpse of how his idea of a high-speed ground transportation system, the Hyperloop, will really work.
Musk’s SpaceX has announced a competition to design and build “the best Hyperloop pod,” or the capsule that would hold passengers and travel in the proposed tube-like Hyperloop, a concept Musk detailed in 2013.
The Hyperloop has a Twitter account, and its first tweet, naturally, was about the pod competition.
The company is inviting university and independent engineering teams, and will build a one-mile track adjacent to its Hawthorne, Calif. headquarters so teams can test their designs during a competition weekend in June 2016.
According to the competition guidelines, teams will have until September to officially enter the competition, and will have to submit their final pod design by December. SpaceX will detail rules, criteria, and tube specifications by August.
Since we first unveiled the idea for a new high-speed ground transport system called the Hyperloop back in 2013, there has been a tremendous amount of interest in the concept. We are excited that a handful of private companies have chosen to pursue this effort.
Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies. While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype.
For this reason, SpaceX is announcing an open competition, geared towards university students and independent engineering teams, to design and build the best Hyperloop pod. To support this competition, SpaceX will construct a one-mile test track adjacent to our Hawthorne, California headquarters. Teams will be able to test their human-scale pods during a competition weekend at the track, currently targeted for June 2016. The knowledge gained here will continue to be open-sourced.
In his 2013 white paper, Musk envisioned a transportation system that would be safer and cheaper than driving or flying, and would the ideal solution for large cities that are less than about 900 miles apart.
“Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment,” Musk wrote back then.
His Hyperloop would involve a low-pressure air tube and pods that would travel the length of the tube. Solar panels on top of the tube would guarantee a self-powering system that would shuttle passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 350 miles, in 35 minutes each way. He has estimated the system would cost about $6 billion to build.
Musk is the chief executive of privately held SpaceX as well as electric-car maker Tesla Motors Inc., he is also the chairman of solar-panel company SolarCity Corp.
Source: MarketWatch
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