SpaceX sets up Hyperloop Pod Competition for students and engineers

University students and engineers now have a chance to contribute to the ongoing development of Elon Musk's and SpaceX's Hyperloop, the high-speed ground transit system that Musk first unveiled in 2013. Since then, the Hyperloop has attracted a healthy amount of speculation and exploration, including the establishment of private (and non-affiliated) Hyperloop companies that are also working to make the Hyperloop a potential reality.

As SpaceX prepares for the construction of a one-mile test track near their headquarters in Hawthorne, California, they recently launched a design-build competition open to university students and independent engineering teams to propose their own Hyperloop human-scale transit pod.

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Entrants have the option to present their designs during Design Weekend next January and/or they can construct an actual pod to operate on the test track during Competition Weekend, currently slated for June 2016. And in case you were wondering, the pods won't be occupied with riders during testing.

SpaceX launched the competition aiming to accelerate the development of a functional Hyperloop prototype and, of course, to foster and promote student innovation. In the current design guidelines, entrants will have to address the pod's essential technical design features including navigation sensors, ground-operator communication, and vital safety mechanisms in the event that the tube loses power or suffers a breach. 

An in-person Design Weekend at Texas A&M University on January 9, 2016 will allow entrants to present their designs -- which could be a pod, a subsystem, or safety feature -- and have them evaluated by engineers at SpaceX and Tesla Motors and university professors.

Entrants must submit their Intent to Compete online by 5 p.m. PDT on Sept. 15, 2015. The full set of competition criteria will be released in August 2015. Read the current competition guidelines here.

Find more about the Hyperloop on our sister site Archinect.