MIT wins design competition for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop

– Anshuman Kumar, 22, leader of the Hyperloop team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, according to BloombergBusiness. Judges included university professors as well as engineers from SpaceX and Musk’s Tesla Motors Inc Besides their highly technical presentations, several teams highlighted not just the cross-disciplinary depth of their engineering talent but business and marketing acumen, complete with Twitter feeds, business cards, small-scale prototypes and highly produced videos.

Some will no doubt be skeptical of the Hyperloop, unconvinced that it can overcome the legitimate physical, financial, and regulatory challenges that lay in its way.

At present, SpaceX is preparing to build a five-mile test track in Quay Valley in California to test pod designs. All the knowledge gained through the competition will remain open source in a bid to flesh out the most appropriate design. And what can you expect?

Musk has said previously that Mars is such a big dream for him, that he’s said he’d happily die there; just not on impact. The SpaceX-run competition is aimed at fueling innovation around Hyperloop pods. In a talk at the StartMeUpHK festival in Hong Kong where he was a guest speaker, Musk said that by September, Space X would unveil plans to get humans to Mars within the next 10 years.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Hyperloop team won first place. Though the current team exists only to compete in the SpaceX competition, if there is demand, he would be more than willing to take on a new project next year.

UCLA graduate students and faculty are collaborating with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), one of two startups attempting to build a system.

From this city on Mars, we might make other spacecraft and launch on a journey that never ends. The company is also providing $150,000 in prize money for the winners.

HTT’s plans call for magnets to suspend pods and shoot them through tubes at 760 miles per hour.

The experience has been especially rewarding, the students said, because it isn’t exclusively academic.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is scheduled to deliver the keynote address. Within a week of the announcement, the company received 700 entries; the final total was 1,751, with 123 advancing to this weekend’s design competition.

In fact, there are now not one, but three Hyperloop test tracks in the planning stages.

By the fall, the 24-person team of UCI engineering students had formed and quickly began working day and night to create their levitating train, Defuria said. Well, guess what? A lot of people-many of them young engineering students-took him seriously.

Realistically, numerous students at the competition will be angling for post-college careers, with SpaceX sure to be at the top of many lists.

That kind of scientific egalitarianism was a theme Awad’s competitors also kept returning to: that anyone can contribute to, as Awad and others put it, perhaps “the next generation of transportation”.