Students from MIT have become the perhaps unsurprising first winners of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop competition, launched to create the concepts that might bring his new super-fast transportation pod to the world.
Although he’s pretty busy launching rockets right now, Musk turned up at Texas A&M University to deliver the good news and hosted a 30-minute Q&A with more than 100 teams who’d signed up for the competition.
The MIT team, along with 21 others, will get the opportunity to test their designs at Musk’s own one-mile test track this summer, which is being built opposite SpaceX’s California HQ.
Musk first announced plans to build a five-mile test track in Texas, so it looks like the company is working on both short and long-range testing by building two separate tracks.
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The idea for the transport pods was first outlined back in 2013, with an estimated $10 billion price tag to bring the solar-powered, almost 800MPH pod to life. That’s about 300MPH faster than a normal passenger plane.
There’s nothing like a student hackathon, judged pretty seriously on everything from feasibility for testing, system applicability and design detail, to help bring your ideas to life quickly and cheaply.
We’ve reached out to SpaceX to find out exactly how the university teams will work with the company to get the designs ready for summer testing.
➤ 22 Student Teams Will Test Pod Design at SpaceX Hyperloop Test Track [Texas A&M via The Verge]
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