Over the past year and a half, an international group of redditors has been been preparing for SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod Competition. Their name is rLoop (short for “Reddit Loop”), and last month they took home the Pod Innovation Award in the competition’s finals at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

But First… The rLoop Origin Story

rLoop’s origins can be traced back to a single comment in Reddit’s SpaceX community. On June 15, 2015, redditors in r/SpaceX were discussing an article about Elon Musk’s announcement of the competition when one user had an idea that struck a chord with others in the comments:

A flurry of comments followed, culminating in the creation of a new community called “Reddit Loop,” where an initial group of 54 users signed up to help design a prototype for a pod capable of safely transporting a human passenger through a vacuum-sealed hyperloop tube.

Unlike the predominantly university-based teams that had already begun work on their designs, however, rLoop started with some significant disadvantages: their team was unsponsored, they lacked organization, and their members were strangers from the internet from different countries, different time zones, different work schedules, and very different professional backgrounds.

Needless to say, their first attempt at meeting as a collective was chaotic. But they got organized quickly, using their Reddit community (r/rLoop) to discuss how they could make their team more efficient.

After gathering volunteers from r/SpaceX, r/engineering, and other Reddit communities, they picked team leaders by upvoting and downvoting nominees. Soon, they added Slack, Trello, Autodesk, and Google Hangouts to their workflow. Within a few short weeks, rLoop was a well-oiled machine, channeling the work of members from India, Canada, Poland, and a dozen other countries into a collaborative pod design upon which they made constant improvements.

Led by Canadian Brent Lessard (the team’s project manager, a mechanical engineer with a background in smart roof technology) and Belgian-born Tom Lambot (the team’s lead engineer, with a background in rocket propulsion at NASA Ames), rLoop advanced their design by segmenting roles and allowing team members to come and go as they pleased.

Lambot explains their novel organizational philosophy in terms any good Trekkie can understand.

“I always talk about Star Trek’s the Borg,” he shared, in a visit to Reddit’s San Francisco office last year.

“Everybody has a small part to play. The Borgs are very bad people—I want to say for the record—because they kill a lot of people. But I think it’s a very good analogy. Their goal was to assimilate the whole universe; our goal is to build a hyperloop. And we have a far lower body count.”

Design Weekend

In January 2016, after months of e-mailing, chatting, and video conferencing, the ever-changing, multi-national, Borg-like team converged at the Austin airport for SpaceX’s Design Competition.

While many university teams had been working together in a campus environment, with corporate sponsors and easy access to teammates, rLoop had no sponsors at the time, and for most people on the team, Design Weekend was the first opportunity they had to meet face to face.

Instead of a sponsor’s banner, they had a simple sign at their booth that read, “rLoop”—the lower-case “r” a nod to their Reddit origins, the “p” stylized to look like a tube with a pod traveling through it.

The name seemed a fitting summary of the team’s presence at the competition: “hyperloop” without the “hype.”

But while their booth looked humble, their design impressed the judges, proving that they weren’t just a group of internet underdogs. Their system of crowd-sourcing ideas and dividing their work into micro-tasks and making decisions democratically had resulted in a pod that could measure up to the university teams.

rLoop won the award for Best Non-Student Design—and the chance to compete in the competition’s finals.

Prep for the Finals

After Design Weekend, the members of rLoop went back to their respective hometowns (whether in Canada, India, or Silicon Valley) feeling validated, as they were one of just 30 teams left in the competition.

But while their design got high marks, the final stage of the competition required a physical prototype, which made their team geography—scattered across 14 countries—a disadvantage once more.

To compensate, members in the Silicon Valley area secured a workspace in Menlo Park, where those who could take time off from work traveled to build the pod.

As in earlier stages of the process, rLoop used a tech-savvy approach to keep the rest of the team involved with phase two of their pod design. We visited the build site ourselves in June and saw a Slack room projected against the wall, with a camera streaming live video of the build area to remote team members.

rLoop’s engineers kindly explained how they monitored acceleration, jerk, vibrations, and temperatures within the pressure vessel; how they used redundancies in their levitation system; and how they used open-source software for their numerical simulation.

(They also kindly forgave us for not understanding the vast majority of the science involved. But we encourage those who are interested in learning more to check out this video series highlighting rLoop’s build process.)

The pod took approximately six months to build, with frequent revisions in response to SpaceX’s updates to the hyperloop test track. Finally, on the night of January 21, the team met up at the build site to take their finished pod to Hawthorne for the final round of the competition.

rLoop, Meet Elon. Elon, rLoop.

Driving by car from Menlo Park to Hawthorne offered the team a not-so-subtle reminder of the original purpose of Elon Musk’s hyperloop proposal: to speed up intercity transportation.

“The trip took 13 hours,” Lessard recalls. “Incidentally, the same trip via Hyperloop would take ~25 minutes and wouldn’t be concerned with the weather.”

Upon arriving in Los Angeles after the overnight drive, those who shepherded the pod joined forces with all the team members who had been working remotely. Many of them had never seen each other outside of video chat, and most team members who flew in for the competition had never seen the pod in person.

“… we had over 60 members from 17 countries arrive in LA, meet face to face for the first time in our 19 month history, and see the hardware for the first time,” Lessard explains.

That Friday, rLoop presented their pod to the judges, who inspected and rated the design. While SpaceX’s partial vacuum track only permitted three of the teams to send their pods through the tube, the team still got ample opportunities to show off their pod.

On Sunday, the competition was opened to the general public, so rLoop—as the only team that formed on Reddit—had to introduce their design in a fittingly Reddit-y way.

“We rolled the rPod down the street playing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up,’” Lessard says, noting that after the event, SpaceX’s social media team joined in on the joke by putting a video of rLoop’s musical debut on the official SpaceX website.

While rLoop missed the opportunity to test their pod in the test track, the real moment of truth came that afternoon, when two special guests stopped by to see their pod: SpaceX’s Hyperloop Director, Steve Davis, and Founder and CEO, Elon Musk.

Davis introduced rLoop to Musk by saying, “This is the team from Reddit”

“We had a brief few minutes to describe the pod and how the team came together,” Lessard explains, but rLoop’s unique design and story piqued his interest.

“Elon was impressed with both the pod and how the team organized, and invited us back for Competition 2 in the summer … We certainly would have liked to see our pod run full speed in a partial vacuum in the tube that weekend, but we are committed now more than ever to continue our work and see the rPod fly in Competition 2.”

After meeting Musk, the team received further praise for their design from the judges, winning the award for Pod Innovation.

“The awards were a bit surreal,” Lessard says. “The team really deserved it. 19 months of work, with no existing organization or infrastructure when we started. We were that rag-tag team of underdogs working tirelessly for the chance to have a real impact. Fantastic to be recognized, super appreciative for the opportunity from SpaceX to compete, and extremely thankful to the community who supported us.”

After the awards ceremony, the team paused to commemorate the moment with a group photo, something they had little time for in the lead-up to the competition. When asked what’s next for the team, here’s what the two leaders of rLoop had to say.

Brent Lessard:

Immediately – sleep and family time. My daughter was born 2 months before we started rLoop, and my wife has been incredibly supportive throughout the journey. I think everyone`s immediate family and friends deserve thanks for their support as well, I know what it was like to be around me throughout the past 19 months! Once we debrief from Competition 1 weekend we’re going to refocus on our Hyperloop prototype pod, implement the full functionality we had designed, and test and demonstrate our scalable Hyperloop solution. We also have created a lot of value in terms of the organization and processes we’ve developed to facilitate global collaboration, we would like to see the rLoop model applied to other large-scale ‘moonshot’ projects. (Asteroid mining here we come!)

Tom Lambot:

That’s the $1M question. Priority is getting some rest and get back with friends and family who have been borderline neglected in the last year! After that, who knows. We know a lot about the hyperloop. We have a prototype that uses componants that can be scaled up. At the same time we have an amazing system to tackle moonshot projects. I really believe in crowdsourced engineering and citizen science/space. Collecting all the smartest mind of the world through one platform to bring humanity to the next level sounds like a fun summer project 😉

You can follow rLoop as they continue their work through their community on Reddit, r/rLoop, and on their website.