SUPRASTUDIO/Hyperloop

Elon Musk is inviting students and independent engineers to design the pod that will carry passengers 760mph along the Hyperloop.

Although neither Musk nor SpaceX is directly involved in the day-to-day workings of the Hyperloop -- being much too busy planning the space travel of the future -- his company has launched the prize to help accelerate progress and get universities involved.


Development of the tubular, vacuum transport system, which Musk first proposed in 2013, has always been a collaborative affair. It's being designed under the research company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, but that is made up of more than 100 engineers using the JumpStartFund crowd collaboration approach. The team includes employees working at Nasa, Boeing, SpaceX and universities. A further network of 25 students at UCLA's SUPRASTUDIO has been working on many of the design problems around the deployment of a new transit system, but now SpaceX is calling for a solution to the slickest part -- the capsule.

As with all recent Hyperloop news, the design competition is backed with a real world promise that demonstrates the system is much more than a pipedream. While ground is scheduled to break in 2016 for the first test track, SpaceX is promising to provide the best designs with a one-mile stretch of test track next to its Hawthorne, California headquarters where the best teams can test their "human-scale" pods over a competition weekend in June 2016 -- though it's promised in the competition guidelines that, "no human will ride in any pod or other transport device used on the test track during this competition". "The knowledge gained here will continue to be open-sourced," SpaceX said in a statement announcing the competition.

The deadline for applications is 15 September, 2015, and entrants can opt to design specific pod parts, from safety features to subsystems (the capsule's aerodynamics or its low-speed system, for instance). The judging panel will be made up of SpaceX and Tesla engineers, as well as academics. The competition guidelines suggest teams will get sponsorship from companies ahead of the test weekend, during a design weekend, to fund the capsule build. SpaceX will build its own demo pod, and we've already had a sneak peek at what that might entail, with slick concept imagery released in June ahead of the competition announcement.


There are no full details yet on the requirements for designs, but SpaceX has given interested applicants some idea of the technical questions it will be expected to have answers ready for -- safety mechanisms for power loss or a tube breach, communication systems, navigation sensors, expected drag of the pod, and heat flux in the capsule.

We have a further few clues as to what's expected from winning designs from past interviews with Dirk Ahlborn, CEO of JumpStartFund and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. He has said that passengers riding the Hyperloop need to feel like they are in a car, not a rollercoaster, saying, "1G is our limit". And last year Ahlborn corrected Musk's view that the capsule doors would open upwards, Delorean-style. He pointed out the doors would need to be extremely heavy in order to accommodate the low-pressure environment. The solution is that the pod sits within another shell capsule -- the shell capsule can have the practical features and heavy doors, the pod can have the good looks. But this will impact the final design of the pod and how it fits in with the shell.

So if you want to ensure the public will not only be able to hop aboard a free, 30-minute ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a pressurised futuristic tube, but can do so in style, make your case here.