While the idea was simple, the engineering wasn’t. So, in June of 2015, SpaceX announced an open competition for independent and university engineering teams to design a half-scale pod for the Hyperloop and have it tested on a track at SpaceX.3,4 Within hours of the announcement, a post on Reddit encouraged the community to form a team for the competition. The hope was that strangers would come together and share their expertise to reach a common goal. It would be an experiment in open collaboration based on the passion and will of engineers.

From this suggestion, the world’s first crowdsourced engineering team was born: rLoop. The team grew organically through social media. They met daily using online tools like Slack and Google Hangouts. Visions and concepts for subsystems thrived in a non-hierarchical structure, while a lack of organizational obstacles enabled rapid iteration and accelerated progress. Eventually, the team consisted of 140 members from more than 14 countries—united by their desire to be part of a world-changing technology and to develop a design for the SpaceX Hyperloop competition.

As a global technology leader, TE Connectivity (TE) has provided rLoop with a home in the TE Silicon Valley campus, sensors and connectivity solutions to power the technology, and over 20 TE engineering advisors who have been sharing their expertise with rLoop. TE is proud to be a partner of a team that is not just inventing a new way to travel, but a new way to work as well.