Announcing SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition II

From: Hyperloop Mailbox
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2016 3:56 PM
Subject: Announcing SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition II

You are on this email list as a university contact for SpaceX. We are reaching out to provide an update on the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition (www.spacex.com/hyperloop).

For those of you unfamiliar with the competition and/or Hyperloop concept, on August 12, 2013, SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk released a white paper on the Hyperloop, his concept of high-speed ground transport. In order to accelerate the development of a functional prototype and to encourage student innovation, SpaceX announced a competition in 2015 to design and build a half-scale Hyperloop Pod. For this competition, student teams from around the country and world came together for a Design Weekend in January 2016 to share their Pod designs. Top teams selected at Design Weekend advanced to the build phase and spent 2016 turning their designs into working Pods. These teams are currently preparing to take part in Competition Weekend on January 27–29, 2017, where they will race their Pods on a Hyperloop test track adjacent to SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters.

Based on the high-quality submissions and overwhelming enthusiasm surrounding the Hyperloop Pod Competition, SpaceX is moving forward with a second installment of the competition: Hyperloop Pod Competition II, which will culminate in a second Competition Weekend in Summer 2017 at SpaceX’s Hyperloop test track. Hyperloop Competition II will be focused on a single criterion: maximum speed. The second competition is open to new student teams interested in competing on the test track as well as to existing student teams who have already built and tested Pods to further refine their designs.

We have attached the Rules document.  There are some differences from Competition Weekend I rules, with two important updates being:

·         This competition will purely be a student competition.   

·         Pods will be judged solely on the maximum safe speed achieved with successful deceleration (i.e. not crashing).

Please feel free to pass this email along to relevant contacts at your university. We hope you will consider participating this year or encouraging students from your university to do so. To apply, your first deadline is filling out the Intent To Compete from at www.SpaceX.com/Hyperloop/Submissions  by September 30, 2016.

Note: This competition is a SpaceX event. SpaceX has no affiliation with any Hyperloop companies, including, but not limited to, those frequently referenced by the media.

Break a Pod!