Months ago, Elon Musk hinted at the idea of SpaceX holding a “student Hyperloop pod racer competition.”
Well, turns out it wasn’t a joke, as SpaceX has officially announced an official contest open to university students and independent engineering teams.
While no humans will actually ride in the pods, and more details are set to be released in August, we do know that the main goal will be to build “human-scale pods” to be tested on the Hawthorne, California test track, set to be constructed adjacent to the SpaceX headquarters.
To me, the cool thing about the competition is the fact that Elon Musk has stated he has no plans to build a Hyperloop infrastructure with the SpaceX name on it.
He genuinely just wants to help hyperloop technology come to fruition sooner rather than later, but does acknowledge the fact SpaceX will likely build a pod “for demonstration purposes.”
Teams have until September 15th to submit their intent to compete, and will need to submit the final designs by December 15th.
A “design weekend” is actually already scheduled for January of 2016 at Texas A&M University, which will be the first opportunity for competing teams to get feedback from SpaceX officials on their hyperloop pod racer designs.
