Since it was announced, the Hyperloop — Elon Musk's potentially insane, potentially game-changing plan to shoot people in pods through giant tubes — has captured imaginations with its heady possibilities and sci-fi flair. Now, Space X is letting anyone in on the project, by way of a design competition.
The competition, announced on Monday, is aimed at university students and independent engineering teams, who will have until September 15th of this year to come up with a design for a pod. Then they'll have to build and present a prototype at Space X's Hyperloop Competition Weekend, which will take place in June 2016.
Entrants can also submit only the design for a pod, "subsystem," or safety feature, although there's no official competition for design-only teams. Instead, they will receive design feedback from an evaluation panel of "mostly SpaceX engineers, Tesla Motors engineers, and university professors."
(And the opportunity to "participate in a fun educational event.")
Teams that opt to build their designs will have the chance to take on sponsorships in January, when all the approved competition designs will be presented at Texas A&M University.
The competition notes make it clear that Space X and, by proxy, Musk, are not taking on the Hyperloop project as a commercial venture.
Neither SpaceX nor Elon Musk is affiliated with any Hyperloop companies. While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype.
However, Space X's involvement in the acceleration process is significant. The company plans to build a mile long "track" to test the competition pods next to its Hawthorne, California headquarters. All pod designs will assessed and vetted by Space X engineers before prototype construction begins, and Space X will likely be building their own prototype, although that will not be eligible for the competition. Finally, all submissions will remain open sourced after the competition.
Even though Space X does not plan to enter the commercial market with Hyperloop, a competition like this does put it and Musk's stamp on any potential industry that springs out of it. In addition to conceiving the initial concept and likely spurring the design of pods, the competition lets Space X largely determine what Hyperloop is going to look like, even if it never builds the giant tubes itself. The competition is going to come with specifications — for tube dimensions, speed of pods, how many potential passengers each pod has to carry — which means Musk will continue help shape the future of transportation, one way or another.
Musk explaining the idea for Hyperloop at All Things D