One Aggie team — “TAMU Aerospace Hyperloop”— will move forward to the building stage after this weekend’s Hyperloop competition.
The team of 35 Aggies won the Levitation subsystem category and will be progressing to the build stage of the Hyperloop Pod Design Competition, making them the only team from the state of Texas to win an award at the competition. Hyperloop is a potential future method of high- speed travel that utilizes a near vacuum tube to reach speeds over 700 miles per hour.
The competition, which took place Friday and Saturday at Texas A&M, summoned crowds when it opened its doors to the public. With teams coming from around the world, Kyle Field’s Hall of Champions was filled with innovative ideas and concepts for this potential new form of transportation.
“This is a moment that changes the world, I think. This is the moment that changes transportation, and you’re going to be able to look back and say you were a critical part of it,” A&M President Michael K.Young said in his speech at the competition.
The competition ended with a presentation of the awards and a surprise appearance from SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk. Elon Musk’s acknowledgement of TAMU Aerospace Hyperloop prompted a response from the university.
“Congratulations to the finalists and all the student teams who competed in the first-ever SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition,” said John Sharp, chancellor of the Texas A&M University System. “I am especially proud of Aerospace Hyperloop, a finalist representing Texas A&M University and its world-class engineering program in the next round.”
Along with the TAMU Aerospace Hyperloop team, 21 other teams will move on to the next competition weekend in California. In addition to those teams, a handful of teams may be chosen to move forward.
“There are approximately three to 10 more that will be announced in the next week. On those teams we wanted to go back and review their final design packages, just to make sure that it was the right thing to do,” said Steve Davis, Director of Advanced Projects At SpaceX, during the award ceremony.
“MIT Hyperloop Team” took first place overall, followed by “Delft Hyperloop” from Delft University of Technology all the way from the Netherlands in second, “Badger loop” from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in third, “Hyperloop” at Virginia Tech in fourth and “HyperXite” from University of California Irvine coming in fifth place. A full list of the winners can be found at hyperloop.tamu.edu.
The teams selected to move forward in the competition will improve on and build the designs they presented at the competition. These prototypes will then be tested at the first-ever Hyperloop test track in California this summer.