The next wave of transportation is in the works as SpaceX partners with Texas A&M for a Hyperloop design competition. 

The competition aims at engaging students to design innovative Hyperloop pods that will go on to a test track if selected in January.

The Hyperloop concept is a brainchild of Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, and hopes to revolutionize transportation between cities. A tube with near-vacuum pressure will hold passenger and cargo “pods” that travel over 700 miles per hour. Over 1,400 teams from academia and industry have registered to compete in a design competition that will be hosted on Texas A&M’s campus in January.

The proposed Hyperloop route would link Los Angeles and San Francisco in California, with a projected travel time of 30 minutes. 

SpaceX wanted to partner with a large engineering school  like A&M to engage students in the project, said Magda Lagoudas, executive director of industry and non-profit partnerships in the Dwight Look College of Engineering.

“We were approached, and of course we were excited because this goes very well and aligns well with the college goals to promote innovation and what we call entrepreneurial minds,” Lagoudas said. “We thought this is something significant for us and we wanted to be part of it.”

Rodney Boehm, industry mentor in the engineering college, said in 2013, SpaceX gave a basic outline of how the Hyperloop might be implemented. SpaceX started the current design competition to push the push the project forward.

“They didn’t feel like it was moving fast enough,” Boehm said. “So they wanted to engage universities and other people to try to push this as fast as they can because they really believe in it.”

There are two main ways teams can participate — design the pod, which will hold between 20 to 25 people, or design a subsystem.

The signup deadline is Sept. 15 with a preliminary design submission on Oct. 22. The final design document is due Dec.15 and will be showcased in January, Boehm said.

There will be no explicit winner of the competition. Instead of ranking designs, corporations will choose in January which projects to fund. 

Matthew Wescott, aerospace engineering senior, is working on a pod design with a team of his peers. Wescott said the competition is a once in a lifetime opportunity to work on a project that could shape the future.

“I signed up for this because even if only parts of a design I contributed to as part of a team, only parts are chosen to be created into the final pod design that SpaceX wants to build, not for the half-sized track in June but the full-sized one, that’s a slice of a $6 billion capitally funded project,” Wescott said.

For more information on the competition, visit engineering.tamu.edu/hyperloop.