Science

Feds consider helping fund Elon Musk’s Hyperloop

The future of transportation was on display at Texas A&M University.

Eric Berger – Feb 1, 2016 3:52 PM | 199

The hyperloop pod design contest took place in Texas A&M University's Hall of Champions. Credit: Eric Berger

COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS—For years, the Hyperloop was a much buzzed-about myth. Finally, in 2013, Elon Musk provided a bit of substance by outlining the proposal in a research paper. People riding inside a tube, he said, could go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes at speeds exceeding 700mph. But Musk had rockets and electric cars and batteries to build, and he expressed a hope that others would step forward to help carry the idea forward as an open source project.

Now some help has arrived. While SpaceX is building a test track near its southern California headquarters, more than 100 teams of student engineers have spent the fall and winter months designing “pods” to run inside the Hyperloop. And perhaps more importantly still, this weekend US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx said that the idea merits consideration for a public-private partnership to develop it further.

On Friday and Saturday, the student teams gathered in central Texas to show off their homegrown designs, taking the first step toward building pods and making the future Elon Musk a reality. In these teens and young twenty-somethings, Musk has found not only some of the world’s brightest minds but also believers. Musk had inspired them, and in the students he had found the youthful energy to push forward a brash idea like the Hyperloop.

Texas A&M University hosted the event, staging the competition in its Hall of Champions, a football-shaped space adjacent to Kyle Field, its football stadium. The expansive hall had the feel of a convention floor, with booth after booth packed with eager students and innovative ideas.

During the two days, more than 115 teams were judged by engineers from SpaceX, Tesla, and academic institutions. The winners are likely to gain sponsors to build their pods for actual tests on a track this summer.

Ars, of course, couldn’t miss checking out the competition to see what concepts the students had brought forth.

Ars Video

The dreamers

Among the most buzzed-about booths was one put together by a group of students from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, one of the most prestigious engineering universities in the world.

A team of 10 full-time and 20 part-time team members had been working around the clock since September to develop a pod concept based upon passive levitation, in which a Halbach array of magnets suspended the pod 20mm above the Hyperloop track. This type of magnetic array required no onboard power and also kept the magnetic field outside of the pod. “It’s pacemaker safe,” explained Quint Houwink, a 19-year old sophomore studying aerospace engineering at the university. To look into the eager eyes of someone like Houwink is to understand what Musk has tapped into with the Hyperloop idea. Only students this young would be so brash to think they could introduce the world’s first radically new mode of Earthly transportation in more than a century.

Come on, I asked. Do you think this is actually going to happen? “It’s definitely going to happen,” Houwink said. “Oh yeah. I’m surprised that it doesn’t exist already. All of the technology inside the Hyperloop has been around for decades. The only thing we’re doing is putting that technology together. It’s not complex.”

Pressed for why he’s so optimistic, the answer, ultimately, is Musk. “Everyone in the Netherlands is a fan of Elon Musk,” Houwink explained. “He takes an idea and actually does something with it. It’s the same as SpaceX. There was not a company in the world that wanted to get involved in spaceflight because it was too expensive, and he said he would do it. And it’s the same with the Hyperloop. He took a concept and wrote a paper about it, and that stimulated students to do something about it.”

Quint Houwink, a 19-year-old from the Netherlands, was a member of the Delft University of Technology's successful Hyperloop team.

Ultimately, the top prize on Saturday went to a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but Delft finished in the top five, winning the “Pod Innovation Award.” All told, 22 student teams advanced to the test track competition this summer in California. They now must secure sponsors to raise tens of thousands of dollars to build out their pod concepts.

The policymakers

As if to underscore the notion that the Hyperloop is not just some tech mogul’s science fiction fantasy, Anthony Foxx bounded onto the stage Friday night in College Station. By attending the competition Foxx, who has been the US Secretary of Transportation since 2013, said he was signaling his interest in the Hyperloop. “It’s one thing to have a really cool new idea,” he said. “It’s another thing for that idea to go through the traps required to have that actually used by the mass public. That’s not to say this isn’t an idea that has merit. I’m here. It has merit.”

There are four primary modes of transportation that move people around the world today: trains, automobiles, boats, and airplanes. The last of those, the airplane, was invented more than a century ago. Foxx said his department must be open to new ideas in a world with a growing population and aging infrastructure.

“When I first heard about the Hyperloop, I was less than enthusiastic,” he said. “Reflexively I felt this proposal was impractical. Then I began to think, what if there had been a secretary of transportation when the automobile was first built or the airplane invented with that attitude? I feel that we have in our department a responsibility not just to continue the traditional forms of transportation, but a responsibility to nudge the future of transportation along.”

So Foxx held out the possibility of federal funding to spur development of the Hyperloop concept. He cited the department’s University Transportation Centers program, which provides more than $70 million annually to US universities to advance transportation technologies. “A concept like the Hyperloop is the kind of technology that could run through that program,” Foxx said. “The power of this Hyperloop competition is it starts to engage other minds in how do we get there from here. Hopefully we could develop it as a public-private partnership.”

For now the Hyperloop remains largely grounded in paper and PowerPoint presentations. But this weekend, hundreds of students took the first step toward changing that. The world may get a glimpse of what the Hyperloop would look like this summer. And federal money could ultimately turn the seeds of student ideas into real projects.

In other words, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop may be going somewhere.

Listing image: Eric Berger

Eric Berger Senior Space Editor

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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