Transportation Secretary Says Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Could Be Next ‘Moonshot’

After initially unveiling his concept for a “fifth mode of transport” back in 2012 (i.e., the Hyperloop system), Elon Musk stayed relatively quiet while unaffiliated businesses and startups raced to develop the innovative tech.

The mile-long track will be located right next to SpaceX headquarters in California.

The teams presenting during the Design Weekend were selected from hundreds of entries.

The SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition is being held at Texas A&M.

“For the students who have been involved in this, obviously, it’s a tremendous learning experience”, said UCLA architecture professor Craig Hodgetts.

“Our class provided the fundamental material that is still being employed”, Hodgetts said of ideas from UCLA students being used at HTT, where he is also the chief architect. Design efforts are already underway and construction is expected to begin this spring. The cable channel is reportedly offering teams $20,000 to build a functional version of the the pod. While much of the technology for building such a system exists, the challenge is combining them into a precision mechanism, Hodgetts said. (HTI), which is a sponsor of the SpaceX contest. Today, the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition kicks off at Texas A&M University, and a handful of teams will be given the green light to build prototype pods by the end of the weekend.

The concept is to have a system of pods that will transport people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than thirty minutes.

Foxx said the Hyperloop is a “very solid idea” that merited further beta testing, and that the federal government had a “responsibility” to support the idea. “There’s a lot of different designs, things that aren’t similar or even work similarly at all, and you can’t believe different teams came up with such different ideas”.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be on the ground floor of a brand new transportation system that could be the future, the new wave”.

“It was trial and error and looking for advice from our teachers and faculty adviser”, Bocanegra said.

El Segundo High School’s Hypereagles, hailing from just outside Los Angeles, spent time working on the air compressors and other systems that would propel the pod to close to 800 miles per hour. “It was tough, basically us coming up with ideas, something that may be fiction now but could become real”.