Purdue Hyperloop Team Heads to Pod Competition

The Purdue Hyperloop team gather around their pod which they will test this weekend. (photo courtesy Purdue University)

A team of Purdue University students is heading to California this weekend to complete in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. The team will compete against 30 others to demonstrate its Hyperloop pod, a capsule designed to travel at high speeds through a transportation tube.

The competition, which begins Friday and runs through Sunday, will take place at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The teams will test their human-scale pods, which are being designed to ultimately carry passengers or cargo, at a test track constructed next to the company’s headquarters.

Richard Brookes is the project manager for Purdue’s Hyperloop team and says the project has become a learning tool for students.

"A lot of people that I consider very good engineers have told me this is never going to work and it’s crazy," said Brookes. "So hopefully, at the end of this competition, I think people will look at it a little differently."

The winners will be announced Sunday. SpaceX will hold a second Hyperloop Pod Competition this summer, which will have a specific focus on maximum speed. You can learn more about the Purdue Hyperloop project from Inside INdiana Business reporter Kylie Veleta, who highlighted the project in the INdiana Connections e-newsletter in March.