HAWTHORNE, CALIF.—After quinoa bowls and chopped salads on a patio beside the Venice Beach boardwalk, six Ryerson University aerospace engineering students and an entourage of advisers and supporters climbed into two rented SUVs and began driving southeast through Los Angeles’ glaring night.
They were headed back to the Comfort Inn Cockatoo near LAX, where one double occupancy room had been piled with electronics and converted into a makeshift lab, but decided to make a detour first. The SUV turned onto a wide street that borders the headquarters of SpaceX, the rocket company founded by tech swami Elon Musk, and slowed to a crawl.
Running alongside the roadway was a steel tube resting on concrete cradles. As the SUV crept down its 1.25 kilometre length, the tube was just that — a tube. But 36 hours later, with both ends sealed and the air inside pumped down to almost a vacuum, the tube would become what the word printed on its side said: a Hyperloop.
Musk vaulted the Hyperloop concept into the public consciousness in 2013. Inside a tube where the air pressure had been lowered to a fraction of the atmosphere of Mars, a levitating passenger capsule could accelerate to near-sonic speeds.
A Hyperloop would reduce the travel time from Toronto to Montreal to just 30 minutes. A downtowner could grab after-work bagels at St-Viateur and be back in Toronto in time for the Raptors game.
Musk himself, busy with SpaceX and his electric car company, Tesla, declared Hyperloop an open-source design and invited anyone to try and make it a reality. His proposal spawned a cottage industry of doubters. But enough engineers and entrepreneurs were captivated that competing Hyperloop startups have attracted tens of millions in funding.
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Yet none of them have publicly demonstrated a full, working prototype — a capsule that speeds successfully through a depressurized tube. Two years ago, in a bid to accelerate the technology, Musk tweeted that he wanted to build a Hyperloop test track and stage a competition for students.
Within a week of the official announcement, SpaceX was deluged with more than 1,700 applications. By the day of the competition last month, after a year and a half of increasingly complex design challenges, just 27 teams remained.
Ryerson was invited to exhibit a wheel system they had designed. The University of Waterloo and their “Goose I” pod, named after the aggressive waterfowl that swarm campus each spring, was the only Canadian team attempting to race a capsule.
Both teams had emerged into the California sunlight after months foxholed in Ontario labs. Few of the students were getting academic credit for this, which was part of the appeal: building a totally new transportation system means, by definition, veering off-curriculum.
“You don’t learn Hyperloop in school. There is no Hyperloop engineering,” Graeme Klim, Ryerson’s team lead and an aerospace engineering graduate student, explained.
Economists and urbanists are still debating the feasibility of Hyperloop. But for these students, Musk’s challenge was irresistible.
“What changed a lot of the world was the ability to move goods and people quickly and more efficiently. Look at the railroads,” said Yazan Obeidi, Waterloo’s team captain and a systems design engineering undergraduate.
“It’s not just a hypothetical, ‘Ooooh, this app could make the world better,’ ” Obeidi said. “This is actual infrastructure that could advance humanity.”
**
The original four modes of transportation — boats, trains, cars and planes — have certainly evolved in recent decades. Cars can be electric, self-driven, and hailed by virtual assistants; Chinese bullet trains hit speeds upwards of 400 km/h.
But these are incremental improvements to existing technologies. The last of the original four modes, airplanes, was invented more than a century ago. And each mode has drawbacks: cars are convenient but slow and bad for the environment; planes are fast but expensive and really bad for the environment.
Elon Musk called Hyperloop the “fifth mode” of transport because, if successful, it would be “truly new” — as well as fast, convenient, affordable and sustainable.
What makes Hyperloop different is the environment inside the tube. The thick air of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level is a drag, literally. Avoiding or overcoming air resistance is why cyclists tuck their bodies in tight to their bikes, why planes travel at high altitudes, and why spacecraft need rockets to get from the soup of sea level to the near-vacuum of space. The faster a vehicle goes, the more power it needs to beat air drag.
By reducing the air pressure in a Hyperloop tube to approximately 100 pascals — equivalent to one-sixth the atmospheric pressure on Mars — the passenger capsules inside a Hyperloop require very little energy to go very, very fast: up to 1,200 km/h, just below the speed of sound.
Travelling super fast in an almost-vacuum creates new problems, though.
Wheels are unstable at such speeds and create friction, so the passenger pods should float. Because the system runs in extremely low pressure but not an absolute vacuum — maintaining a vacuum is tricky and costly — some air would inevitably build up in front of the pod as it plunged through the tube; that air needs be released or diverted. A few other necessary subsystems: a method of propelling the pods to super high speeds, a method of braking, and a source of energy.
Before the first successful airplane, there was a zoo of pseudo-kites and flapping-winged ornithopters. Because no one has ever built a viable Hyperloop — early “atmospheric railways” and later vactrains, variations on the same theme, fizzled — it’s not clear what type of technology works best for each component.
When Musk and SpaceX launched the student competition, they were creating a crucible for diverse, even radical, designs.
“The whole point was to innovate,” Steve Davis, a SpaceX director, said in a video created for the competition. “If you gave somebody at this point in society a train track and said build a train, most of the trains are probably going to look the same. So what we did is create a Hyperloop test track that could accommodate almost any type of levitation.” (One rule: no human or animal passengers.)
Waterloo’s pod project was conceived on Reddit. “SpaceX just launched a Hyperloop Pod Competition geared at universities,” a student wrote, linking to the contest rules. “Just wondering if anyone thinks we could pull anything off?”
Early on, the “Waterloop” team chose to use air bearings as its levitation system, the same approach Musk proposed in his 2013 white paper. The system pushes air through nozzles or pores in flat casters to create a thin film of air between the pod and the floor of the tube, like pucks on an air hockey table. Pneumatic levitation is cheap, low friction, and well understood, but that doesn’t mean it’s problem-free.
To levitate continuously, the pod’s four casters need an air source. A scuba shop in Kitchener sold them two dive tanks for $500.
But the standard tank connectors didn’t synchronize with the pod’s other systems, so they customized one. The team ran calculations to be sure the new connector would work. But when they went to have the tanks refilled, the scuba shop balked.
“They were like, ‘Who are these children,’ ” remembers team member Robert Riachi. “ ‘Are they trying to blow something up?’ ”
A faculty adviser wrote a letter vouching for the device’s soundness. That letter convinced a facility in Toronto to run tests, after other facilities turned them down. The device worked as the students had calculated. The facility issued the team a certificate, which they took back to the scuba shop.
The tanks were refilled after a two-month ordeal, just one obstacle on the path to levitation. An even bigger challenge: air bearings are typically used to move heavy things slowly, not light things quickly.
“So we’re kind of like exploring, almost pioneering it as we go,” says Obeidi, the team captain for phase one of the competition.
“I fell asleep during two midterms,” Riachi says.
As Waterloop assembled their pod, in downtown Toronto another team was at work. Ryerson’s Graeme Klim was in his bedroom when he saw Musk’s tweet in the summer of 2015.
Klim was interning at Safran Landing Systems, a maker of aircraft landing and braking gear. He spoke to advisers there and recruited other Ryerson students. After a month of discussions, the team decided to focus on one subsystem: a set of deployable wheels, a crucial element in a Hyperloop.
The majority of the teams in the competition, and at least some of the Hyperloop startups, use magnetic levitation, a system that exploits magnets’ repulsive forces to float and propel a pod. “Maglev” pods need to hit a certain speed to start levitating, so wheels are necessary for initial acceleration.
Air bearing designs use wheels, too: any air supplied to the pod must be stored on board (like Goose’s scuba tanks) or drawn from outside. Wheels can be used at lower speeds to conserve that resource. Wheels are also needed if the Hyperloop tube repressurizes, halting a pod as air drag returns.
Designing wheels for a Hyperloop pod required unusual considerations. A typical pneumatic tire would expand and contract as it transitioned from normal to vacuum conditions, so Ryerson’s wheels are made of solid polyurethane. The team also sourced special dry bearings, because vacuums cause materials to “outgas,” leaching the lubrication from a greased bearing.
In January 2016, both Ryerson and Waterloo travelled to Texas for SpaceX’s pod competition design weekend.
Of the original 1,700 teams that applied, fewer than 8 per cent were invited to showcase their plans. The goal of encouraging design diversity had been a success: there were designs for pods that would weigh over a ton and pods that could fit into carry-on luggage.
At the close of the weekend, Ryerson won the award for “subsystem innovation,” the only Canadian team to win an award.
Waterloo was invited along with 21 others teams, including those from MIT and Carnegie Mellon, to Hawthorne, Calif., for competition weekend, where SpaceX’s headquarters are located — and where the world’s first functioning Hyperloop test track would be constructed.
**
The day of the pod competition, a hot, bright Sunday, one street flanking SpaceX’s headquarters was closed to traffic.
Outside the stanchions erected at one end, observers queued in a long line, many wearing shirts with the SpaceX logo or the phrase “Occupy Mars.” (SpaceX has contracts from NASA to run resupply missions to the International Space Station, but Musk’s ultimate goal is to make it easier and cheaper to reach Mars.)
Inside the stanchions, a combination of street party and science fair was underway. Foosball, air hockey and pool tables sat on the road, across from food trucks selling ice cream sandwiches and poke bowls (a Hawaiian raw fish dish and Angeleno food obsession). Each of the 33 teams — more pod teams and subsystem exhibitors had been invited after the design weekend — had a tent to show off what they had built.
Spanning one side of the road, protected by pylons, was the 1.25-kilometre-long Hyperloop tube itself. SpaceX employees had spent months constructing it, first laying down concrete supports and cradles, then adding 15-metre sections of solid steel tube. At 1.8 metres wide, it is roughly half the scale of a full passenger-ready system.
The day before, the Ryerson team and their supporters had spent the day running from their room at the Comfort Inn to a U-Haul outside, both of which had been transformed into mini labs.
Inside the hotel room, Tayo Shonibare and Wintta Ghebreiyesus, two electronics and controls team members, checked data from sensors on the five wheels they had shipped from Toronto. Once satisfied, another team member carried them to the U-Haul, where Klim and a faculty adviser installed four in a mock wooden pod. The fifth would sit atop their exhibition table.
The same morning, members of the Waterloo team had taken a break from the many tests the pods were being subjected to inside SpaceX. Only after successful demonstrations on a 12-metre open-air track and a smaller vacuum chamber, among other trials, would teams be selected to actually compete on race day.
Waterloop had already tested their pod on a 900-metre open-air track in Waterloo. But at every step of this process, there were unknowns.
“It’s such a big project and there are so many pieces, and we’re all learning as we’re doing this,” Obeidi said.
On Sunday, competition day, the assembled media learned that only three teams had been selected to demonstrate their pods under full, depressurized conditions: the teams from MIT, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and the Technical University of Munich.
As reporters were corralled in the heat to await the first public pod run, a murmur swept the crowd. Elon Musk entered the staging area, flanked by Eric Garcetti, the mayor of L.A.
Garcetti spoke first, segueing quickly into remarks on U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel ban, which had taken effect less than 48 hours earlier.
“I came from the airport today, and this is an apolitical event, but this is a nation of immigrants, immigrants like Elon and others,” Garcetti said.
The crowd cheered. The Hyperloop competition was exactly the kind of initiative many in the tech community worried would be stymied by Trump’s indiscriminate ban on travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries. One Ryerson student who is from Iran landed in L.A. on Thursday; had his flight landed a day later, it is unclear what would have happened to him.
Garcetti introduced Musk, who congratulated the “smartest engineering students in the world.”
Musk left after his remarks. But as everyone waited for the tube to be pumped down for the next pod, he returned, plunging into the crowded area where the team’s tents were set up.
Musk is a celebrity everywhere, but in a crowd of student engineers, he’s a demigod. Flocks of people trailed him like supplicants as he visited a few of the tents pointed out to him by SpaceX staff. The students he visited went wide-eyed or immediately turned their back on him to take a selfie.
The teams he skipped were downcast. As he bypassed the Carnegie Mellon tent, a collective groan went up. “Dude, we were so presentable!” one student wailed. “What went wrong?”
With the tube finally ready, Musk’s handlers ushered him back to the staging area. Musk had already walked past the Waterloo tent when Yazan Obeidi darted out in front of him, somehow bypassing his sizeable detail.
“Hey Elon, want to see the Canadian pod?” Obeidi asked. The billionaire entrepreneur veered off course, following Obeidi.
In Waterloo’s tent, he spent a few minutes surveying their pod as Obeidi listed its specs. Finally a staffer insisted: they really had to go. Musk left.
The entire team looked dazed. “I have to sit down,” Obeidi said.
It was night by the time test runs were done and the awards handed out. The team from Munich won for top speed — only around 100 km/h, which is a fraction of the speeds the pods were capable of, but as fast as feasible with the constraints of this first trial.
It was clear all the teams were looking forward to August, when phase two of the competition would take place.
**
Team Ryerson left Hawthorne happy. The CEO of the Hyperloop startup that is arguably the furthest ahead, Hyperloop One — the company plans to run their own full-scale prototype demonstration early this year, and has agreements to explore both passenger and freight routes in Dubai — had given Ryerson a shout out at a major economic forum in Toronto last September, and on competition day, the co-founder of the company dropped by.
Two Saturdays after the competition, Team Waterloop was already buried in sketches and simulations. The second phase of the competition will be judged by a single criterion: maximum speed.
The teams that had made it onto the test track in January all used magnetic levitation. But Waterloop would be sticking with air bearings, and the students seemed genuinely unruffled at not having been selected that day.
“We really believe in the idea of pneumatics,” Obeidi said.
Magnetic levitation is much more expensive; the technology is also used in bullet trains, which have been built at astronomical costs. Some of the student teams that used maglev had spent five times as much as Waterloo to build their pods, and prototype costs would grow exponentially when applied to a full-scale system.
Even deep in the Hyperloop peanut gallery, few debate the actual technology. While combining them is hardly trivial, the components to create a Hyperloop already exist. The biggest doubt is the cost.
Waterloo’s pod “is scalable to be a real Hyperloop that people will pay for, that makes sense financially, versus a really expensive research project,” Obeidi argued.
Later, he added: “It is a big deal, the competition, it’s what started this whole thing. But really, we’re all putting in the sweat and blood and tears for a reason, and a lot of it, for a lot of people, comes down to that one day we want to have a better transportation system.”
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