Rob PegoraroYahoo Finance August 17, 2017
It may take years to see if Elon Musk’s dream of a hyperloop will lead to humans zipping between cities at hundreds of miles an hour aboard pods packed inside low-pressure tubes, but one team of college students is sure they can help lead the way there.
And starting later this month, they and 23 other teams will have a chance to prove it by competing in SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod Competition, where they’ll send their own pod flying down a mile-long test track at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Meet Nemesis
The University of Maryland’s UMD Loop team showed off their entry at the school’s College Park, Md., campus Tuesday morning. Their entry, named Nemesis, consists of two parts: an aluminum frame containing all the electronic and mechanical systems, and a streamlined carbon-fiber shell atop that.
“We are at about three months building it,” explained systems lead Mike Rennie, 29, in a room at UMD’s Institute for Physical Science and Technology. He put the cost of this prototype at about $90,000 after some machining mistakes and do-overs of components like the circuit board holding the pod’s computer.
The roughly 450-pound assembly starts its journey on four sets of polyurethane wheels as it gets pushed down the hyperloop tube by the functional equivalent of the spring launcher in a pinball machine. The pod should begin levitating magnetically at about 11 mph, said his colleague Shelly Szanto, 19, and continue picking up speed rapidly until its pusher plate is free of the launcher.
More:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/college-students-vying-build-elon-musks-hyperloop-200724101.html
