University of Cincinati: Hyperloop UC

A team of University of Cincinnati students are on the ground in Hawthorne, California, this week as they take on the world’s brightest engineers in a high-stakes competition to reinvent transportation.

On Sunday, Jan. 29, Hyperloop — a tube-based passenger concept that involves rocketing pods of people between cities at the speed of sound — will take a major step forward when UC and 28 other teams (from as far away as Japan and the Netherlands) send their prototype pods barreling through a mile-long test track.

Students are contributing toward a novel technology that would allow travel and shipping at roughly 200 mph faster than commercial airliners, an advance that effectively would allow passengers to live 400 miles from work and still commute in under 40 minutes. Think Cincinnati to New York in under an hour. The travel pod could achieve such high speeds because it floats in a vacuum inside the tube. 

UC Magazine is along for the ride as 30 students from Hyperloop UC travel to SpaceX, the corporation headed by billionaire inventor Elon Musk, who dreamed up the open source pod contest that drew more than 1,200 entries. Just 30 teams (one dropped out) advanced beyond the design weekend in Texas a year ago and were invited to build, and now test, their pods during competition weekend Jan. 27-29.

In the final test, pods will be loaded into the mile-long 6-foot diameter de-pressurized steel Hypertube, then fired forward by a “pusher” as teams wait to see if their design holds up under stress and stops before the end of the track. Those that don’t brake in time will barrel into a foam catch pit at the end. Hence the SpaceX hashtag #breakapod.

Follow our live coverage as we share a behind-the-scenes look at UC’s team, their creation and the culmination of an adventure that started 18 months ago when a single UC student was inspired by Musk’s notion to improve transportation.