The SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition has a winner. 30 students representing the technical university of Munich (TUM) from Germany, who call themselves WARR Hyperloop, the German acronym for the school's scientific workgroup for Rocketry and space Flight. WARR was able to construct a prototype pod that can reach 201 miles per hour (324 kilometers per hour).
WARR beat out other competitors at SpaceX's headquarters in the Los Angeles-area finale. Every team needed to build a prototype pod that could travel down a .75-mile (1.2-kilometer) vacuum tube. The team that can hit the highest most speed would win. Elon Musk, founder father of SpaceX and one of the important proponents of hyperloop technology, met with WARR after their victory.
Weighing only 176 pounds, the team pointed to its 50kw electric motor as a essential cause in their sucess."By using an electric motor and therefore being independent from the SpaceX accelerator car used by most competitors to gain speed," WARR says in a press release, "the team gave themselves an advantage over the other teams."
Hyperloop technology has slowly been building over the years and this is not the first time a test run has hit around 200 MPH. However the question of implementation lies behind every competition and milestone. Musk these days announced he had obtained "verbal approval" for building a Hyperloop on the American east coast, but after preliminary curiosity over what this meant there has been no follow up. Competitions like this show that the drive to make this technology is plentiful, the drive to pay someone to build it, with costs estimated between $84 million and $121 million per mile, is probably less so.
Source:Verge
No comments:
Post a Comment