Arizona’s team to compete in final international Hyperloop competition
On Sunday, about 60 members will watch their Hyperloop pod travel down a vacuum-sealed tube for the final Hyperloop competition at the SpaceX headquarters.
Members of the AZLoop team pose with their competition pod at the group’s 150-foot test track on the Arizona State University Polytechnic Campus, in the pre-dawn hours on Friday, Aug. 18. The team will finish testing and finessing before packing up Saturday and driving the pod to the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition in California. Photo by Ken Fagan/ASU Now.
PHOENIX — For the members of AZLoop, Arizona’s Hyperloop competition team, this weekend means a lot.
On Sunday, around 60 team members will watch their pod travel down a vacuum-sealed tube for the final Hyperloop competition at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.
The AZLoop team consists of Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, ASU and Northern Arizona University. The members of Arizona’s team have backgrounds in engineering, robotics, physics, astrobiology, marketing and business management.
Arizona’s team was one of 24 selected for the competition. More than 1,000 teams were considered.
The competition marks the second time SpaceX has had teams from all over the globe competing against one another to see who can achieve maximum speed in a 1,250-meter long tube without crashing.
Leading up to this weekend, it’s been a lot of long nights for the AZLoop team as it tries to get everything prepared before the final competition.
“My mom always said that it’s the sleepless nights when things are not going your way, when nothing works and Murphy’s law hits, that you have to keep going, keep your eye on the prize and remember why you did it,” said Lynne Nethken, co-lead of AZLoop.
“That has never been more true than this week.”
Hyperloop was created by SpaceX and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk and originally introduced in 2012 as a new method of travel between Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Through a partial vacuum and the use of magnets, pods float through a continuous steel tube above ground at speeds more than 700 mph. The new plan for Musk is to build an underground Hyperloop that runs from New York City to Washington, D.C.
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