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Washington Hyperloop slims down its pod racer

Washington Hyperloop team
Washington Hyperloop team members show off their Husky spirit at an on-campus unveiling of this year’s pod racer. Veteran team member Mitchell Frimodt peeks out from within the pod’s carbon composite shell, while the guts of the racer are on display on a table at left. (Margo Cavis Photo)

Could this year be the year for Washington Hyperloop? For the fourth time, the students on University of Washington’s pod-racing team are taking aim at the top prize in tech titan Elon Musk’s competition, and this time they’ve got their racer down to fighting weight.

This year’s purple pod racer, which looks like a cross between a bobsled and a miniaturized bullet train, was unveiled May 10 at UW’s Husky Union Building.

“Our pod this year is about 60 percent of the weight of last year’s pod, with the same propulsion specs,” engineering senior Mitchell Frimodt, one of the veterans on the Hyperloop team, told GeekWire. “That’s our performance boost.”

Propulsive oomph per pound is a key factor in what’s become an annual tradition that plays out at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. This year, Washington Hyperloop and a dozen other collegiate teams are due to compete on July 21. Competitors will show off the racers they’ve built, and the best of the pack will face off in time trials conducted in a mile-long tube that’s been built just across the street from SpaceX’s rocket factory.

The fastest team wins. And in the previous three competitions, the fastest team has been WARR Hyperloop from the Technical University of Munich in Germany. This year, Munich’s student engineers are racing under a different team name — TUM Hyperloop — but they’re expected to be every bit as formidable.

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WARR wins Elon Musk’s Hyperloop III pod races

Elon Musk and Mitchell Frimodt
SpaceX/Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Washington Hyperloop team member Mitchell Frimodt check out the UW team’s racing pod at the Hyperloop competition. (Washington Hyperloop via Twitter)

WARR’s Hyperloop pod registered a world-record top speed of 290 mph in its final run through the mile-long enclosed test track at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

That’s higher than the top speed that WARR reached during last August’s Hyperloop contest (201 mph), as well as the speed reported for Virgin Hyperloop One’s test pod last December (240 mph). WARR also posted the top speed in the first round of Hyperloop pod races, conducted in January 2017.

“Very impressive,” Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, told the WARR team after today’s record-breaking run.

Dutch-based Delft Hyperloop was the runner-up in the finals with a top speed of 88 mph, and Switzerland’s EPFLoop team was No. 3 with 53 mph.

Although Washington Hyperloop didn’t make it to the three-team finals, the UW team’s leaders said they had an “amazing competition experience” over the past week.

“We finished in the final four, and #1 in the U.S.,” they said in a text message exchange with GeekWire. “After a week of insanely hard work, we powered through the testing stages and managed to get some open-air runs in the tube.”

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Washington Hyperloop unveils its next pod racer

Hyperloop pod racer
Courtney Klein, Washington Hyperloop team member Sev Sandomirsky and Marc Lemire take a look at the pod racer during its unveiling at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

The Washington Hyperloop team is counting on the third time being the charm.

But it’s not just a question of superstitious sayings: For SpaceX’s third university Hyperloop competition, the three dozen student engineers and entrepreneurs on the University of Washington’s pod-racing team have reworked the design for their vehicle from the ground up.

“Everything on this pod has been redesigned, manufactured,” said team co-leader Nicole Lambert, a junior who’s majoring in mechanical engineering. “It’s a completely new pod from the last two years.”

The pod racer had its formal unveiling at UW on June 1. It’ll be put to the ultimate test next month,  when SpaceX hosts a series of practice runs and races inside a mile-long enclosed test track next to the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

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Teams gear up for a Hyperloop showdown

Hyperloop test tunnel
SpaceX’s Hyperloop test tunnel stretches for a mile next to the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Teams from the University of Washington and more than 20 other universities and colleges around the world are converging on SpaceX’s Southern California headquarters this weekend for the company’s second Hyperloop pod competition.

Like many sequels, this contest could well be more intense than the original.

Hyperloop I, which was conducted in January, scored the contestants on multiple scales, including design and safety ratings. In contrast, the Hyperloop II competition on Aug. 27 will be judged solely on the basis of which team’s pod is the fastest.

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SpaceX sets Hyperloop II contest for August

Hyperloop pod racer
The UW Hyperloop team’s sleek pod racer is unveiled at an Eastlake lab building amid the glow of purple spotlights. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

SpaceX’s second Hyperloop competition for student-led teams is coming up in August, with the University of Washington’s crew listed among two dozen contestants.

Hyperloop Pod Competition II, set for Aug. 25-27 at SpaceX’s test track in Hawthorne, Calif., follows up on the first round of pod races that took place in January. The mile-long, low-pressure tube is designed to simulate high-speed transit trips on a scaled-down basis.

Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, came up with the Hyperloop concept four years ago as a means of getting from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles in just a little more than a half-hour.

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UW Hyperloop team unveils purple pod racer

Hyperloop pod racer
The UW Hyperloop team’s sleek pod racer is unveiled at an Eastlake lab building amid the glow of purple spotlights. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

The University of Washington’s Hyperloop team showed off its sleek pod racer and let fans take a peek under the carbon composite hood, one week before a national competition in California.

For the team’s roughly 35 students, the Jan. 19 unveiling at the GloCal Composites Lab in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood was an opportunity to celebrate the purple-tinted fruits of their labor.

“Everyone is committed to being a part of something bigger than themselves, grander than the team itself, and ultimately as a part of history as we think about the next mode of transportation,” UW engineering student David Coven, one of the team’s leaders, told the gathering of students and faculty, guests and journalists.

In its grandest form, the Hyperloop concept calls for shooting passenger pods through tubes at near-supersonic speeds. SpaceX founder Elon Musk came up with the idea in 2013 as a means of traveling between San Francisco and Los Angeles in about a half-hour.

Musk is leaving the commercialization of the concept to others, but in the meantime, SpaceX is sponsoring a college competition for scaled-down models of the pods. Coven said he and other students at UW jumped at the opportunity.

“We couldn’t help ourselves,” he said.

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Crowdfunding fuels UW Hyperloop’s final dash

UW Hyperloop team
Members of UW’s Hyperloop team are ready for the pod races. On the left side of the pod track, from front to back, are David Coven, CJ Grijalva, Max Pfeiffer and Jasdip Singh. On the right, from front to back: Ted Coleman, Luke Marcoe, Nicole Lambert and Isaac Perrin. (UWashington Hyperloop Photo)

The University of Washington’s Hyperloop team is getting ready to compete in a set of pod races aimed at blazing a trail for a new means of near-supersonic travel – but they need a little help to get to the starting line in California.

This week, team members kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on UW’s Useed online platform to raise $20,000 for their quest.

“it’s paramount for our current and future success,” Luke Marcoe, the team’s marketing and public relations lead, told GeekWire in an email.

The campaign already has gotten into high gear: More than $10,000 was raised on the first day, thanks to contributions from just two donors.

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