The Official SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition II, will culminate on August 25-27, 2017, at SpaceX’s Hyperloop track. Hyperloop Competition II focus on a single criterion: maximum speed. The competition will include new and returning student teams, some of which have already built and tested their pods during the first competition.
Let’s say you build the world’s fasted pod and need to transport it from a local college in California to the Hyperloop track in Hawthorne CA. Not a massive undertaking. But, let’s say your University is based in Warsaw, Poland – what then? The solution – you call in DB Schenker.
Polish students designed the Hyperloop capsule in response to a competition announced in June 2015 by Elon Musk – the owner of SpaceX and author of the Hyperloop concept. 1,200 groups from all over the world enrolled in the competition. The final was reached by 24 teams – 18 designs from the USA, 6 from Asia and Europe, including one from Poland.
The capsule weighs 640 lbs., is 12 ft. long, more than 3 ft. high and nearly 3 ft. wide. The streamlined silhouette resembles a modern high-speed train. When preparing for the operation, DB Schenker was responsible for the documentation, all permits, customs clearance, transport to the airport, and for adequate and safe packaging of the cargo. It made it to Hawthorne, CA. The pod did arrive in record speed, but DB Schenker did not transport it at its own top speed of 745 mph. That’s the future of logistics.
The Hyperloop concept was proposed by Elon Musk, CEO of the aerospace firm SpaceX and Tesla. Musk’s Hyperloop consists of two massive tubes extending from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The Hyperloop Pod Competition is an incentive prize competition sponsored by SpaceX where student and non-student teams are participating to design and build a subscale prototype transport vehicle to demonstrate technical feasibility of various aspects of the Hyperloop concept.
The team at DB Schenker wish the Hyper Poland University Team, consisting of students and young engineers from Warsaw University of Technology and Wrocław University of Technology the best of luck. Break a pod!
