Are you ready for the first new mode of transportation in over 100 years?

Imagine a world where you could travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 30 minutes, or Paris to London in 15 minutes. We are close to making this a reality. The Hyperloop, a high-speed transportation system initially proposed by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is one of the most exciting technological propositions in recent history. To accelerate its development, SpaceX announced an open competition for engineering teams to design their own Hyperloop pods to compete on a test track in 2016.

Formed on social media site reddit, rLoop is the only non-student team to reach the final stage of the competition.

With our designs approved by SpaceX, we now need your support to successfully manufacture our Hyperloop pod to make safe, cost-effective, and efficient high speed transit a reality.

We'd like you to join us on this journey of international collaboration and innovation.

Introducing the HyperLoop, the fifth mode of transportation as proposed by Elon Musk. The Hyperloop would enable passengers to travel between cities at over 700 miles per hour, allowing the ability to live in one city and work in another.

Frustrated by a proposed California "bullet train" that would take over 3 hours to go between LA and San Francisco, Elon laid out the basics of a proposed "hypersonic loop" that could do the same trip in less than 30 minutes. Elon described the Hyperloop publicly for the first time in a 2012 interview: 

"It's a cross between a Concord, a railgun, and an air-hockey table."
~Elon Musk

After Elon's public discussion of the HyperLoop, he was surprised by the overwhelming interest in the concept from the public. That interest inspired him to release the monumental Hyperloop Alpha paper in 2013, which presented a number of novel solutions to problems that would arise from traveling at hypersonic speeds inside a tube.

One problem was the requirement to eliminate rolling resistance from wheels. Another was the power and reliability issues associated with a complete vacuum in the tube. And the most difficult problem would be the build up of air pressure in front of the pod as it traveled at fast speeds, an effect known as the Kantrowitz Limit (or the syringe effect).

At that time, Elon was not sure what would happen to the concept once released - but the Hyperloop went viral. He had originally thought he would have to create a subscale version himself to iron out the details, but the overwhelming interest from the public in this new mode of transportation gave him the idea of creating a contest to crowdsource the solutions.

On June 15th, 2015, SpaceX announced a competition, open to the public, where teams could submit designs for pods and subsystems that could have a chance to be tested on an actual track at SpaceX headquarters in the summer of 2016. This is when rLoop was born.

In the comments section of an article about the competition on the SpaceX subreddit, a number of members began proposing that they should collectively form a team; that maybe strangers on the internet could come together, united by a common goal, and compete against top engineering companies and universities in the world.

Out of that initial conversation formed a team originally called RedditLoop, and later shortened to rLoop. The team is globally distributed, operates in the cloud, and communicates through internet services including Slack, Trello, GitHub, and beyond.

The team met daily online, with members from more than 15 countries working around the clock to put together a design package that would enable rLoop to make the cut from the 1,200+ initial submissions to the 120 teams invited to present their design to SpaceX and Tesla engineers at the Design Weekend Competition.

On January 28th, 2016, nine members out of the more than 250 on the rLoop team traveled to College Station, Texas, meeting each other in person for the first time. After two days of presenting their design package and answering questions to judges, the public, and other teams, the rLoop members gathered around to hear the results of the competition.

Hearing our name called as the only non-student team to be selected was an amazing moment that caught us off guard. We were excited because had worked so hard, but we quickly realized that now our ideas had to become a reality. We would have to take our team from the internet and translate all our digital work into a tangible prototype.

This is where you come in. With our designs approved by SpaceX, we now need your support to successfully manufacture our Hyperloop prototype pod. Your contribution creates an opportunity for you to advance Hyperloop technology and provides rLoop the opportunity to engage in a unique collaborative design experience. The complexity of this project places rLoop at the forefront of technology and innovation.

We'd like you to join us on this journey of international collaboration and innovation.

If you are located in the Bay Area and would like to help the team, please reach out and let us know. We welcome people of all skill levels.

When Elon Musk was asked by an rLoop team member what an individual could do to help advance the adoption of the Hyperloop, he replied; "I'd encourage people that are interested, to sort of join the competition. Just generally sort of support the idea of new forms of transport."

So listen to Elon and support rLoop today! Back us and show your support for the Hyperloop by rocking one of our limited edition coffee mugs, t-shirts, sweaters, bumper stickers or flight jackets.

New Poster Perks!

Sincerely,
The rLoop Team

rLoop In The Press

Our Affiliates

Who is rLoop?

Formed in June of 2015 on social media site Reddit, rLoop is the only non-student team to reach the final stage of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.

We are a non-profit, open source, crowd sourced think tank. Our goal is to democratize the Hyperloop by embracing open source and collaborative design and development. Over the last ten months, more than 200 members from over 15 countries have rallied behind this concept. Together we designed and presented a Pod concept to SpaceX and Tesla judges at Design Weekend this past January at Texas A&M University.

Introducing rPod

The rLoop competition Hyperloop pod is named rPod. The rPod needs to perform the mission of safe, cost-effective, and efficient high speed transit over the length of the Hyperloop test track while providing a comfortable cabin for a self-contained flight data recorder and passenger dummy, in order to win the SpaceX competition.

Mission Objectives:

For design details on rPod, check out some of the following documents:

Pod Cost Breakdown

By helping to fund the construction of our pod you’ll be shaping the future of transportation alongside rLoop’s global team. Join us in this journey of collaboration and innovation, and we’ll see you at the SpaceX Hyperloop Test Track later this year.

We’re offering a huge range of perks, from having your name written on the pod to exclusive swag to an actual levitating model of our pod:

Risks & Challenges

• Being an international team has had its advantages throughout the design phase but can be a weakness when manufacturing is required.

• Our plan to overcome this has been to use a centralized facility near many experienced team members and to leverage members from around the world to build subsystems independently before the centralized assembly of the pod.

• The hyperloop is new technology, being a pioneer into the field brings unknown risks of its own

• rloop has strived to overcome the unknowns that have arisen to date, and are prepared to overcome anything on our journey. An international team with experience in a variety of fields, we are uniquely prepared for any problems that stand in our way. Your help and contributions will ensure that rloop has the means to accomplish these goals.