Berkeley Hyperloop to SpaceX Pod Competition

We are Berkeley Hyperloop, a UC Berkeley student project team that represents Cal at an international scale at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. Our highly diverse team of 40 undergraduate and graduate Berkeley students designs, tests, and manufactures a high-speed pod, learning and growing in our journey.  Please join us in our efforts to raise $10,000 so that we can achieve our speed goal of 300 mph and make Cal proud.

Imagine a world where you could go from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes. That is the innovative vision behind Elon Musk's original Hyperloop Alpha concept, and is also the driving force behind the Hyperloop Pod Competition, where teams from around the world strive for speed in the 1 kilometer-long vacuum tube test track at the SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne, California.

Our Goal

We seek to solve novel technological paradigms to win the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, while simultaneously equipping Berkeley students with the skills needed to evolve into inventors and innovators. Berkeley Hyperloop provides a unique opportunity on campus as we design and build a high-speed land vehicle that operates in a vacuum—an engineering problem found nowhere else. In the process of solving this unique problem, our team of dedicated students gains unparalleled experience. We proudly celebrate a culture of problem-solving, radical open-mindedness, first principles reasoning, safety, and innovation.

When you support Berkeley Hyperloop, you are giving young engineers the opportunity to develop and apply their skills to a completely new engineering problem.

Our Story

In a modest underground library in the summer of 2015, five UC Berkeley students passionate about technology decided to compete the inaugural SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. They would go on to design, build, and test two unique pods that both qualified as finalists for the competitions in 2017 and 2018.

Now, we begin our design cycle for Summer 2020 with our eyes set on winning it all. To reach the speeds necessary for winning the competition, our pod will require high performance components that are as powerful as they are lightweight. Efficient electric motors will be driven by high voltage power systems, controlled by high precision sensors in our navigation system, and fixed to a lightweight structural carbon fiber chassis. If we meet our goal on this campaign, we will make this pod dream a reality.  

How do we use our resources?

Our highly specialized components and testing are extremely resource intensive. We design, manufacture and test a majority of the pod in-house helping us maximize our learning and part customization whilst minimizing costs. However, achieving the lofty goal of making an extremely lightweight and high-speed pod requires expensive materials such as carbon fiber and titanium. Passing SpaceX safety requirements is also one of our biggest challenges and warrants us to build expensive testing equipment that guarantees the safety of our vehicle.

Berkeley Hyperloop is in this for the long term and we will keep working towards the development of sustainable and efficient transportation technology. Being a student team, we make sure that the next generation of Berkeley Hyperloop engineers will have the resources to continue working on technological and engineering breakthroughs.

We thank the following companies for providing our team with engineering software, expertise, job opportunities, and other key resources.

Visit our website to learn more about the team!

Conlon Meek, Project Manager - conlonmeek@berkeley.edu

William Vassetizadeh, Crowdfunding Director - williamvasseti@berkeley.edu