UPDATE: 12 HOURS LEFT!!!

Huge shoutout to our generous donors who have helped take us all the way to our goal of $10,000!!!

Thanks to your support, we are now able to build and control our pod's key components! That being said, we'd love all the support we can get in the final 12 hours of our campaign! Meeting a stretch goal of $12k will fully fund our production team, and make sure they have the equipment and safety gear they need for a great build.

Please join us by donating and sharing this project with your family and friends today!

-The Berkeley Hyperloop Team

Our Goal: 

We are a team of driven Berkeley students selected by SpaceX to compete in the Hyperloop Pod Competition this January. We hope to revolutionize transportation, develop cutting-edge technologies, and inspire Berkeley students to take on impossible-seeming challenges. Please join us in our efforts to raise $10,000, which will be used to build our fully-functional Hyperloop Pod!

Our Story:

In the summer of 2015, in a modest underground library, five Berkeley students passionate about technology decided to compete the SpaceX Hyperloop Competition. Six months later, at the end of Texas A&M;’s Design Weekend, they were one of the only twenty-two teams on their way to revolutionizing the face of global transportation.

What started as a humble initiative gradually grew into a robust team of engineers, designers, and logisticians all driven by a single radical idea. Berkeley Hyperloop’s approach to designing the Hyperloop pod is a unique one – while Hyperloop is inherently an eco-conscious, affordable and unprecedented challenge to conventional transport, bLoop believes that safety comes above all with an idea as sweeping as Hyperloop. Hence, in January 2017, passenger safety will be central to bLoop’s model of the Hyperloop pod, which will be tested at SpaceX’s mile-long test track in Hawthorne, CA. We will be competing against top engineering teams from universities such as MIT and Carnegie Mellon as well as independent teams to collaboratively create an indelible impact on the future of transportation systems.

Funding is essential to taking our renders off the drawing board and making them a reality. We aim to have our pod machined and assembled a month in advance of SpaceX's test track, so as to fully prepare ourselves for the competition. bLoop's high-profile project is not only transformational for the transportation industry, but also an opportunity to further showcase the spirit of entrepreneurship and scientific creativity here at Berkeley. Our project will draw the attention of media and high-profile industry giants, and we want UC Berkeley to be at the forefront of an engineering competition as unprecedented and unique as this.

Apart from external pride, bLoop is also about perpetuating the culture of problem-solving and innovation that has been part of Berkeley's fundamental values since its inception. Our engineers and designers are directly applying the skills they learn in their classes to real-life problems while working on the pod, while our logisticians and marketeers work their way around daily problems that arise in large corporations and technology firms. Our mission is to simultaneously establish Berkeley as the premier institution for innovation, creativity, and engineering efficiency, and sustain the distinct culture of scholarship at Berkeley.

Notable Sponsors: 

Berkeley Hyperloop is sponsored by the Berkeley College of Engineering. (Letter of Support: https://goo.gl/AQQTN2) We have faculty sponsorship from Professor Tony Keaveny, David Rich, and Dennis Lieu. We also have public corporate sponsorships from Autodesk, Samsung, Northrop Grumman, Modus Advanced, NI, and Ansys.

Using the software of our generous sponsor Autodesk, we've designed our pod structure from the ground up in Autodesk Fusion 360. In the same interface, we've analyzed stresses via FEA and been able to ensure that our pod is safe and has backup systems in the event of any failures. The support of Autodesk and our other industry partners have given us the tools to develop our ideas, and now it's up to all of us to get it built and launched!

Perks and Rewards:

For more information about our pod, you can find our renders, blog updates, and technical information here:

http://www.berkeley-hyperloop.com/

Explore the SpaceX Hyperloop Competition here: http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop