Elon Musk Promises Longer, Curved Tunnel For Future Hyperloop Contests

Shortly after the 2019 Hyperloop Pod competition ended, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that next year’s Hyperloop competition will be held in a six mile curved vacuum tunnel. Previously, the competition was held in a straight three-quarters of a mile test tunnel which is located at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Engadget reports: The Hyperloop competition is a student engineering challenge where teams are invited to design and build a prototype vehicle to travel in the potential Hyperloop network. The vehicles must be self-propelled and achieve maximum possible speeds without crashing. At this year’s competition, in which a team from Technical University of Munich (TUM) reached a top speed of 288 miles per hour before damage occurred and an emergency stop had to be performed, Musk mentioned the possibility of expanding the competition to include tunneling as well. “We’ll consider a tunneling competition,” Musk said at a Q&A about the competition, TechCrunch reports. “I think a tunneling thing would be pretty exciting. Because as I just articulated the primary challenge is how do you tunnel effectively, especially how do you put in the reinforcing segments and get the dirt out effectively — it’s harder than it seems.”