Lifestyle
Hyperloop Competition Receives a Big Lift from SpaceX
If you did a timeline of all the major Elon Musk announcements in the last five years, it would have a lot circles on the X axis. One circle would include the Hyperloop white paper.
Musk “dropped” off the concept to the world back in 2013 and moved on. However, last year Musk and SpaceX introduced a Hyperloop pod competition for college students to take place at SpaceX’s test track in August 2016.
Most Elon Musk devotees probably know a bit about the Hyperloop white paper released in 2013 and how this “fifth mode” of transport offers a low-cost solution versus high-speed rail proposals floating around the U.S.
The Hyperloop concept from Musk involves a low-pressurized air tube structure — say from San Francisco to LA — and propels passengers in a “pod” compartment at speeds of more than 700+ mph. The pod shoots through this low-pressure tube with induction motors intermittently placed in the track that moves the compartment. These motors “would provide a reboost roughly every 70 miles,” according to the paper.
After seeing SpaceX land a rocket on a tiny barge in the ocean, this doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Companies like Hyperloop Technologies and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies are currently working on proof-of-concepts and test tracks.
In January 2016, SpaceX held the Hyperloop Pod design competition at Texas A&M and evaluated more than 124 concepts, which included best overall concept and innovation. Thirty plus university teams were picked to move on to competition weekend at SpaceX’s Hawthorne facility, where a mile long test track — six foot in diameter steel tube — is being built.
The MIT Hyperloop team won the best Overall Design Award while the Pod Innovation Award went to the Delft Univ. of Technology in the Netherlands. The event also awarded BadgerLoop, from the Univ. of Wisconsin, with the 3rd place and the Pod Technical Excellence award.
BadgerLoop’s pod will reach speeds of up to 200+ mph in a matter of 15 seconds with a run lasting approximately 43 seconds.
Being based in Chicago, I reached out to the BadgerLoop team in March and interviewed multiple members of the team, including a Co-President, the Electrical and Controls Manager and, of course with Hyperloop, the team’s Levitation Lead.
Teslarati: So how many students are on the BadgerLoop team?
David Van Veen, Operations Director: We have a 150 dedicated members helping in all aspects related to the competition and have about 75 student engineers working on the pod project.
Brett Sjostrom, Co-President: We have something special with this team, we’ve been engineering students for three or four years and BadgerLoop is going up against teams with much more experience. The MIT Hyperloop team is made up of graduate students and some of those folks interned at NASA, SpaceX and Boeing.
The aluminum sub track in Hawthorne will be flat and this allows the BadgerLoop team to move past the air bearings concept from Musk’s white paper. BadgerLoop is implementing a Halbach Arrays concept.
Sjostrom: Halbach arrays are a certain configuration of magnets that amplify the magnetic field on one side, and negate it on the other side of the array. Passing this array over the aluminum sub track creates eddy currents which give our pod its levitation.
Teslarati: How does your Hypeloop pod differ from other teams?
Van Veen: Other teams are using passive Halbach arrays which provide just vertical levitation but there’s no forward propulsion to it.
Bill Carpenter, Levitation Lead: Our design creates drag from the levitation but by spinning the wheels — using drag — in the opposite direction, we can create thrust to move the pod forward. Our pod has a total of ten Halbach Array wheels, four in the front and back, and two in the middle.
So, it’s negating our drag and providing a truly frictionless ride. It’s also providing that contactless stability in all directions. Plus, it’s an active system so we can control it, speed it up or slow it down.
Here’s an example of BadgerLoop’s Halbach arrays on a wheel. The configuration of magnets amplifies the magnetic field on one side, and negate it on the other side of the array. Passing this array over the aluminum sub track creates eddy currents, which produces the pod’s levitation.
Obviously, stability is important with a $150 million test track located next to the company’s headquarters. Most of SpaceX competition specifications for a test run involve many safety hurdles to actually get on the track in August.
According to Badgerloop, these pods will reach speeds of up to 200+ mph in a matter of 15 seconds with a run lasting approximately 43 seconds. That’s why BadgerLoop’s pod will have more than 140 sensors on board for real-time safety data and avoid overheating motors and other components.
Teslarati: Can you provide an overview of your pod controls and sensors?
Eric Amikam, Electrical Team Lead: Our pod will have 114 sensors. These include proximity sensors for between the pod and the rail, acceleration and gyroscopic data. We’re also taking in almost 50 different temperature points that create a full, live thermal heat map of our pod.
Teslarati: Why so much thermal sensing?
Eric Amikam: We’re in a vacuum and don’t have the benefit of convective heating like you normally do, so we have to make sure that everything is very thermally regulated. We have a variety of thermistors placed all throughout the pod and it goes to one central location. We can look at our dashboards in the middle of a run.
If one of our motors is getting dangerously hot and we don’t want to break that motor, we can just shut it off remotely.
Eric Amikam: In a couple months here, we will have a full simulation from dynamic model via CANalyzer from Vector — Tesla Motors uses the using the same software. The simulation allows us to infer “over the course of these 42 seconds, here’s what all of the sensors should see.” Then, we’ll fake all that data in our CAN bus, at the hardware level, and see how the system reacts. From there, and we can fine tune it, debug, test out our fault codes and start up sequences.
Sort of a Big Deal (Not Ron Burgundy)
Of course, meeting the International Man of Action, Elon Musk, was a bonus for Co-President Sjostrom and Tieler Callazo during the Design competition at Texas A&M.
“The lead SpaceX Hyperloop engineer appears on stage and says there’s been a recent hashtag on Twitter about where’s Elon. And we’d like to answer that question,” says Sjostrom.
An early look at BadgerLoop’s pod at the Univ. of Wisconsin.
Then, Elon Musk walks out.
The top four teams’ presidents were able to meet with Elon Musk one-on-one and discuss their pod designs. “We were waiting for Musk to finish his conversation and all the other team presidents were just repeating, ‘We get to meet Elon Musk, this is awesome.’”
Sjostrom adds “Musk thought it was pretty impressive that the top four teams were doing magnetic levitation and the first Hyperloop would probably be a wheeled vehicle, just like a proof of concept.
BadgerLoop is building the aluminum pod as the semester winds down and hopes to start integrating the different sub-systems and apply the carbon fiber skin in May. The team is utilizing workplace Slack software to help organize and oversee 40 members on the electrical team, for example. BadgerLoop will have to rely on remote collaboration as some team members graduate in May.
“Regular students go to bed and we keep working,” says Van Veen. “The only issue is when do we sleep. That’s probably our biggest challenge to be honest.”
Looks like Musk is preparing the students for careers at Tesla Motors, SpaceX or Hyperloop.
* All the Hyperloop college teams are looking for funding as this is a capital intensive project. You can donate to BadgerLoop by visiting this page.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig
Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.
Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”
This is the future we shall bring into being pic.twitter.com/8aD0w8MDVc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2026
The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.
This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.
What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.
That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.
Elon Musk
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Tesla is now shipping Cybercabs from Giga Texas with Starlink hardware built in as standard.
Tesla’s Cybercabs are now leaving Gigafactory Texas with Starlink hardware on the rear hatch in significant numbers, according to drone footage captured Tuesday by longtime Austin drone observer Joe Tegtmeyer. Production at the factory ramped back up after the Labor Day weekend, and his flyover of the outbound lot showed rows of gold Cybercabs alongside Model Y Long Wheelbase units, many carrying the satellite module for the first time as standard equipment rather than a one off retrofit.
Giga Texas today is busy with production coming back up following the long weekend. Of interest today in the outbound lot is the appearance of hundreds of Mode; YL’s and many more Cybercabs and for the 1st time equipped with the Starlink module one the hatch in big numbers.
At… pic.twitter.com/G9yl6s51m4
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 8, 2026
Tesla first showed Starlink built into an actual Cybercab on August 10, when the Robotaxi account posted images of a single gold unit with the antenna integrated into the roofline above the taillights and called it the first Cybercab with Starlink integration. That followed a July reveal where Tesla and Starlink jointly posted a cutaway diagram of the antenna placement without a working vehicle to back it up. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI software, said at the time that the connection isn’t required for the car to drive itself. It exists mainly for navigation, customer service and keeping tabs on the fleet.
Musk has made a different case in public. During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, he said the company can’t afford robotaxis stranded in what he called “Bermuda Triangles of lack of cellular connectivity,” and he separately claimed on X that Starlink will eventually reach every Tesla built, calling it the only way to deliver high bandwidth to billions of vehicles. He has also pitched the antenna as an entertainment upgrade, telling riders they would be able to stream 4K video or play games during a trip.
The rollout has moved fast since. Robotaxi service opened to the public in Austin on September 3, and Cybercabs had already been spotted with Starlink hardware in Houston and near Miami International Airport in the weeks before Tuesday’s factory footage showed the module shipping at volume rather than on scattered test units. Whether the satellite link earns its keep is still an open question. Tesla’s unsupervised service currently runs in dense metro geofences in Texas and Florida, markets where cellular coverage is already strong, which is not where the rural dead zones Musk describes tend to show up.
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