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
The FCC just said ‘No’ to SpaceX for now
SpaceX is fighting the FCC for spectrum that could put satellites inside every smartphone.
SpaceX was dealt a new setback on April 23, 2006 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after the U.S. government agency dismissed the company’s petition to access a Mobile Satellite Service spectrum that would allow direct-to-device (D2D) capabilities.
The FCC regulates communications by radio, television, wire, and cable, which also includes regulating D2D technology that lets your existing smartphone connect directly to a satellite orbiting Earth, the same way it would connect to a cell tower.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been building toward this through its Starlink Mobile service, formerly called Direct-to-Cell, in partnership with T-Mobile. The service officially launched on July 23, 2025, starting with messaging and expanding to broadband data in October of that year.
T-Mobile Starlink Pricing Announced – Early Adopters Get Exclusive Discount
It’s worth noting that SpaceX is not alone in this race. AT&T and Verizon have their own satellite texting deals with AST SpaceMobile, while Verizon separately offers free satellite texting through Skylo on newer phones.
The regulatory foundation for all of this dates to March 14, 2024, when the FCC adopted the world’s first framework for what it called Supplemental Coverage from Space, allowing satellite operators to lease spectrum from terrestrial carriers and fill gaps in their coverage. On November 26, 2024, the FCC granted SpaceX the first-ever authorization under that framework, approving its partnership with T-Mobile to provide service in specific frequency bands. SpaceX then went further, completing a roughly $17 billion acquisition of wireless spectrum from EchoStar, which gave it the ability to negotiate with global carriers more independently.
Starlink’s EchoStar spectrum deal could bring 5G coverage anywhere
This recent ruling by the FCC blocked SpaceX from going further, protecting incumbent spectrum holders like Globalstar and Iridium. But the market momentum is already in motion. As Teslarati reported, SpaceX is targeting peak speeds of 150 Mbps per user for its next generation Direct-to-Cell service, compared to roughly 4 Mbps today, which would bring satellite connectivity close to standard carrier performance.
With a reported IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation on the horizon, each spectrum fight, carrier deal, and regulatory win or loss now carries weight beyond just connectivity. SpaceX is quietly becoming the infrastructure layer underneath the phones of millions of people, and the FCC’s next move will help determine how much further that reach extends.
FCC Satellite Rule Makings can be found here.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk talks Tesla Roadster’s future
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
SpaceX Board has set a Mars bonus for Elon Musk
Tesla’s biggest rivals fights charging wait times with a modern approach
