Hyperloop students reap scant rewards
Ben Lippolis flew across the country to take part in a student hyperloop competition hosted by Elon Musk. This was no science fair. At the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. headquarters on the outskirts of Los Angeles, engineers from some of the world’s top universities loaded 2,000pound hunks of metal onto a tubular track and, one by one, raced their pods to see who could clock the fastest speed.
Lippolis, a recent graduate of Northeastern University, teamed up with some classmates and students from Memorial University in Newfoundland to form team Paradigm. They’ve been toiling away to construct a passenger train that can travel at high speeds inside an enclosed tube, as envisioned by Musk. To fund
their project, including air travel, accommodations, parts, machinery and transport for the pod, they cobbled together grants from the Canadian government and corporate donors.
In the two years since Musk’s SpaceX started organizing these competitions, the rocket company has found a unique formula for luring talent at little cost.
While most companies spend extensively on recruiting, the hyperloop competitions consistently bring in eager, young prospects on their own dime jockeying to show off their abilities. Winners of last month’s contest received no prizes, and all entrants were required to hand over rights for SpaceX to use any of their technology in the future without compensation. The University of Waterloo has had a team in the competition called Waterloop.
The real reward: a shot at impressing their hero. “Everyone on our team really looks up to Musk and what he’s been able to do for the world so far,” said Lippolis. “The thought that something you’ve directly worked on and helped develop could one day be incorporated into a system that would vastly improve everyone’s quality of life is truly amazing.”
Hackathons and other technical competitions have been criticized for demanding that participants surrender the right to collect licensing fees from the organizer if that company happens to make use of their creation in the future. But the lack of any award money at SpaceX’s event is particularly unusual. Even so, several contestants said they were happy to participate and offer their work as “open-source” for anyone to use, gratis.
Tim Houter, who started a hyperloop company in the Netherlands called Hardt Global Mobility after winning a past SpaceX competition, said his team’s early work was rudimentary and that they’ve come a long way since then. “There are no issues regarding the intellectual property.”
A SpaceX spokesperson said the company asks for rights to use participants’ technology as a trade-off for access to the test facilities. She declined to disclose the cost of building the track, which is almost a mile long and simulates near-vacuum conditions. The technology licences are needed to protect SpaceX from potential litigation in the future, she said. The student teams retain ownership of the technology.
Musk is making plans to build his own underground hyperloop from New York to Washington, D.C., Bloomberg reported last month. The student events provide his companies with valuable insights, said Christian Claudel, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and adviser to his school’s hyperloop team. “They get to build that facility that they will use anyway, and they let a few teams test their equipment,” he said. “It’s a very good deal for SpaceX.”
Many students said their main hope was to secure a job some day on Musk’s team. The billionaire’s companies recognize the recruiting opportunity. Representatives for SpaceX and Tesla prowled the staging grounds.
Recruiters made small talk and collected contact details from some contenders. Students also got face time with SpaceX engineers, who helped them prepare for various technical tests.
The effort paid off for the champions of last year’s competition. One member of that team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, now works as a structures engineer at SpaceX. Another is a robotics engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.