Home for the holidays
Paradigm Hyperloop team unveils pod, talks about third round of Spacex competition
It’s only fitting that the Paradigm Hyperloop pod should make its way to Newfoundland and Labrador in time for the holiday season.
After all, the pod is the progeny of Memorial University and College of the North Atlantic students who spent countless hours engineering, manufacturing and fine-tuning the vehicle.
And they’re mighty proud parents, having finished second in the second phase of tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Spacex Hyperloop Pod Competition this past summer.
On Wednesday, the MUN and CNA team members, and a few from partner school Northeastern University in Boston, were feted at Confederation Building.
“To have the whole thing here is exciting because people want to see it,” says former project lead Adam Keating. “It’s cool to be able to actually show what this is.”
Imagined by Musk in 2013, the Hyperloop is a concept for a new mode of transportation in capsules travelling through a nearly depressurized vacuum tube at speeds up to 700 miles per hour.
The Paradigm team were the only ones in the competition to use air bearings instead of magnets.
Work is already underway for the third round of the competition set for next summer. “In January we’ll be submitting the final design of what we’re proposing for next year and from there we’ll be hearing Spacex feedback about whether they like our design or what things we need to address,” explains business lead Mark Comeau, a College of the North Atlantic mechanical engineer and manufacturing grad.
“From there we’ll be going into the build. Probably around the spring is when we’ll start first cutting.”
Keating says the next pod will be a little smaller, but a whole lot faster.
“And there’s a lot of things on the engineering front that are going to allow us to achieve what we’re hoping to achieve, what we were hoping to in the first competition.
“We’re happy, but we’re not satisfied.” Keating has been around the project since the very beginning, earning the nickname Podfather from his teammates. Having graduated last spring, he thought it would be the end of his time on the Paradigm squad. By the time the August competition rolled around, he couldn’t tear himself away.
“Physically, I couldn’t because I was still tied into so much and emotionally there’s too much I want to see happen with the vehicle and with the overall group,” he says.
But the torch has been passed — Northeastern’s Manny Barros is the new project lead — and Keating is now strictly an adviser for the foreseeable future and that suits him just fine.
“I’m not doing any technical calculations anymore, but there are so many people capable of doing that now and there’s so many other good leaders that I’m really just around now to support building the bigger things, building the team, building the culture, solving some of the tougher challenges,” he says.
“The foundation is there now. The mentors are there now. So it’s really about getting people who are willing to commit to this craziness and keep pushing it forward.”
Wherever the pod takes the Paradigm Hyperloop team in the future, it seems there’s another generation of innovative minds eager to get involved.
“I’ve had high school teachers reach out to me asking, ‘How can some of our students get involved?’ It’s becoming more than just a university thing,” says Comeau. “We’re also going back into the community to a lot of these high schools and fostering innovation, showing them these are things you can do, this is different technology that students are developing, this is only a couple years away from you, so maybe start thinking about activities and seeing what you can do.”