Risk & Business Magazine Cal LeGrow Risk & Business Magazine Fall 2017 | Page 29

PARADIGM HYPERLOOP
NEWFOUNDLANDERS
TAKE ON THE WORLD
Paradigm Hyperloop Places Second
W
hen Elon Musk
of Tesla and
SpaceX fame
launched a student
competition to
create a vehicle that could achieve
the fastest travel speed through a
partial vacuum tube, the response
was simply overwhelming. Over
1,200 designs were submitted, with
twenty-five winning the opportunity
to test their prototype at a specially
designed testing site located adjacent
to the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne,
California. Paradigm Hyperloop—
composed of students from Memorial
University of Newfoundland, the
College of the North Atlantic
(Newfoundland and Labrador’s public
college), and Northeastern University
(located in Boston, Massachusetts)—
was the only North American team of
the three teams selected to compete in
the final round.
“When the contest was first
announced in 2013, no one knew what
a hyperloop was or how it would work,
as it had never been done before,”
says Adam Keating, a team leader for
Paradigm Hyperloop. The students
met each other on the Internet and
started building on their ideas in
chat rooms. Eventually, they decided
to form a team and presented their
ideas at an event in Texas in 2015. At
the actual speed competition held this
summer, Paradigm’s vehicle reached a
top speed of 63 miles per hour (mph)—
high enough to place second behind
the WARR team from the Technical
University of Munich that clocked in at
an impressive 200 mph, but outpacing
the third-place Swissloop team whose
vehicle topped out at 25 mph.
In designing their vehicle, Paradigm
went against the grain, using air
levitation technology—similar to what’s
used in an air hockey game—rather than
the magnetic levitation system used
by other teams. Their finished vehicle
was the largest and heaviest in the
competition at eighteen feet long and
about two thousand pounds. Ultimately,
the team plans to apply this frictionless
approach to reduce the size of its vehicle
and make it travel even faster.
Musk was inspired to launch this
contest out of his own frustration
after a traffic-laden drive between San
Francisco and Los Angeles. While this
drive can often take between six and
seven hours, Musk envisions shortening
that trip to thirty minutes through
his revolutionary “pod” technology,
which would shuttle travelers either
above or below ground in specially
designed metal tunnels. He estimates
that top speeds of 700 mph could be
achieved, saving millions of dollars in
lost productivity due to ground traffic.
His idea has exploded on the Internet
and in labs worldwide as scientists vie
to make history in reaching this goal.
On July 20, 2017, Musk announced that
he had received verbal approval from
the US government to build a hyperloop
system between New York City and
Washington, DC.
With its inspiring second-place finish,
the Paradigm Hyperloop team has
received more than $150,000 in funding
from private sources, including cash,
in-kind donations, and government
grants. The students already know what
they need to do to increase their vehicle
speed—and plan to come back with a
vengeance in the next event that will be
held in the summer of 2018. +
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