Austin, Texas · Targeting May 2027 · Inaugural event
Hyperloop Open is a new collegiate engineering competition bringing hyperloop back to North American soil — built for the student engineers and researchers advancing the technology, and for the companies whose hardest thermal, vacuum, and electromagnetic problems those teams are uniquely positioned to attack.
01 — Mission
The SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition ignited a generation of student engineers and proved what collegiate teams are capable of. In Europe, European Hyperloop Week carries that energy forward every summer. North America deserves a venue of its own — and Hyperloop Open is being built to be it.
We're also evolving the question. Alongside the race for speed, we ask teams to confront the compounding physical bottlenecks that stand between hyperloop and reality: heat that has nowhere to go in a vacuum, motors that cook themselves inside sealed hulls, levitation that must survive an imperfect track.
Targeting late May 2027, the Open is designed to complement — not compete with — European Hyperloop Week: a North American shakedown where teams can test, refine, and build momentum before traveling to Europe later that summer.
02 — The Challenge
Hyperloop Open spans two domains: a hardware track, where teams build Core Tech Sleds that integrate tightly coupled physical systems — and a peer-reviewed Research Symposium, where teams compete on the strength of their ideas alone. Build hardware, present research, or do both.
Draft format — the competition structure and rulebook are in active development with our engineering leads and prospective teams, and details below are subject to change.
Domain 1 · Hardware track — Core Tech Sleds
Linear induction motors trap rotor heat inside a sealed vehicle, and near-vacuum cuts convective cooling by a factor of ~1,000. Integrate a LIM with active thermal management — phase-change materials or cooling loops — and prove it under static vacuum load.
Magnetic levitation is unforgiving of the real world: track irregularities that are invisible at low speed become destabilizing at high speed. Integrate mechanical suspension, lateral guidance, and magnetic arrays to ride out physical disturbances on the open-air rail.
Every operational hyperloop needs to move people and cargo across a ~1 kg/cm² pressure boundary, quickly and repeatedly. Integrate a structural pressure hull with rapid-actuating seals and demonstrate cycling inside the static vacuum chamber.
Domain 2 · Research Symposium
No hardware required. Teams and individual researchers — undergraduate through PhD — submit papers and present before a peer-review panel of faculty and industry scientists. Novel algorithms, advanced materials, computational fluid dynamics, extreme-environment physics, sensing and controls: if it pushes the field forward, it competes.
03 — Facilities
A 100-to-150-meter modular aluminum I-beam track, hosted on open tarmac in the Austin area. Built for levitation, guidance, and dynamics runs in real outdoor conditions — wind, heat, and all.
A custom 10-to-20-foot cylindrical vacuum chamber holding operating pressures near 100 Pa. The first venue of its kind where student teams can test thermal management, propulsion heat loads, and air-lock cycling under flight-like pressure.
The event is operated by a dedicated build crew, while every competing team — including the host university's — works from the same public rulebook with no early track access. Scoring is done entirely by an external panel of faculty, sponsors, and industry engineers.
04 — For Sponsors
Whether you're recruiting hands-on mechanical engineers or brilliant theoretical researchers, a résumé can't show you how a student thinks under pressure. At Hyperloop Open, your engineering and talent teams watch elite students — mechanical undergraduates through physics PhD candidates — troubleshoot, present, and innovate in real time, then recruit them on the spot.
Set up steps from the rail and vacuum chamber. Demo hardware, run challenges, and meet every team that walks the venue.
Sit on the peer-review panel of the Research Symposium as graduate students present novel algorithms, advanced materials research, and computational fluid dynamics models.
A curated résumé book of participating students — undergraduate through PhD — delivered before the event, with earlier access at higher tiers (up to two months out).
See a brilliant mechanical lead on Thursday? Interview them in a private, air-conditioned suite on Friday — before the event even concludes.
VIP paddock access to walk the hardware with teams during Final Design Reviews. Ask why they made each design choice and evaluate real-world problem-solving firsthand.
Open the event with a keynote — or flip the format: bring an unsolved bottleneck from your company, mechanical integration to optical computing, whiteboard it in front of our top teams, and watch them brainstorm solutions live.
Dual-use innovation pipeline — what teams build maps directly onto your roadmap
Mars & lunar habitats · deep-space capsules · satellite thermal architectures
Advanced materials · extreme-environment physics · programmable photonics · optical sensor networks
Rail guns · jet turbine compressors · supersonic aerodynamics
Vacuum manufacturing · Phase Change Materials (PCMs)
Four tiers, from in-kind technology partners to exclusive infrastructure naming rights. Full inventory and details are in the corporate packet.
Corporate contributions are allocated directly to manufacturing the open-source track and vacuum infrastructure — an accessible, low-cost testing environment for collegiate teams, with teams keeping their own IP.
Collegiate hyperloop draws the full academic ladder — first-year builders, senior design leads, and graduate researchers publishing on levitation, thermal, and vacuum systems.
Hyperloop Open is an incorporated Texas nonprofit with federal tax-exempt status pending, governed by a volunteer board. Sponsorship dollars go to track, chamber, and safety infrastructure.
05 — For Teams
The Open is organized with the operational muscle of Texas Guadaloop, the University of Texas at Austin's hyperloop team — people who have machined the parts, pulled the vacuum, and chased the same deadlines you have.
Whether your team is active, rebuilding from the pod-competition era, or brand new, the categories are being scoped for a realistic one-year build and the test infrastructure is provided. Bring a sled, not a budget for a track. The rulebook will be published openly as it's finalized — teams that register interest early get a voice in shaping it.
06 — Get Involved
Whether you want to field a team, explore sponsorship, judge, volunteer, or just follow along — leave your details and we'll reach out.
