Keio Alpha is a student design team formed by a group of postgraduate students from Graduate School of System Design and Management,

Keio University , mottoeng = The pen is mightier than the sword , type = Private research coeducational higher education institution , established = 1858 , founder = Yukichi Fukuzawa , endow ...

, Japan. In July 2015, the team accepted an invitation from

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The ...

to submit design entries for an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

pod that would advance

Hyperloop A hyperloop is a proposed high-speed transportion system for both public and goods transport. The idea was picked up by Elon Musk to describe a modern project based on the vactrain concept (first appearance in 1799). Hyperloop systems compr ...

technology development, in the

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launcher, and a satellite communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the stated goal of ...

-sponsored

Hyperloop pod competition The Hyperloop Pod Competition was an annual competition sponsored by SpaceX from 2015 to 2019 in which a number of student and non-student teams participate to design—and for some, build—a subscale prototype transport vehicle in order to ...

. The team was founded by David Chew Vee Kuan with his faculty advisor, Prof Yoshiaki Ohkami, to build a team of four students to submit a preliminary design to SpaceX for review. The team proposed the vision of Hyperloop System in connecting satellite cities with major cities of distance more than 500 km but able to travel at speed of plane and at the convenience of a train. People able to move from the place they live and the place they work where could be 500 km apart but only 30minutes away. The team proposed a pod design using Magnetic Levitation, Light Vacuum Tolerant Vehicle System, Magnetic Brake System and Safety System Architecture in their design proposal. Following review of the high-level design, the team was invited to the Design Weekend at

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

on 29–30 January 2016 to present their ideas and design to panel of judges along with other 120 teams. Keio Alpha Hyperloop Team was selected as one of the 30 finalist teams to build, and then race, their pod in the prototype vacuum tube test track adjacent to SpaceX Headquarters at

Hawthorne Hawthorne often refers to the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne may also refer to: Places Australia *Hawthorne, Queensland, a suburb of Brisbane Canada *Hawthorne Village, Ontario, a suburb of Milton, Ontario United States * Hawth ...

, (

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the wor ...

) California, USA.

References

{{Reflist, 30em Hyperloop