Project Fifth Mode - Episode 1: The Future is Here

Opportunities don't come around where you can

get involved to design and develop

the next mode of transportation.

So whenever somebody mentions the hyperloop,

the first thing that comes to mind is the Wright brothers.

They were just two normal guys, they weren't engineers.

Daytime, they had a bike shop, and in the evenings

they were in the garage using the bike and trying

to reinvent flight.

So what are my choices

if I want to go down to L.A. right now?

From the San Francisco Bay Area, I can get in my car

and drove, which I did a couple weeks ago.

And it took six hours and I was beat,

and then I gotta drive back.

Or I can take a plane, which is kind of expensive.

Or we can try something different, something new,

something less impactful.

So the Hyperloop, you can see it as a cross

between a very high altitude plane and a train.

So in a nutshell, you have a tube, a big, long tube

in which you make a vacuum, where you reduce the atmosphere,

you pull some of the air out.

And in there, you have a wagon that is like a train wagon,

kind of, that can be levitating inside.

And it would be able to go to very, very high speed

because of that.

And it's as convenient as a train and as fast as a plane.

[Man] It is?

Alright.

It is unplugged.

Alright, yeah, we got motion.

So, last June, Elon Musk announced that he would be

having a Hyperloop competition.

Someone posted a post on Reddit, the online platform,

asking, Hey guys, do you want to do a Hyperloop team?

And I saw the post when it just got posted.

I said, Yeah, sure, come in,

not expecting anything at all.

The other teams were mostly university teams

and high school teams, and that sort of thing.

So we thought, well, how are we gonna be able to

come together if we don't live in the same place,

when we're all over the world?

Makes sense to do that online, right?

So we're gonna do everything online.

We need to find an internet office, which became Slack,

in the end, which is basically a chat platform.

We came up with our Hyperloop design

and we ended up being invited out to Texas

for the Hyperloop design weekend and so we made it

to the final round.

Oh, boy.

We're actually going forward,

now we need to build this thing.

(uplifting music)

The team is great, it's people from all around the world.

And work together for a common goal.

I love the multicultural aspect.

It really makes you feel in-touch and involved

with something that's bigger than you, a global thing.

It's almost like having a hundred eyes

look over one problem.

And then the people conferred and said, Right,

I've done something similar like this before,

and this is the solution to the problem.

We don't really care about what you are on the outside.

We just care if you're able to help us and you're perfect.

For the Hyperloop SpaceX competition,

we did not want to reinvent the wheel.

Our system is divided into two parts.

We have what we call a pressure vessel,

where we have all the electronics, the batteries.

And we have our levitating structures on the bottom.

Just looking at that and seeing the extremes

that we were dealing with.

We're dealing with a near vacuum,

we're dealing with large amounts of speed,

we're dealing with large amounts of power.

So that in and of itself gives you

kind of a tingle in the back.

The time we had to actually build it, I know,

is on everyone's mind.

But at the end of the day, I think that you have

the mentality of people here that,

they are focused on what needs to happen

to get it actually across the finish line.

Thanks to TE Connectivity and their support,

and their watching over us, and their senior engineers

assisting us and guiding us, I'm not worried at all.

I don't think anyone truly believed

that you could even think about travelling the speeds

that they're contemplating.

And the technology they're developing is really exciting,

so we're hoping to contribute to that,

and we're hoping to learn about it at the same time.

The future is here and you can be part of it.

So people are really excited.

This looks so next gen that they want to be part of it.

(uplifting music)

[Man] That's about it.