Perspectives from the Technical University of Munich
I learned a lot while running the UC Davis HyperLoop team, and most of it is not particularly interesting to anybody other than myself. However I did learn one thing that I think may be worth sharing.
The HyperLoop competition was an annual competition run by SpaceX, where universities competed to see who could make the fastest pod. The race was held in a vacuum tube. Before I became president (I was a controls programmer), I attended the very last HyperLoop competition that SpaceX ever held. It was in 2019 before Elon unceremoniously stopped responding to all our requests for competition plans without officially canceling the competition, leaving us in a confusing limbo regarding how we should plan our year and design our pod, and decided that he had better things to do with his time, such as purchasing Twitter. The winners of that competition were the students at the Technical University of Munich.
When giving the award, Elon made a joke that it was ironic how the results of the race were presented in imperial units despite the fact that the best teams always used metric. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it was certainly true that it was always the non-American teams that won. I presumed that it had to do with the fact that for them, it was an international competition. If a team was going to ask for funding to participate in an international competition, they had better be pretty good. However, while that explained why there were so few bad international teams, it did not explain why all the international teams were so much better.
