Halasuru to SpaceX (1/3)
Halasuru to SpaceX (1/3)
My journey with a team that started from a scrappy garage and reached the quarters of Elon Musk.
In the summer of 2017, a team of ~40 students across the country embarked on a mission way beyond their age, expertise, and comfort zone. An (almost) impossible endeavor to build the first Hyperloop prototype to be built on Indian soil. This is my attempt to take you through a journey with a relentless team, that came together in a modest shack-like workspace under Halasuru Metro Station in Bengaluru, and reached SpaceX and the Prime Minister of India - a journey that would teach a young college boy to test the frontiers of his imagination and cement the belief that actions will always supersede the noblest intentions.
This piece is an ode to all my talented colleagues, who worked day and night to make their team, their family, their country proud.
This piece is my journey at Hyperloop India.
“When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, okay, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength — 400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well, it’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore after that”—Elon Musk
Beyond the classroom
I remember the words of one of my professors in college when he stated that if you’re a student of humanities and economics, it is your duty to do right by your discipline by at least attempting to apply it across subject matter expertise, no matter how absurd the outcome. It’s one of those cliché classroom moments when the professor drops the mic and leaves a room full of students to collectively introspect in silence. Of course, I was no exception.
From that point on, in my second year of college, I made it a point to scout for opportunities that reminded me of my professor’s words. I was itching to test out my limits beyond the classroom, and besides, I never resonated with the archetype of functioning in any one particular order. Sometimes I think it’s important to shake things up and become an agent of chaos.
One evening as I was returning home from college, I happened to stumble upon a video on YouTube of an individual named Sibesh Kar giving a keynote session in an event organized by the Indian Railways. He spoke about leading a think tank of students who’d be attempting to build the first Hyperloop in India. I recall having only two questions on my mind that evening. Firstly, how on earth do people my age (I was 20, then) have the audacity to make such claims, and secondly, if there was the slightest chance of it being legitimate, how do I get involved. I needed no incentive to apply because like every other youngster in the world, I too was enchanted by the myth of Elon - his plans to colonize Mars, build underground transportation tunnels, and of course, human travel at the speed of sound.
Two days later I was recruited to work on business development and policy for Hyperloop India.
Run up
For the first couple of months, I was juggling work from Pune itself, trying to optimize the clock either in between or post college lectures. Slack channels, emails, and WhatsApp groups would be buzzing all day long. It’s funny and commendable how much energy it takes to align young college folks, distributed across geographies, to work pro bono on an open-ended goal. Especially for me, because coming from a non-engineering background, I thought I’d find myself unnerved by the jargon and abstract nature of the task at hand, but I was firm about getting past that discomfort. During my ramp up, I had no choice but to absorb various engineering concepts, from levitation systems to aerodynamics to electronic circuits, at a quick pace in order to understand the product I was entrusted to sell to investors and other stakeholders.
In the months leading up to the qualification period in February 2017, the engineering team had already made significant progress on the manufacturing and design plans of the first vision of the OrcaPod. Although the sub-systems of the engineering team were divided across the different BITS campuses (Pilani, Goa, and Hyderabad), they worked as though they were hustling under one roof. SpaceX screened applicants in two stages - The Proposal and The Engineering Design. The engineering team’s efforts got us SpaceX’s green flag, and we were all set to head to manufacturing, with one goal in mind: The Final Race.
It was time for the team to congregate and bring the skeletons on screen to life. It was time to build, and the undisputed location of choice was Bangalore.
In March, about 40 of us moved to the city of Bengaluru. All of us were put up in a modest hostel on HAL Road—and well, it was as chaotic as you’d imagine it to be. A bunch of boisterous college students working on the same project, living under the same roof, breathing the same air, day in and day out. In hindsight, it gives me a hint of claustrophobia, but I guess it worked in maintaining team spirit. For most of us, our daily routine for the next three months would entail walking to the nearest metro station every morning, assembling at our co-working space, Workbench Projects, right under Halasuru Metro Station, and returning back to base close to midnight.
A lot of folks in the team, including myself, were also juggling parallel internships (university mandates), therefore, the execution plan kept evolving every few days. While raising $200,000 (~INR 2 Cr.) in ten weeks to manufacture, insure, and ship our pod felt improbable, the best we could do was stick to the process and keep our outlook optimistic.
The goal was audacious, all that mattered now was if we were capable of delivering.