ORU Students Developing Way To Travel At The Speed Of Sound

A team of Oral Roberts University students are headed to California to show off a high speed invention they've been working on for months.

They tell me, their idea could change the world.

The ORU Codex team has built one of the world's first hyperloops, a developing form of transportation that would take you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes. The speed of sound.  That is how fast we could travel by hyperloop.

"There's no air resistance, and there's no friction from your wheels while you're traveling.  This gives us an opportunity to travel really fast, really efficiently, unlike anything we have right now," said Team Captain Emily Dzurilla.  

A hyperloop pod travels through levitation in a vacuum sealed chamber. A group of ORU engineering students are trying their hand at designing one of the first systems ever, which they'll present at a competition in California in a couple weeks.

"Countless hours. We worked all through the summer, 40-50 hours a week. Pretty much everyone on the team is giving their extra time to this," said Emily Dzurilla.

The SpaceX Hyperloop competition started with 1,200 teams. The ORU team is not only the team from Oklahoma still competing, but is among just 29 teams in the country that's headed to California.

With such a steep competition pool, the ORU Codex team knew they'd have to find something to set their pod apart from the rest.

"Just the simplicity of our design. We didn't over complicate anything. We tried to make it as straight forward as possible so there's no real problems when we're going down the track," said  Emily Dzurilla.

These 29 students built the entire pod themselves, no outsourcing necessary.  And it's a pod they believe is innovative enough to win.  Dzurilla told me there is a prize, but none of the teams know what it is.  They were simply told, "it's the greatest thing you can ever imagine."  So we wish them all the best of luck.