So we went over to the pod competition yesterday. I may have some pics later, but some quick observations:

I saw a lot of innovation; as Elon said, of the 27 teams, no two concepts were alike. I was amused that almost everyone had an aeroshell, for a vehicle that’s supposed to operate in vacuum. As I noted to Gwynne (who I just happened to run into for a minute, meeting her husband for the first time), the primary functional purpose of the aeroshells seemed to be to provide real estate for sponsors’ names, like race cars. (I also saw and finally got to meet Sandy Mazza from The Daily Breeze, who has been having fun covering Elon’s antics).

The winners of the race were supposed to be announced at 4:30, but at that point, only the German team had actually run (we heard their pod rattle by behind us as we were eating a hot dog by the tube). Apparently, it took a long time between runs, because they had to evacuate the tunnel after the pod was placed in it, then repressurize to get it out the other end. To pump it down took half an hour. My question (which I didn’t get a chance to ask anyone): Why not have an airlock at each end? Evacuate the tunnel, put the pod in the airlock, evacuate the airlock (which could happen much more quickly, then open the door to the tunnel. Reverse the process at the other end. Seems like it would save a lot of both time and energy.

Finally, as we were walking to the event (we parked at Lowe’s, across the street from SpaceX), we saw a lot of activity in the adjacent SpaceX parking lot. Elon had (as he’s warned on Friday) apparently started digging a hole for his tunnel. As he said in his remarks at the event, they were just getting going, and were going to start trying ideas on better tunneling tech (he thinks it can be improved five or ten fold, in terms of time and cost), but that they didn’t yet “know what they were doing, (which reminds me of an old quote from von Braun, possibly apocryphal, “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing). Anyway, interesting times in Hawthorne.