During my time in undergrad, I spent a year as a design team captain. Specifically, a co-captain of the McGill Rocket Team (MRT). I also spent several years trying (and failing) to get another design team off the ground. I think this was quite possibly one of the most valuable experiences I could have had as a nerdy, young, somewhat immature soon-to-be-professional with questionable social skills and very little idea of what it’s like to be on the managerial side of things.

On June 21, 1961, in a dusty small town in Texas, about 60 miles south of Houston, President John F. Kennedy stepped up to the podium to make a speech before the assembled throngs of people below. Or rather, his aides did. The ongoing Cuban missile crisis demanded his presence in Washington, so he instead gave the speech through a telephone call. The matter, however, was deemed of sufficient importance that Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was in attendance.

Anyone who’s somewhat interested in mass transportation systems is bound to have looked into the Hyperloop concept at one point or another. One of the things that came up during my research was something called the ‘Kantrowitz limit’. What is the Kantrowitz limit? I admittedly had never heard of it before, but it seemed like something very important that fortunately had technological solutions. Yet there was something unsatisfying about all the popular resources I could find about it.