Futuristic forms of transportation appear all across pop culture. You have the air powered tube travel featured in the Jetsons:

Or the kind of teleportation that would make me fear leaving an arm behind on an enemy planet:

We already have subways that travel underwater, metal planes that hurdle through the air, high speed trains...now get ready for the high speed Hyperloop!

SpaceX is hosting a competition to bring the commute time from Los Angeles to San Francisco down to thirty minutes, all without stepping on board a plane! The competition is geared toward college students, and you can learn more about it here.

How are they going to do this? The answer is: Hyperloop.

The idea behind Hyperloop comes from Elon Musk, a forward-thinking businessman who helped to found Tesla, PayPal, and SpaceX. Hyperloop’s theoretical design involves a levitating pod which could travel through tubes at speeds up to 750 miles per hour, using air pressure to hover above a track, kinda like how an air hockey puck floats above the table. The pods are being designed with the commute from SF to LA in mind, but they can work between any two cities about 900 miles apart. Pods will be spaced five miles apart, so that they can be stopped without collision. This means that up to 70 pods could be in operation at any given time.

Another cool fact about the Hyperloop is that it could be coated in a material called Vibranium! Of course, we have yet to see what Marvel has to say about that. This new material was made by the hyperloop startup Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, in collaboration with a Slovakian materials firm called c2i. The material will contain sensors that can provide ongoing feedback on any given pod, so that if one is damaged in transit in can immediately be pulled from service. The material is said to be ten times stronger than steel, and to weigh five times less than aluminum!

SpaceX “designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft” according to their site. So maybe we can consider the hyperloop a rocket you can get on without ever having to leave Earth! The public transit of the future.

Perhaps the coolest thing about this new technology is that it’s being built by students. The future of all commutes is being shaped by grad students hard at work in places like MIT’s Edgerton Center. Their model of the Hyperloop’s levitating pod has won the initial round of the SpaceX contest. Now all that’s left is to build it. Over the summer a prototype will be tested. (No humans will be used in the testing of this technology!) The pod will be magnet-embedded to facilitate levitation, and shaped much like a bobsled.

This tube could save workers of the future a whole lot of time. It’s incredible that the design competition relies on college-aged minds. SpaceX is focusing on the leaders of the future, and entrusting us with a chance to shape the world we live in!