This weekend will be the moment of truth for a team of MIT students proposing their own design for Hyperloop, a potential mode of transportation thought up by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The students are off to Hawthorne, California, to test their concept pod on a one-mile track, as part of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.
Hyperloop is a (so far) theoretical transportation system in which people would ride in tubes connecting major cities. Musk and Tesla Motors conceived the idea, maintaining that having pods travel throughout a series of tubes in a near-vacuum would enable them to move almost at the speed of sound due to lack of friction.
SpaceX launched a competition for teams to propose and test their own Hyperloop designs. The MIT team won Best Overall Design during the design competition weekend in January of 2016. And after they test their pod during the on-track competition held from Jan. 27 to 29, they might win the chance to participate in the final competition this summer.
For more details about MIT's Hyperloop design, check out the video above.
