Elon Musk's newest brainchild gets help from a world's worth of minds (perhaps including yours)

In 2013, SpaceX leader Elon Musk called out the State of California for wanting to build a bullet train. Said Musk, a bullet train is a 20th-century technology, and a modern state like California should be looking toward the future of transportation. He proposed the Hyperloop as an alternative based on developing technologies that would deliver statewide transit that was safe, fast and economically superior to trains, planes and automobiles.

The Hyperloop is like a gigantic, information-age version of the old pneumatic tubes that would take mail and packages to different sections of an office building. The concept is the same, but the tubes are hundreds of miles long and the packages carry people and cargo.

Here at PSFK, we’ve followed the evolution of the Hyperloop story from its inception. You can look here, here, here and here for earlier entries in our coverage of this developing transportation solution. Most significantly, SpaceX has opened the general plans for a Hyperloop for development by third-party companies in the hopes of making the idea a reality.

SpaceX’s most recent step in this plan is the recent announcement of a competition to assist private companies in their development of the prototype. Supporting the competition, they have allowed university and independent engineering teams to design a Hyperloop pod. They will test the entries on a one-mile prototype track built adjacent to their Hawthorne California headquarters.

All teams who wish to participate have until June 2016 to create a human-scale pod for the competition. Any knowledge gained or used will be released into the public domain as open source. Teams will have until September 15, 2015 to decide if they will compete or not. SpaceX has a signup sheet that will close after that time, full guidelines are shared.

SpaceX