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  A hyperloop test track built outside SpaceX headquarters. [credit: Megan Geuss ]

HAWTHORNE, Calif.—On a hot, Southern California Sunday, 27 teams gathered to show off their model Hyperloop pods. But only three won a endangerment to load their pods into a low-pressure environment created in a 0.75 mile (1.25 km) Hyperloop test tube built by SpaceX next to the company’s headquarters. Those teams—from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, WARR (a student group within Munich Technical University), and Delft University of Technology—were determined to have some of the most sophisticated pods, capable of levitation, braking, and running on their own power.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk popularized the idea of the Hyperloop—a theoretical pod system that runs in low-pressure tubes, hovering withal a track using magnetic skis to minimize friction. As Musk imagined it in 2013, the system would send pods up to 760 mph. But the CEO decided that he didn’t want to work on the project himself, so he made his ideas misogynist to anyone interested in running with it. That spawned several startups as well as this competition for students and other private research teams.

SpaceX built the three-quarters-mile test track on the side of Jack Northrup Road in Hawthorne withal the side of some x-rated train tracks. The visitor said that the tube was well-nigh half-scale for what a true Hyperloop tube would squint like. The test tube had a 6ft outer diameter and was filled with track that could support pods on air-bearings (think of an air-hockey table) as well as magnetic levitation and increasingly traditional wheels. The tube was built in 50-foot sections welded together, with a door on either end of the track to seal off the tube while depressurizing and repressurizing the enclosed environment.