Co-Founder and CEO of Telsa and SpaceX, Elon Musk, is known for his futurist entrepreneurship, and he first started talking about the concept of the Hyperloop in 2013.

The Hyperloop was envisioned as a pod that would transport passengers through specially designed tubes at speeds never before travelled by trains. If built – and government approved  –  Musk claims the Hyperloop would allow people to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a mere 30 minutes, travelling at 1126 kilometres per hour. This means you could travel from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore in 20 minutes.

In June 2015, a competition was announced to make Musk’s vision a reality. The reach was international, attracting teams from all over the world to take part in inventing this innovative mode of transportation.

After numerous drafts and proposals from teams were submitted, a design weekend was held at Texas A&M University on the 29 – 30 January 2016. The following 23 teams achieved their spot in the final competition weekend:

• MIT Hyperloop Team, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Delft Hyperloop, Delft University of Technology
• Badgerloop, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Hyperloop at Virginia Tech, Virginia Tech
• HyperXite, University of California Irvine
• rLoop, non-student team
• uWaterloo Hyperloop, University of Waterloo
• UWashington Hyperloop, University of Washington
• University of Toronto, University of Toronto
• RUMD Loop, University of Maryland and Rutgers University
• GatorLoop, University of Florida
• Team HyperLynx, University of Colorado-Denver
• Hyperloop UC, University of Cincinnati
• UCSB Hyperloop, University of California-Santa Barbara
• bLoop, University of California-Berkeley
• TAMU Aerospace Hyperloop, Texas A&M
• WARR Hyperloop, Technical University of Munich
• Purdue Hyperloop Design Team, Purdue University
• Codex, Oral Roberts University
• Lehigh Hyperloop, Lehigh University
• Keio Alpha, Keio University
• Drexel Hyperloop, Drexel University
• Carnegie Mellon Hyperloop, Carnegie-Mellon University

The dates for the competition weekend have yet to be announced, but it is planned to be held during the summer this year (2016). There, selected pods will compete as the SpaceX Hyperloop test track.

Of course, the Hyperloop project doesn’t come without its criticisms. Many of which surrounding the physical impact travelling at such speeds will have on the human passengers. Others say it was never proposed as a way to travel pleasantly, just a fast one.

But for now, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what comes of the 23 Hyperloop pods to be tested this coming summer in the U.S.A, which is not far off.

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To learn more about the Hyperloop and how it relates to the evolution of rail travel, you can click here to read an interesting research article on it!