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SpaceX seeks students to design 'Hyperloop'

In addition to space travel and the automobile industry, Elon Musk's other transportation obsession has been to build a "Hyperloop," a low-pressure tube that would blast passengers near the speed of sound.

Elevated on pylons, the tubes would be like "a Concorde and a rail gun and an air hockey table," he has said.

With so many other pursuits, the head of Tesla Motors and SpaceX announced his vision for the Hyperloop in a white paper in 2013 and then turned the idea over to others. But now SpaceX is jumping into the project, announcing an open competition for university engineering teams to build the pods that could fly through the tubes on cushions of air at 700 mph or more.

"In order to accelerate the development of a functional prototype and to encourage student innovation, SpaceX is moving forward with a competition to design and build a half-scale Hyperloop pod," according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.

SpaceX intends to operate the pods on a test track, which will be built near its Hawthorne, California, headquarters by next June.

The Hyperloop has been compared to the pneumatic tubes used by drive-up bank tellers. But Musk envisions them on a much grander scale: a system for cities that are less than 900 miles apart in heavily congested areas such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. The pods would be able to travel much faster than high-speed rail because they wouldn't have air drag or friction.

The tubes would have such low pressure that they would reduce "the drag force of the air by 1,000 times relative to sea level conditions and would be equivalent to flying above 150,000 feet altitude," Musk wrote in his paper.

The project is one of many ambitious projects for Musk and SpaceX. The goal of the company is to eventually colonize Mars. It recently asked the federal government for permission to test a project to beam Internet service from space by using thousands of small satellites around the world.

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