High-Speed American Dreams

A futuristic transport system envisioned by Elon Musk. A wave of international students striving to make it real. And a violent encounter in the Silicon Prairie

- ADAM SKOLNICK

Hyperloop UC had to raise its six-figure budget from scratch.

January 29, 2017 was a warm winter day in southern California. The sky was hazy, and white light bounced off the road running between SpaceX headquarters and the ass-end of a Costco. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, standing at a lectern next to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, called this paved slice of post-industrial heaven “the cradle of aerospace.” I had come for a glimpse of the future—not in the hangars housing the company’s beautiful minds and rocket ships, but in the pipeline-like tube directly behind the mayor and Musk. Six feet in diameter, it ran on a one-mile track adjacent to the SpaceX complex.

“Today,” Garcetti said, “we are looking at the very first Hyperloop pods. This is the future of transportation.”

I was among 2,000 sweaty technophiles packed onto two sets of metallic grandstands at the finals of the first-ever SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. Also on site were 800 members of 27 competing teams, mainly from academic institutions. The finalists had been distilled from more than 1,200 applicants around the world. That day, only three of the teams would successfully run their pods on the SpaceX Hyperloop test track.