A team from MIT has won a competition to design a levitating travel capsule for the Hyperloop ? a futuristic, high-speed transport network conceived by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.
MIT's design was announced as the winner of the SpaceX competition at Texas A&M University over the weekend.
Weighing only 250 kilograms, the MIT pod could travel up to 110 metres per second (360 feet) ? 245 miles per hour ? through Hyperloop's elevated tunnels using magnetic propulsion.
The MIT team beat 99 other groups from around the world, who all presented their conceptual designs for Hyperloop transport pods over the course of the weekend.
First proposed by Musk in 2013, the Hyperloop system would consist of a network of tubes. Passengers would be propelled in computer-automated, levitating capsules drawn by powerful magnets and vacuums. A company has since been set up to realise the idea without Musk's direct involvement, but the competition for the pods was organised by Musk's SpaceX company to help "accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype".
The MIT team comprises students and faculty from the fields of aeronautics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and business management.
MIT's design could travel at up to 396,000 miles per hour on Hyperloop's network using magnetic propulsion
Their pod's tubular shell is made of woven carbon fibre and polycarbonate sheets. Measuring roughly 2.5 metres in length and one metre in width (eight b...