The Hyperloop made a splash when Elon Musk dreamed up the designs for his 800-mile-per-hour mass transit system in August. But he didn’t have much intention to pursue the $6 billion idea any further .

Now the Hyperloop is taking on legs of its own–and maybe going all according to Musk’s plan after all.

A team led by Patricia Galloway, a top civil engineer, and Marco Villa, a former SpaceX executive, announced that it would start raising funds to form a company around the goal of developing the Hyperloop. The group will use input from the crowd, through the platform JumpStartFund, and award an ownership stake in the project for useful ideas.

And at the 3-D design software company Autodesk, staff have already been working to see how they could improve on the Hyperloop designs–mostly just for fun, says Jordan Brandt, the company’s technology futurist, but he says they’d like to keep seeing where it’ll go.

“Elon Musk put a lot of this energy into designing the pod capsule, and the power requirements, and things like that,” says Brandt. “But not so much into the infrastructure, which by the way is the most expensive aspect of the project.”

Using 3-D visualization and collaboration software, Brandt re-aligned the tubes of the Hyperloop–in a horizontal configuration in Musk’s plan–into a vertical, figure-eight style design. That would reduce the land requirements for the project if it were to run along California’s Interstate 5, and more importantly, reduce the number of expensive pylons needed to support the tubes.





Getting input from engineers and scientists internally at Autodesk, he also devised a potentially cheaper way to manufacture the tubes.