THERE’S A FUTURE we’ve seen in science fiction for so long it almost seems like the past: people whisked from one place to another inside tube trains that crisscross the landscape.

But imagine you could board one and travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a half-hour. As you sit down in an engineless pod the size of a bus, your seat remembers you and adjusts the entertainment settings. The pod accelerates to 760 miles per hour, a velocity made possible by the near-vacuum inside the tube. There’s no engine noise—the nearest thing to an engine is the tube, a smart tube that measures speed and location. The pod has been pressurized to minimize the G forces’ effects on a passenger; the trip is as comfortable as a flight. All of this is solar-powered.

MODELING SCHOOL | Students at UCLA’s Suprastudio program designed the ‘human factor’ of the Hyperloop experience, including seats and station architecture.

For now Elon Musk, it seems, is calling his invention home to see what it’s become. In the process, he’s joining what may become the biggest tech free-for-all in American history—one he started. But not all of those interested in making the Hyperloop work are answering the contest’s call. The Hyperloop Movement, as some of its unaffiliated members refer to themselves, is officially bigger than the man who started it. “ The Hyperloop Movement is officially bigger than the man who started it. ” IN HIS SANTA MONICA CONFERENCE ROOM, Quay Hays of GROW Holdings is laying out the plan for Quay Valley, the city he hopes will be a model for California’s future. It sounds, at first, like any other affluent California community: retail space, resort hotels, a winery, a spa. Where Quay Valley stands out is its plan to be solar-powered with extremely low water use. With a town of 26,000 networked smart homes and apartments built green from the ground up, Hays hopes to give 75,000 residents the eco-friendly lifestyle that critics of clean energy say is impossible. “There have been advances in green design and smart growth over the years, and the idea was, put all these things together in one place,” says Hays, a former publisher and film executive whose first job was booking punk and new wave acts for the Greek Theatre in the 1980s. His first attempt to launch Quay Valley was thwarted by litigation over water rights and the financial crisis of 2008; the new plan is to break ground on the site, a 7,200-acre expanse halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, sometime in 2016. When that happens, the world will be watching, and not just for the promised sustainability—Quay Valley also plans to feature the world’s first working Hyperloop, built by Hyperloop Transportation Technologies at an estimated cost of $100 million to $150 million. Dirk Ahlborn, HTT’s chief executive, wants little to do with the SpaceX contest. Ahlborn founded HTT three months after Musk’s “Hyperloop Alpha” paper hit the Internet, and while he maintains a friendly relationship with Musk, he calls the contest a distraction. “A half-scale model is of no use to us now, and so their specs are also not relevant to us,” Ahlborn says. His company is focused on Quay Valley. “We are past the prototyping phase and have developed our own proprietary technology,” Ahlborn tells me. “I know you need to portray this as a race, but I don’t see it as a race. We’re not competing with them. Our competitors are other forms of transportation. If it were a race, it would be over.”

NOT JUST A PROP | HTI’s aptly named Blade Runner facilitates hardware testing at supersonic speeds.

A German-born entrepreneur, Ahlborn made a small fortune founding alternative energy companies in Italy, moved to the U.S., and lost that fortune shortly after. At one point, he found himself waiting tables to make ends meet while pursuing another startup. He took a lesson in unreliability from that tumble, and in 2012 he founded JumpStart Fund, an online startup incubator that uses a crowd-sourcing tech-hub model. It’s the model used by HTT, a scrappy, fast-growing operation of just under 500 people who initially earn only equity in exchange for at least 10 hours a week, leaving them free to hold down day jobs. HTT has been characterized as “the Bad News Bears” of the Hyperloop movement, but Ahlborn has pulled off a string of increasingly impressive partnerships. In 2013, HTT partnered with the engineering software developer Ansys, which ran simulation models for the fluid dynamics of the Hyperloop. In 2014, HTT teamed up with UCLA’s Suprastudio master’s in architecture program, which designed the “human factor” of the HTT user experience, from pods to station architecture to boarding and ticketing. In August of this year, HTT announced partnerships with international engineering giant Aecom and Oerlikon, the world’s oldest vacuum technology—signs the company may be looking to expand beyond Quay Valley. HTT also began the permitting process in Kings County, Calif., where Quay Valley will be located; these will be the first permits ever issued for a Hyperloop. Designed to carry both people and freight, The Quay Valley Hyperloop has a projected top speed of more than 300 mph, significantly slower than Musk’s dream train. But the short track will demonstrate the potential of smaller suburban Hyperloops—a necessary early step. And it’s designed to create more energy than it uses, thanks to a mix of solar cells along the tubes, wind turbines along the supporting pylons and kinetic energy generated by the braking process. HTT plans to sell this energy back to the grid, creating a mass-transit system that’s also a power company. Ahlborn declined to offer any specifics on the technology, but officials at both Aecom and Oerlikon said they had vigorously vetted HTT’s plans before approving their partnerships, and they are now actively involved in all development. Though HTT and Quay Valley seem poised to win the Hyperloop race, Quay Hays sees it differently. “Why does there have to be just one Hyperloop company?” he asks. “Why can’t there be many?” “ If braking mechanisms were to fail, the Hyperloop pods could go from bullet trains to actual bullets in the world’s largest gun barrel mechanism. ” HTT IS OFTEN CONFUSED WITH ITS MOST VISIBLE COMPETITOR, HTI, which is a source of frustration for Ahlborn; HTI was formed eight months after HTT. “They’re pretty smart people,” Ahlborn says. “They could have called it something else.” Both points are inarguable. HTI was founded by Shervin Pishevar of Sherpa Ventures, a close friend of Musk and early investor in Uber. His co-founder, engineer Brogan BamBrogan, formerly of SpaceX, is now HTI’s chief technology officer. “I went to Shervin’s place in Napa prepared to say no,” says BamBrogan, laughing. “But his plans for Hyperloop—Hyperloops underwater!—blew me away.” The company’s board is something of a Silicon Valley fantasy-football team: David O. Sacks , Jim Messina, Peter Diamandis , Joe Lonsdale —and most recently Emily White, the former chief operating officer of Snapchat. ON THE LOT | Robot arms and test tubes at HTI’s Los Angeles headquarters. In June, Pishevar found his CEO in Rob Lloyd , the former co-president of Cisco. Lloyd had spent 20 years building the infrastructure for the World Wide Web, eventually leading a team of 25,000 engineers around the globe. He left Cisco shortly after being passed over for CEO. Lloyd, who was once told that no one would ever pay bills online, feels uniquely suited to run a company like HTI, whose product inspires disbelief. When Pishevar described his idea for a network of tubes crisscrossing the country and the world, Lloyd saw his work on the Internet’s infrastructure as a map to this fifth mode of transportation. “With information moving faster,” Lloyd says, “things have to move faster, too. It’s like the pattern of moving a digital bit, applied to a physical bit.” Freight at—or closer to—the speed of information. A literal Internet of things. HTI is raising $80 million for its next round of expansion. Pishevar, Lloyd and BamBrogan now regularly speak about what they call the Hyperloop’s Kitty Hawk moment: when the first working pod shoots down a full-size tube. HTI recently formed a relationship with the developer of a high-speed rail project from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. That company, China Railway International USA, is a partnership between the Chinese government’s railway company and XpressWest, a private American venture. Vegas, then, could be HTI’s Kitty Hawk. And given the players involved, it’s also an entry point to the potentially enormous Chinese market. If both HTT’s and HTI’s Hyperloops are successful, Quay Hays’s notion of multiple Hyperloop companies could come true, potentially leaving us with a national version of the New York City subway system, built in the early 1900s by two competing private developers, who each used different train cars. To this day, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is forced to buy two different types of subway car. A national network of Hyperloops could be stymied if pods are unable to cross from one system of tubes to another, potentially sabotaging the game-changing efficiency that Elon Musk imagined in Hyperloop Alpha. But we’re only two years into this idea, and despite the rampant speculation that surrounds Musk’s involvement, it would be a mistake to count him out. THE SPACEX COMPETITION GUIDELINES STATE THAT NO human or animal of any kind can be placed inside the test pods. It’s a standard safety precaution at this early stage, but the passenger ban underscores a serious public perception problem. Assuming the Hyperloop movement overcomes the regulatory, land-use and technological obstacles, it still has to persuade the public to get on board in the literal sense. Hyperloop Alpha contained a pod rendering that resembled a bullet with seating pitched at a semi-reclined angle: a claustrophobic high-tech bobsled. Other concerns became apparent. If a tube were to rupture or braking mechanisms were to fail, the pods could go from bullet trains to actual bullets in the world’s largest gun barrel. Worse, if the tubes were somehow crushed or blocked, it could be like tying the barrel in the act of firing. The initial excitement for a fifth mode of transportation had hit a roadblock. POWER PLAY | A model of motor coils that may someday make HTI’s Hyperloop more than an inventor’s fantasy. The need for an appealing and assuring user experience is not lost on the Hyperloop movement. HTT has recently collaborated with UCLA’s Suprastudio Architecture Program, which matches corporate partners with teams of top architecture students and faculty. In contrast with Musk’s SpaceX contest, which invited hundreds of teams to create a half-scale pod, Dirk Ahlborn’s HTT posed a challenge to a team of 25 at UCLA: create solutions for the Hyperloop user experience around a central technology that does not yet exist. Built into that challenge is the perceived impossibility of the technology. Architect Craig Hodgetts, the faculty leader of the Suprastudio team, describes their aim as “changing the emotional context” for the Hyperloop. Marta Nowak, another faculty member, puts it this way: “We wanted to change it from a ride no one wants to get on to a ride no one wants to get off.” As early test cases were discussed, a student named Yayun Zhou mentioned her grandmother in China as someone who would never set foot in a capsule capable of traveling near the speed of sound. Hodgetts asked for a picture of her grandmother, taped it to the studio wall and asked: “How do we get Yayun’s grandmother to ride the Hyperloop?” The elderly Chinese woman became the project’s muse. A user experience suitable for Yayun’s grandmother required a mix of urban planning, architecture, engineering, business marketing and even show business—Hodgetts brought in guests like Larry Gertz, the legendary Disney theme-park designer, and Syd Mead, the visual futurist who designed iconic vehicles and robots in “Star Trek,” “Tron” and “Blade Runner.” Suprastudio’s students suggested pods pressurized like airplanes to reduce G forces and, to make up for a lack of windows, landscape simulations projected on the insides of the pods—forests, starry skies, fields of grass. At the conclusion of the program, Ahlborn brought Yayun Zhou and some of her classmates onto the HTT team. “ We’re two years into Musk’s idea, and despite the secrecy that surrounds him, it would be a mistake to count him out. ” WHILE THE UCLA SUPRASTUDIO TEAM WAS ADDRESSING the user experience for HTT, students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were putting the finishing touches on a 1/24th-scale Hyperloop, complete with a magnetic induction coil and a 3-D printed pod. On May 4th, their tiny pod accelerated forward in the tube, exactly as they’d hoped. Later, the students shot a six-second video and posted it on YouTube. The video went up shortly after the SpaceX competition was announced. “Suddenly our YouTube video was getting all these hits,” says Emad Jassim, the director of undergraduate programs for the university’s department of mechanical science and engineering (MechSE). “But we were right here the whole time.”

TAKE A SEAT | A full capsule mockup designed by UCLA’s Suprastudio team.