University students and engineers now have a chance to contribute to the ongoing development of Elon Musk's and SpaceX's high-speed ground transit system, the Hyperloop. As SpaceX works toward constructing a one-mile test track near their headquarters in Hawthorne, California, they launched a design-build competition open to university students and independent engineering teams to propose their own Hyperloop human-scale transit pod. Entrants will then be able to operate their pods on the test track during Competition Weekend, currently scheduled for June 2016. And in case you were wondering, no riders will be inside any of the pods during testing.

SpaceX launched the competition in effort to accelerate the development of a functional Hyperloop prototype and, as always, to foster and promote student innovation. In the current design guidelines, entrants will have to address the pod's essential technical design features including navigation sensors, ground-operator communication, and vital safety mechanisms in the event that the tube loses power or suffers a breach.

An in-person Design Weekend at Texas A&M University on January 9, 2016 will allow entrants to present their designs — which could be a pod, a subsystem, or safety feature — and have them evaluated by engineers at SpaceX and Tesla Motors and university professors. Other entrants may also choose to actually construct a pod for testing.

Entrants must submit their Intent to Compete online by 5 p.m. PDT on Sept. 15, 2015. Read the current competition guidelines. The full set of competition criteria will be released in August 2015.

Find more about the Hyperloop on Archinect here. You can also listen to Archinect Sessions episode #21 for a conversation with Craig Hodgetts of UCLA's own Hyperloop Studio.