Fortune (Oct. 5) -- As announced in June, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is inviting challengers to design early prototypes of pods that could travel through the ultra-high-speed Hyperloop system. One team with a big head start is based in Illinois’ department of mechanical science and engineering, where Emad Jassim directs the undergraduate program. Students there have been working on Hyperloop designs since 2014, and built a working scale model of the Hyperloop as a senior design project.