There was a moment, an hour before an event last week, when 30 or so young fresh-faced people stood around their creation and posed for a group photo.
They were in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. All around them, reminders of historic innovations that began with research at this legendary college.
As the photographer clicked away, I wondered - what place in history would this photograph have? Will we look back at these 30 smiles and say "that was the team that changed the world!"?
If that is to be the case, there is a long road ahead. And indeed, it is long roads that are the motivation for this project. The MIT team is one of several working on Hyperloop, a vision for rapid travel put forth by Silicon Valley's most interesting man, Elon Musk.
He says the commute from San Francisco to Los Angeles - currently a five hour drive or an hour of flying - could be cut to 30 minutes.
What is Hyperloop?
Hyperloop is a conceptual transport system in which passengers are loaded into pods and fired through vacuum tubes at more than 600mph (1,000km/h).
Prototype pods have been tested running along magnetic tracks, much like the maglev trains used in countries such as Japan today.
Pumping the air out of the tubes reduces resistance, allowing high speeds to be achieved, potentially using less energy than a train.
The idea could reduce journey times over long distances, but there are many challenges for the rival developers to overcome before any such project can become a reality.
Mr Musk is the boss of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, and when he published in 2013 a white paper outlining a way to use airtight tubes to propel pods at speeds of up to 700mph (1130km/h), he set a challenge to anyone and everyone who wanted to try and build the technology.