SpaceX is pushing back the Hyperloop pod competition to January 2017

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company that plans to land a spacecraft on Mars in 2018, has delayed the Hyperloop pod competition. Originally, the competition was scheduled to be held late this summer, but the company has decided to push it back to the weekend of Jan. 27-29 in 2017.

SpaceX, which is not affiliated with the two commercial companies that are attempting to build the Hyperloop track, said on its website that many of the independent teams of engineers have asked for more time to refine the designs of their pods.

"While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype," the original announcement for the competition read. "For this reason, SpaceX is announcing an open competition, geared towards university students and independent engineering teams, to design and build the best Hyperloop pod."

The competition will take place in Hawthorne, Calif., where teams will be asked to demonstrate the capabilities of their pod designs on a one-mile test track built by SpaceX.

Twenty-two of the more than 115 student engineering teams that entered the competition were chosen to advance to the next level in January, 2016. The top five teams came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Delft University of Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Virginia Tech and University of California, Irvine.

Elon Musk on the progress and plans of SpaceX

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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