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.
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.
Mr Musk isn't paying the firms, but he has committed to funding a series of tests. The hope is that these will happen in August this year. The target is that by 2021 humans will be travelling on Hyperloops around the world.
The MIT team is one of more than 20 non-commercial groups also designing a Hyperloop pod - with money coming from SpaceX in the form of a competition.
That was split over two phases - a design contest, which MIT won in January, and an on-track test coming up in the summer.
But it all could be a colossal waste of time. The barriers to Hyperloop becoming a reality are enormous - and it's not just about technology.
Straight and narrow
Part of any visionary's CV is the ability to ignore the naysayers and focus on your vision. If and when you succeed, everyone backtracks and says they knew you were a genius all along.
Elon Musk is the sort of chap that is used to people telling him he's wrong. When he set out to make electric cars appeal to petrolheads, he had a lot of people to convince - but somehow, and on the brink of bankruptcy, he got some investors on board.
For more:BBC