A Hyperloop company is about to break ground on its five-mile test track in California

HTT

The Los Angeles-based startup Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) is gearing up to build a five-mile test track to test its Hyperloop.

HTT secured the land in Quay Valley, California in early 2015 with the plan of breaking ground this year. The startup officially announced Wednesday that construction will begin by the end of the second quarter in 2016, which concludes June 30.

The Hyperloop works by propelling people in pods through a tube-like system at speeds that could top 700 miles per hour.

HTT has filed the necessary permits with Kings County and will begin the "preparation activities" necessary to start construction in the coming weeks, HTT wrote in a press release. The company is aiming for a public opening in 2016 and estimates that the track will cost $100 million.

"This will be the world’s first passenger-ready Hyperloop system,” HTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn wrote in the release.

HTT is not the only company aiming to have the first passenger-ready Hyperloop. The similarly named Hyperloop Technologies is currently working on two separate test tracks.

One track, which is being built in North Las Vegas, Nevada, is unenclosed and shorter than the proposed full scale system. Testing is slated to take place during the first quarter of this year on that system.

Hyperloop Technologies has yet to pick another location for its full-scale, two-mile test track, but the Hyperloop tubes for that system have arrived in Nevada.

"We actually have the whole company riveted behind achieving our own Kitty Hawk moment," Rob Lloyd CEO of Hyperloop Technologies, said in a recent CNN Money interview. Lloyd was referring to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — where the Wright brothers achieved the first airplane flight.

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