On the last weekend in January, more than 1,000 students from 27 countries and 20 U.S. states flew into College Station, Texas for a chance to win SpaceX's first-ever Hyperloop pod design competition. The 120-plus teams gathered at Texas A&M University and pulled out all the stops to impress deep-pocketed tech companies who might turn their renderings into reality, but the ultimate prize went much further than any seed funding: a chance to build their pods and test them on SpaceX's one-mile Hyperloop test track in California.

When is an airplane actually a boat? That's as much a legal question as it is a philosophical one for FlyShip, a German purveyor of low-flying boat-like seaplanes. FlyShip's decades-old AirFish series of vehicles are legally boats, but they fly like very, very low-skimming planes. And they're working on a new version.

It is supposed to be about fun, one man told the assembled journalists this morning, as we sat in a conference room facing K Street in Washington, D.C. They gathered us here to set the stage before they went off to battle against a three-letter F-word: the FAA. The Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), a community-based hobbyist organization founded in 1936, is spending today lobbying Congress for new rules about their airplanes. It's the latest effort to make sure that, whatever future drones bring to the skies, there's still room for children to fly their airborne toys for fun.

By land mass, Canada is the second largest country on Earth. Yet much like Earth's largest country, Russia, humans populate a very small amount of its land. This leaves large tracts of resources untapped and wilderness unvisited. However, snow and ice make vast swathes of this land inaccessible for all but a few summer months, and large sea ice prevents the same for ships much of the time. And though increasing global temperatures will eventually (if global climate change isn't halted) reduce sea ice and the potential severity of winter, there's another alternative if humans want to traverse interior Canada before that happens: actual freakin' airships.

In 1783, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Ètienne Montgolfier launched a sheep, a duck, and a rooster in the open basket of a hot air balloon over southern France. In 1957, a very different kind of balloon carried US Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger to 100,000 feet on the first Manhigh mission. The difference in balloon technology that made Kittinger's flight possible came down, largely, to one man: Otto Winzen.

Airliners are designed as if people are afraid of the sky. The tiny windows, never matched perfectly to the seats, are easy to obscure, and the insides evoke all the comfort and mundanity of a commuter train or, on really nice planes, a bland but expensive lounge bar. This is a shame, because passengers struggling through a pre-selected movie while waiting for their half-size sodas or miniature cocktails are missing out on a truly amazing experience: hurtling through the sky in a flying machine, the kind that's only existed for little more than a century. So why not design a plane that sees the sky as a joy to experience, rather than an inconvenience to hide?