Last July, SpaceX unveiled its Hyperloop Pod Competition, in which over 100 teams vied for the chance to test their designs on the company’s one-mile hyperloop test track. Now, the field is down to 30 teams, all consisting of students—except for one international group of over 140 engineers who found each other on Reddit.

Called rLoop as a nod to the “r/” prefix in every Reddit community’s name, the group decided to share what they’ve been working on for the past eight months through an AMA (Ask Me Anything), after their crowdfunding pitch rocketed to the top of Reddit’s Videos community the day before:

“We see the Internet as a tool for empowering humanity,” rLoop’s PR lead Richard Behiel writes in the team’s AMA, “and we hope to show people what can be accomplished when an online community comes together …”

As rLoop team member Jason Belzer explains in Forbes:

“rLoop is a non-profit, open source, online think tank composed of more than 140 members from 14 different countries working to help bring [Elon] Musk’s vision into reality. Among that membership are engineers from NASA , CERN, Tesla, GE, Honeywell, and dozens of other top technology companies, all of whom are volunteering their time to help create what will be the greatest leap forward in ground based transportation since the invention of the steam engine.”

Despite the distance (and wide range of time zones) between team members, the group stayed in touch and iterated on each other’s work using software that helped them stay as connected as their competition, primarily student teams based in the same location.

“We use Slack and Google Hangouts for collaboration, Trello for task management, Google Drive for document storage and AutoDesk Fusion 360 for our collaborative 3D CAD platform,” writes redditor and rLoop team member daballachris in a comment. “Telecommuting is becoming more and more the norm, I think we’re just ahead of the curve!”

The final round of the Hyperloop Pod Competition—slated for this summer in Hawthorne, Calif.—will pit the more traditionally organized teams of engineering students from a single school against rLoop’s more sprawling online collective and open-source design process.

“Part of rLoop’s mission,” Behiel shares in a comment, “is to provide the Reddit community with the opportunity to get involved … regardless of their background or skill-set.”

Among their ranks are a Belgian aerospace engineer, a Canadian classically trained musician now working as a mechanical engineer, an Australian safety engineer, and individual students at schools around the world.

Whether the group’s collaborative system will hinder their progress as they move past the design phase or continue to be their competitive advantage remains to be seen. As rLoop’s engineering lead Thomas Lambot told VICE in February, “Our strength, which was having a lot of brains from a lot of different countries, has now become a weakness—how are we going to build this thing? Where are we going to do it?”

Now one month closer to the final test in Hawthorne, the team addressed these and other questions from redditors in their AMA. Below are a few of their top responses.

Are Hyperloops Really the Future of Transportation?

Goals for the Upcoming Test This Summer?

Human Control or Auto-Pilot?

How Are They Making the Prototype?

Is It Safe?

How Would the rPod Work Commercially?

To read all of the rLoop team’s answers to redditors’ questions, head over to the original AMA discussion. You can learn more about their work, team members, and how you can get involved on the rLoop website.