Nov 23, 2016 05:08 AM EST By Jane Reed, UniversityHerald Reporter

With January 2017 inching close, thousands of engineers and university teams are making sure their Hyperloop pods are up to expectation.

After SpaceX founder Elon Musk challenged the world's greatest minds to create a transportation system that would take its subjects from point A to point B in less time than it should take, thousands answered. Most come from university schools and research teams. These teams are working on Musk's idea of supersonic travel using vacuum tubes as a means of public transportation.

One team is already gearing up for the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition on January. VicHyper, a team of university students from Melbourne, Australia are proud to release their design, cites New Atlas. VicHyper is just one of the 30 teams that have been selected to test their designs next year. In the previous year, hundreds of teams entered but MIT stood out as having the winning design which includes the comfortability of the passenger too.

In order for the Australian team to carry its subjects and reach speeds of over 760 mph, they need to suspend their pods to reduce friction. Most of the teams in the Hyperloop competition use magnetic levitation or air bearings. They were able to create a small cushion of air that enabled the pod to hover.

But the students from VicHyper, wh all come from the RMIT University in Melbourne, are doing something different. They are one of the few teams that were able to make the cut from the 125 competitors this year, hailing from the Southern Hemisphere.

VicHyper lead Zac McClelland said that SpaceX wanted them to feature how good their designs are of the braking systems. But he added that SpaceX also wants them to simplify their design by putting it on wheels and removing the air bearing.

Without having to worry about using magnetic levitation, VicHyper is working on perfecting a braking and acceleration system that works at high speeds and in a vacuum environment.

Watch out for VicHyper and other competitors to test out their designs on the Hyperloop track next year.

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