Eurotube Foundation

Recently, an increasing number of dominantly European university teams have excelled at developing vehicle prototypes to compete in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition in Los Angeles, California. Therefore the EuroTube Foundation was founded in 2019 to provide simpler access to public test and shared research infrastructures in Europe. As a Swiss foundation, EuroTube’s non-profit framework counters the trend of venture-capital-backed companies that corner academic research by building private test infrastructures with limited accessibility, capability, and insufficient conditions for proprietary developments by such academic or industrial users. The EuroTube Foundation’s mission is to provide neutral research and technology testing grounds at central locations in Europe. At its Swiss base in Collombey-Muraz, the EuroTube Foundation develops the necessary infrastructure technologies to facilitate its first, 3km-long test track that is designed to the needs of university research groups and the growing industrial and startup ecosystem for vacuum transportation. As of the year 2021, EuroTube has been recognized as Research Institute of National Importance in Switzerland.