Students from ETH Zurich achieved success in the SpaceX competition of US entrepreneur Elon Musk with their Swissloop ‘enhanced capsule’ concept, competing against thousands of other teams.

The Swissloop project is supported by Leybold (www.leybold.com), the vacuum company that has been promoting Mr Musk’s Hyperloop projects since 2015 (a hyperloop is a sealed tube or system of tubes through which a pod travels in a vacuum, conveying people or objects at speeds up to 1,000kph).

Swissloop (www.swissloop.ch) CEO Luca Di Tizio — together with his team of designers, physicists, computer scientists and mechanical engineers — competed in the Hyperloop Pod Competition 2017; Swissloop was one of 27 teams (from an initial 1,200 university teams) invited by Mr Musk to the SpaceX test site in Hawthorne, Los Angeles, where they presented their specially developed pod solution.

The Swissloop pod capsule took third place, and the team was the first one to risk a test run with ‘cold gas’ drive.

Swissloop will now compete in the Hyperloop Pod Competition 2018 finals, which again take place at SpaceX headquarters in California — from 15-21 July.

Swissloop will work closely with engineers from SpaceX and Boring Company (an infrastructure and tunnel construction company founded by Elon Musk in late 2016) to validate this year’s pods and test whether the Swissloop pod will “glide safely through the vacuum tube”.