Space for Aaron's ambitions after Hyperloop experience
An Irish team made it in to the top five out of 1,000 entries from across the world in a prestigious competition run by Elon Musk’s Tesla and Space X in California – and on that team was a young Rochfortbridge man, Aaron Scully.
“Thrilled,” was how Aaron says he felt after the 50-strong ‘Éirloop’ team’s success in the competition in the US in July. As well as coming fifth, the Éirloop members won an Innovation award.
“It was the top 20 teams globally, and just six of those were from Europe,” he says, putting the Ireland team’s ranking into perspective.
The entrants’ mission was to design a self-propelling vehicle – or pod - that could travel in the vacuum-sealed ‘hyperloop’ tube system that Space X and Tesla are attempting to develop.
The ‘hyperloop’ is intended as a transport system that will facilitate ultra-high speed travel for both passengers and freight, at a top speed of 1,260kph – the sort of speed that would mean a journey time of just 11 minutes from Dublin to Galway.
Because it will be sealed, the tube would be free of air resistance.
Naturally, neither Dublin nor Galway are on Musk’s radar just yet: his focus is on getting passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco – a 350 mile journey – in just 35 minutes.
Aaron, a second year Computer Science student at NUIM, heard about the project from a friend, and was immediately excited about it, little expecting that his participation would ultimately see him spending three weeks in the US working alongside a mix of engineering, design, computer science and physics students from colleges across Ireland, some of them being, like him, still in first year, and others at PhD level.
Heading up the Irish project was DCU student Bartek Baran.
In January, when the finalists in the competition were announced, Ireland’s team was on the list, and the team – with the generous support of Aer Lingus – had to decamp to the US, although hundreds of hours of preparatory work was done here at home.
“I worked on the electronics, sensors and was solely responsible for the management of our high- powered batteries and battery systems,” says Aaron.
The work was intense, and production of the pod was expensive: “It cost around €80,000 – and that’s not talking about our time, or the cost of getting to the US and living there,” says Aaron of the Éirloop team’s eventual creation.
Mergon
Among the sponsors was the Castlepollard firm Mergon.
Their prototype, which was around the size of a door, was capable of achieving a speed of around 50kph when tested, which delighted the team.
This was the third year that the competition was hosted by SpaceX, and after testing, three teams qualified to launch on the 0.8 mile test hyperloop track which is being used for experimentation aimed at bringing the vision to reality.
In the final, Delft University of Technology, from The Netherlands, achieved a top speed of 88mph; the team from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland achieved 53mph, but the overall winners were the team from the Technical University of Munich, who, for the third time, emerged on top, having achieved a top speed of 284mph – a significant increase on their 2017 performance, when they hit 201 mph.
Elon Musk made a surprise appearance at the event, and Aaron was delighted to meet him.
“We gave him an Irish rugby jersey, because we knew he has an interest in rugby,” said Aaron, who has been left completely fired up by the experience.
“It was such a difference: beforehand, you would see lines of code on a computer, but when you see your code move things, it motivates you to do more.”
The ex-St Joseph’s pupil has always been interested in space technology, and his hope is that his degree will ultimately enable him to work for a body such as the European Space Agency, or perhaps working in the sphere of satellite technology.