I don’t think Elon Musk can still call his Boring Company a “small project” if it’s not going to have only one but now two multi-million dollar boring machines to play with.
Earlier this year, The Boring Company took delivery of their first giant boring machine– pictured above , which is 26 feet in diameter, about 400 feet long, and weighs 1,200 tons. They named it ‘Godot’ after the play ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett.
They wanted to learn from the machine and develop ways to improve its capacity in order to increase the speed of the machine by over ten-fold – from digging about 300 feet per week to up to 1 mile per week.
The machine reportedly already completed a 305-feet (100 meters) tunnel with an entrance in SpaceX’s parking lot in Hawthorne. They have received the green light to extend the tunnel by 2 miles.
Now it looks like Godot will have some help since Musk announced on Twitter that they have a second boring machine “almost ready”:
Second boring machine almost ready. Will be called Line-Storm, after the poem by Frost. "And be my love in the rain." pic.twitter.com/xlWPYdPu3P
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2017
The Boring Company started selling hats, which Musk jokingly says that it is financing the startup – though they apparently did sell over 6,000 hats in just two days.
Jokes aside, the startup is getting serious if we consider that those boring machines often cost several millions of dollars and often tens of millions.
The actual boring of the tunnels is actually just one part of the company’s plans. They also plan to use Tesla’s technology for its transportation system in the tunnel – a sort of electric skate platform to transport cars autonomously in the tunnel.
Musk hopes that after the 2-mile test tunnel, they will connect with LAX to dig up to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood and Sherman Oaks. He is reportedly working with the Mayor of Los Angeles on the project.
In other projects for longer distances, the Boring Company is actually thinking about creating a vacuum in the tunnels to turn them into a hyperloop system. Musk says that the company is already working on a project between New York and Washington DC.
Update: Elon Musk’s Boring Company is starting work on Baltimore-DC underground Hyperloop
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