Elon Musk, well known for being the founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX, is planning to create an underground transportation tunnel system. Los Angeles officials approved the request from Musk’s Boring Company to construct a test tunnel between the northeast corner of Hawthorne Municipal Airport and the 120th Street.
According to a report published in the journal Daily Breeze, the Los Angeles suburb Hawthorne leaders approved on Tuesday night the construction of a two-mile underground tunnel in a 4-1 vote; only Councilman Nilo Michelin denied the request. The track will extend from the west of the city to the SpaceX headquarters, and it will let vehicles to drive in an extremely-fast velocity.
A video uploaded by Musk’s Boring Co. shows a car that descends under the street and joins other cars on a “skate” that speeds through the tunnel. Each of those cars goes to different destinations, and at the end of the journey they ascend and come back to the street on the surface.
Any information about how fast the car would go was not delivered to media. However, Musk promised to invent something the world has never seen before.
Nobody will feel the construction of the tunnel
According to the entrepreneur, the building of the tunnel won’t disturb the surface of the area. There won’t be any visible workers according to Musk, who will also oversee the Boring Co. tunnel creation. “You don’t see it, don’t hear it, and certainly don’t feel it,” said the billionaire. He also told the media that the company would stop the process if “the surface ground subsides by a half-inch above the tunnel.”
Brett Horton, the senior director for SpaceX operations and part of the Boring Co. team, told the council at its Aug. 22 meeting that the tunnel construction won’t intervene with traffic flow or anything in the surface.
“Everything happens underground,” said Horton. “We won’t have construction crews walking down the street. We won’t have excavators.”
Musk hopes that the construction reaches a level of 44 feet underground. There’s already a shaft and a tunnel entrance of 160 feet long in SpaceX’s old parking lot, near of its 1 Rocket Road headquarters.
The elevator that lets cars go underground to the specially designed “skate” is also already being tested. According to the Boring Co., the skate would let pedestrians and bicycles go to the underground tunnel.
The entrepreneur hopes that the Hawthorne tunnel gets so long, it ends at the Los Angeles International Airport.
America hopes for Hyperloop trains
Elon Musk hasn’t officially told the media that he expects to test the high-speed electric Hyperloop trains. However, he hasn’t denied the possibility either.
The concept of these trains was introduced in 2013. They would move over depressurized tubes, and they would gain impulse from magnetic suspension technology, which is expected to let the train move at a speed of 700 mph.
White House officials announced in July that they had “promising conversations” with the billionaire entrepreneur about creating “transformative infrastructure projects” across the country.
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Source: Daily Breeze