Cosmic Log
Out of the blue, tech billionaire Elon Musk reported today that he’s received verbal approval from the government to build an underground Hyperloop transit system between New York and Washington, D.C., with stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore.
“NY-DC in 29 mins,” Musk said in a tweet.
The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, says he spends only about 2 percent of his time working on tunnels, and some of that time was allotted this week to tweeting about the digging that’s being done on SpaceX’s property in Hawthorne, Calif.
Musk tweeted video clips that highlighted the riggings for a “car/pod elevator” that’s taking shape in an old parking lot. “Should be operating next week,” he said.
In its on-the-scene report, the Daily Breeze says the finishing touches are being put on a roughly 600-foot-long bore pit and tunnel entrance, dug 20 feet beneath the ground-level lot.
Musk’s aim is to extend the tunnel as an experiment that could lead to a high-speed transit system for cars beneath Los Angeles. He jokingly calls his venture The Boring Company.
One problem: Musk hasn’t yet gotten the regulatory go-ahead to dig beyond SpaceX property.