The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunnel-digging venture, is close to completing its next tunneling machine, the Line-Storm. According to an article in Inverse, the machine could be working in a month or so.
The new machine forms a key component of Musk’s plan to reduce the costs of tunneling and enable better transportation through cities. Musk explained on Twitter that the current focus is on higher travel speeds and tighter follow distances in the test tunnel. The company hopes to send autonomous electric vehicles through at speeds of up to 150 mph, using guide wheels to steady the vehicle.
The company’s initial tunnel, a 1.14-mile stretch in Hawthorne, California, was built at a cost of $10 million, around 10 times cheaper than the average cost of regular tunnels, according to the article. The Boring Company’s overall goal is to develop machines capable of mining continuously, as current designs can only dig for 10 minutes per hour.
This second machine is named after Robert Frost’s poem “A Line-Storm Song.” Musk plans on building a third machine dubbed “Prufrock,” in reference to the T.S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Watch the video here.
Source: Inverse
