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Elon Musk's Boring Machine Completes the First Section of An LA Tunnel (theverge.com)
New submitter simkel shares a report from The Verge: Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk says his ambitious tunnel-boring endeavor, aptly named The Boring Company, has officially started digging underneath Los Angeles. Musk announced the news on Twitter, where he said "Godot," the Samuel Beckett-inspired name of the company's tunnel boring machine, had completed the the first segment of a tunnel in the Southern California metropolis. Prior to today, it was unclear how long it would take Musk to convince the city to allow him to move the experimental effort beyond the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne. We don't have details on what Musk hammered out with the city of LA. But he did tweet earlier this month about a meeting with L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti to lay the groundwork for the necessary permits and regulatory approvals he'd need to start digging with Godot, which weighs about 1,200 tons and runs about 400 feet long. Musk said last month that the first tunnel would run from LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood, and Sherman Oaks, with later tunnels covering more of the greater LA area. Now, it looks like the LAX to Culver City route appears underway.
The article doesn't say, but does anyone know how long this "first segment" is? Since the TBM itself is 400 feet long, I can only assume it's at least 400 feet...
But he hasn't left his own property yet has he? There isn't a lot of red tape to work though to dig a hole on your own property, some, but not a lot.
It's a tunnel that goes nowhere at this point. Wait, he's going to be tied up in red tape soon enough doing traffic studies, environmental impact statements, building permits and OSHA reports.... Not to mention doing some actual engineering and survey work...
However, I wouldn't be surprised if getting caught up in the red tape isn't the plan. I know of a couple of deep holes being dug in some pretty interesting locations under strange circumstances, including this one. I'm beginning to suspect some kind of Glomar Explorer esk project is going on....This hole in the ground sure looks like a cover story worthy of Howard Huges, dubious in actual value, but plausible enough you cannot just dismiss it out of hand.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I'm sure this isn't an issue since they must have smart engineers working on the project, but the first thing that comes to my mind are the earthquakes that plague California. Is this not an issue?
SpaceX has had unprofitable periods and profitable periods. General consensus is that it's probably running around the break even point on average, but it's doing that while plumbing a large amount of R&D money into reusable rocket technologies, developing them and currently trying to drive the refurb window down to days. That may not meet your definition of "profitable", but if nothing else, it's employing a lot of people, helping local economies, advancing the state of the art in aerospace, and has directly driven launch costs down while causing competitors to find ways to make access to space cheaper too. That's already a win, even if they go bust tomorrow, which is unlikely.
There's a similar situation for Tesla, plumbing a huge amount of money into a battery factory and generally investing for the long haul, not for immediate profit.
Unlike many businessmen, Musk is not in it for the money. He's in it to change the world in ways he believe are for the better. Will it all work out? Probably some will, some won't (I'm not sold on the viability of the Boring idea), and there are problems with his approaches (e.g, running employees to the bone) but it's still a damn sight more impressive than "schlub at Starbucks". He's done more for the world than you will do if you had a hundred lifetimes to do it in.
They are putting in a tunnel in my city for an LRT system. For many years before they were drilling core samples to know what they were going to be drilling through. Even then we've had 3 sinkholes caused by the tunnelling and it's only been luck that nobody has been hurt.
One does not just decide to make a tunnel through a downtown core without years of preparation and approval. Tunnelling causes a lot of the ground to shift which can cause damage to buildings and the sinkholes. While Musk can afford to pay for the damages the city can't if it's found out that due diligence wasn't done and they permitted this to go ahead.