If you haven’t heard about ‘The Boring Company’ then what world are you living in? It is another one of Elon Musk’s super ambitious projects, which was brewed while being stuck in a severe traffic jam in Los Angeles (LA). The honking vehicles pushed him to the limit and he decided to start a project to curb on-road congestion. He named the company as a pun and started work on this project, which has been materialized and is being kicked off today.
Musk has already got himself a second-hand tunneling machine, which has been painted and repaired to get ready for action. He has shared photographs of this very machine a couple times before, while other times it has been spotted sitting in SpaceX’s yard. About a couple day ago, Musk kicked off a debate about the naming of the machine, with a suggestion as random as — Snoop Dug.
Naming theme for tunnel boring machines will be poems & plays. Decided against plays & poems. Too obvious.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2017
But, something clicked for this legendary innovator just yesterday, when he announced that the boring machines will be named after poems and plays. He has earlier ruled out the possibility of the same but has now settled on the name of the first machine — Godot. It has been taken from Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play, Waiting for Godot.
First machine is Godot. Still waiting … Don’t know why, when or where.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2017
Call it ceremonial or not! Here’s the very first photograph shared by CEO Elon Musk today. This is the entry for both the tunneling machine (as you’ll see below) and the engineering team who’ll be working on this project. Now since this is just the beginning, it could well be the reason why Musk shared a photograph of the opening of the tunnel, before the machine itself.
Even the tunnel is ecstatic about the beginning of this project. This is precisely the location where Godot will be transferred to before it is switched on to start creating tunnels under LA. Musk is starting off in the front yard of SpaceX, but plans of connecting LAX (Los Angeles Airport) to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood and Sherman Oaks through the first full-length tunnel. The machine will be jacked up by then, hence, future tunnels will cover the whole of greater LA.
Here’s Godot, operating at standard industry speeds. Elon Musk is aiming to increase the speed of operation ten fold, eventually making it faster than his pet snail named Gary. This snail is also present at the tunneling ceremony, noticing if the said boring machine will ever surpass its speed or not. You can take a peek at Gary right here, a photo of him in his Pineapple enclosure has also been shared on Instagram.
You can witness the boring machine’s cutterhead in the photograph attached above and the body of the same in the image attached below. From what it seems, today is the day — The Boring Company goes from being just the name of an ambitious project to create underground 3D tunnel networks to actually existing. The machine has been lowered down to the starter tunnel and is expected to start chewing through rubble soon enough. The final assembly of the machine is expected to be a few hundred metres long.
Bonus content: While this Instagram post also relates to the boring project, we’ve still termed it as bonus content — separate from the start of boring. As can be seen in the video underneath, a camera has been mounted on an electric sled which is expected to soon transport people at speeds as high as 200 kilometers an hour (approx 125 miles/hour) in these tunnels. Musk has already talked about the same when he first shared the simulation of the said project at his TED talk earlier this month.
