American billionaire reveals about tunnel digging monster

Billionaire Elon Musk announced that the second tunnel boring machine of the company he founded, the Boring Company, is "almost ready".

Part of billionaire Elon Musk's Godot tunnel boring machine. Photo: Verge.

Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX and Tesla, said in a tweet yesterday that the new machine will be called "Line Storm" after a 1915 poem by famous American poet Robert Frost, according to CNBC. The new announcement has sparked speculation that the machine is designed to operate in all weather.

Musk came up with the idea for the tunneling company after becoming frustrated with traffic congestion in Los Angeles, California. He planned to build a network of tunnels under the city that could transport cars on sleds at speeds of around 125 mph.

Drilling head of 12,000 ton tunnel boring machine. Video: YouTube.

Earlier this year, the Boring Company's first tunnel-boring machine, Godot, began digging a test tunnel under Los Angeles. The machine is named after Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot."

News of the second tunneling machine comes just two months after the Boring Company received its first permit to dig a tunnel outside its corporate campus. In August, the Los Angeles City Council voted to allow the Boring Company to build a 2-mile (3.2 km) test tunnel 45 feet (13.5 m) below public streets around SpaceX headquarters.

Elon Musk's idea of ​​transporting cars in tunnels. Video: YouTube.

This test will help ensure that the plan actually works. If it doesn’t work as expected, the city of Los Angeles could order the tunnel to be filled with concrete or rock. The company also pledged to stop construction immediately if the ground moves more than an inch.

Some have suggested that Musk will use the Boring Company to dig tunnels for the Hyperloop system. However, digging tunnels under cities takes time because the thick layer of rock has not been accurately mapped.

"Our recent experience with tunneling in the US is that people are concerned, you have to meet a lot of environmental regulations, and you never know what's underground," Wired quoted Michael Manville, an urban planning expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.

According to VNE