The Hawthorne board of directors in Los Angeles have given a go-ahead for the construction of an ultra-fast tunnel test portion under one of its streets for electric vehicles extending west from SpaceX headquarters. Godot will not have waited that long. Elon Musk's tunnel digging machine - named after the character in Samuel Beckett's play - will finally be able to get into action for a first test in the public basement. Ultra-fast car tunnels will soon be launched in California.
The City of Hawthorne, located in Los Angeles (and home to SpaceX's headquarters), has given permission to Elon Musk's Boring Company to complete a first test run of 2.6 kilometers as part of the giant project of ultra-fast billionaire tunnels.
The City Council had signed off the two-mile project on Tuesday in a 4-1 majority, with only one member Nilo Michelin refusing.
Elon Musk tunnels, an administrative puzzle
The agreement of the local authorities was the last missing part of the network of tunnels imagined by the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla last January. The idea of building underground roads where cars could be transported on high-speed platforms had come to the billionaire after being trapped in the traffic jams of Los Angeles.
Until now, Godot had been able to dig only under the private domain of Elon Musk, but the machine could now be exercised under 120th Street in Hawthorne under the government assistance. The express tunnel will be dug about 13 meters from the surface and the SpaceX construction manager in charge of the project ensures that the citizens will not see or hear anything from the site.
And if The Boring Company encounters any problem, the City Council reserves the right to stop the work and ask Elon Musk and his team to put it all together again.
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"You don't see it or feel it, and surely don't hear anything as everything will be done underground," says Brett Horton, SpaceX’s senior director of construction, and who also oversees the Boring Company's work.
"The company workers will be extremely observing the consequence of the tunneling and instantly holds work if the surface ground sinks by a half-inch beyond the tunnel," the director added.
Eventually, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and now The Boring Company hopes to build a network of 30 to 40 tunnels under the California metropolis. And as if the project was not crazy enough like that, Elon Musk explained that all these little tunnels were just training to colonize Mars, where SpaceX plans to go by 2018.