 |
The Boring Company also known in short as TBC is basically an American infrastructure and tunnel construction services company whose foundation was laid by Elon Musk. Although its current and proposed projects are being designed for loop intra-city transit systems, but the Boring company has stated that the Hawthorne test tunnel can support Hyperloop research and development, and that current tunnels are also being built in such a way that they could support eventual transition to Hyperloop-based transportation on longer routes between cities.
The Boring company has completed one tunnel for testing Hyperloop as well as Loop in Los Angeles County, and it has another tunnel under construction in Las Vegas for Loop only. Two more tunnels are pending permission, one connecting Washington D.C. to Baltimore with both Loop and Hyperloop, and another connecting Dodger Stadium to the rest of Los Angeles which would be Loop only.
Difficulty with Los Angeles traffic and limitations with the present two-dimensional transportation network has been the early inspiration for the Boring company. Initially the Boring Company was a subsidiary of SpaceX, becoming a separate and fully independent company only in the year 2018. Upto December 2018, 90% of the equity was owned by Musk, with 6% held by SpaceX in return for the use of SpaceX resources during the initial startup of the company. Outside investments during 2019 have changed the equity split though.
The company states that future boring operations will implement a "contemporaneous operation" of boring and tunnel reinforcement for cost reduction in tunnelling operations, also there will be reduction of tunnel size, re-using soil materials for tunnel construction, and further innovative technological improvements.
Musk also gave a teaser at the possibility that the underground infrastructure technology might be used for his project of creating a self-sustaining human colony on the red planet Mars with the following statements, "And then, along the way, building underground habitats where you could get radiation shielding... you could build an entire city underground if you wanted to".
More