Elon Musk Gets Approval to Pursue Underground Hyperloop

A trip from New York to D.C. would reportedly take just 29 minutes.

Elon Musk took to Twitter on Thursday to once again break some big news. According to Musk, he has received verbal government approval for his new venture, The Boring Company, to pursue an underground Hyperloop that connects New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. The trip from New York to D.C. would take just 29 minutes to get from city center to city center, about 230 miles, and the loop would have 12 or more entry/exit elevators in each city. Right now, you can do it in a car in about 4.5 hours, and less than three if you take the right train.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the White House confirmed that it has been in talks with Musk and Boring Company executives over the planned tunnel. While they have had "promising conversations to date," the company still seems to be a long way from boring.

Musk added on Twitter that there is still much work to be done in order to receive formal approval, but he is optimistic that said approval will be swift.

Musk announced the new tunneling project in December 2016 after he declared that "traffic was driving him nuts" so he bought a boring machine and started digging around his SpaceX facilities. It's too bad that the first potential tunnel would be about 3,000 miles away from his desk in Hawthorne, CA.

In an April Ted Talk, Musk described the Boring Company as "puttering along" with a few interns and people working part time, but the company, which seems poised for more than puttering, is hiring. According to the website, the Boring Company is looking for everything from mechanical engineers and tunnel design engineers to plant operators, geologists, and even an in-house counsel, which might be important to help push these projects along a bit faster your average infrastructure projects.

The White House spokesman said that the administration is “committed to transformative infrastructure projects,” and while much of the news is preliminary, the tube technology would certainly classify as transformative. Keep in mind that The Boring Company is still talking tunnels, and not necessarily the Hyperloop sled. If you recall, last week we saw that Hyperloop One’s sled works, but right now it tops out at 70 mph and was only tested for 5.3 seconds. Still a long way to go before we’re tunneling through the East Coast.

I’m David Mantey, and this is IEN Now.

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