The Boring Company has received federal approval to build a series of tunnels that will link major East Coast cities together and significantly cut travel time between them.
The tunnels would house Boring Company founder Elon Musk’s innovative ‘Hyperloop’ – a system in which train car type pods are launched through a tunnel with a near vaccuum seal at extremely high speeds. In a tweet authored earlier this week, Musk said he had received verbal approval to build tunnels linking New York, Philadelphia, D.C. and Baltimore, with the NY-DC tunnel cutting travel time between the two metropolitan areas to just 29 minutes.
Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2017
According to , Musk’s tweet was likely inspired by recent talks with a government representative that were described by the White House as “promising.” The White House declined to elaborate on the discussions, only saying the Trump administration is “committed to transformative infrastructure projects, and believe our greatest solutions have often come from the ingenuity and drive of the private sector.” Musk later tweeted out that formal approval is still needed, but following these discussions, he’s confident the project will be able to move forward.
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The Hyperloop technology is yet to be perfected, however Musk previously stated that receiving the permits to build the tunnels is much harder than developing the technology. The company recently boasted of a successful full system test in which the Hyperloop car levitated above the track for 5.3 seconds, reached 2Gs of acceleration and hit a speed of 70 mph. In production form, a Hyperloop passenger car should be able to reach speed of up to 700 mph. The company hopes to reach a speed of at least 250 mph in its next test.
[Source: Bloomberg]
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