Here’s a company with zip experience in boring. Their first home brew machine is “anticipated to be ten times faster than conventional boring machines, with hopes of making it even faster.”
No rationally run startup for something with this level of engineering could get away with saying something like this without being laughed at.
The real “difference” is the hyperloop and similar stuff. Musk thinks he can send people from NYC to Washington DC in 29 minutes, center to center. Sure, I could do that with a $100 billion. But the chance of fatalities would be high. And the economic model is terrible. It makes the Concord look like genius level thinking.
This is a guy who started his first boring project in his company parking lot just for the fun of it.
It’s doing a lot different. None of it provably good.
SpaceX is also a going concerns with both manifested commercial and government payloads. It isn’t clear just how much profit the company is actually making, if any, and since SpaceX is privately held they do not publish detailed financial reports, but given the tempo of launch operations and the existing manifest, barring a string of launch failures or evidence that they are operating strictly out of capital reserves there is no reason the company shouldn’t continue to operate indefinitely. Musk’s antics with regard to Tesla and otherwise have essentially no impact on the day to day operations of SpaceX, and the kerfluffle about whether he might have a security clearance (if he holds one) revoked has no bearing on the ability of SpaceX to perform launches.
That being said, there is the old saw that the best way to become a millionaire in the aerospace industry is to start out as a billionaire. There is no stated plan to profitibility with Musk’s Mars colonization schemes, the superheavy lift Big Falcon Rocket which is designed to support them has yet to fly, and there is almost no existing market requirement for the capacity it provides especially when many commercial satellites are getting smaller and lighter. Depending on how much revenues they are plowing into that effort and whether they can develop a market demand for it doing multiple payload deployments at a high enough rate to give a return on investment, they may have to scale back or put the program on hold if it interferes with the current business.
Also, boring tunnels under Los Angeles is particularly troublesome given the sesmic instabilities and pockets of natural gas, which is part of the reason LA has never had an extensive subway system other than immediately under downtown (the Red Line and parts of the Blue Line). The actual process of boring, while slow and laborsome, is not the big technical challenge; it is dealing with all of the problems, both technical and legal, that occur during projects like Boston’s Big Dig or Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct. It is unlikely that, at least with respect to public transit in the Los Angeles areas, that The Boring Company will be anything more than a novelty.
It would be amusing were it not for the army of willing sycophants who strut around acting like they’re going to be living on Mars sometime soon.
I think it’s possible that we will send a crewed vehicle to Mars at some point during the remainder of my life (anywhere from 20-40 years from now.) I can consider the possibility of a small station on the Moon (think something like the ISS but on the surface) within the remainder of my lifetime.
those people who think we’re going to have colonies on Mars within the lifetime of anyone currently breathing on this planet are bonkers and need to stop desperately wishing sci-fi was real.
SpaceX is scheduled to launch a GPS satellite for the USAF in December, and then another Falcon Heavy demo launch for them in March of 2019. They’ve got additional launches contracted beyond that. I’d be quite surprised if his pot-smoking incident causes them to lose those contracts, or future ones they stand to win.
This is the thing as far as the USAF perspective. It doesn’t matter who is in charge on paper. If the owner has issues and can replace the manager on a whim, then the owner’s issues are the Air Force’s issues.
The last several articles I’ve read on the matter indicate that the USAF knows it has to do “something” but isn’t sure what that “something” is. I do not know where these articles are getting this.
