Elon Musk aims to revamp tunnel digging
Strikes deal with Wis. firm to build underground rail
Billionaire CEO Elon Musk is known for his California rocket and electric-car businesses, but he looked to the Midwest to show he is serious about building an ultra-high-speed underground rail system from New York to Washington, D.C.
In pursuit of a massive tunnel boring machine to innovate yet again, Musk struck a deal with Super Excavators in Menomonee Falls, Wis. He is drawing upon the 67-year-old contracting company’s expertise with a goal of developing ways to dig tunnels faster — an accomplishment that could dramatically reduce the cost of bringing his latest dream to life.
Musk, CEO of both automaker Tesla and rocket maker SpaceX, has quietly assembled a team of advisers to aid his latest start-up, which he appropriately named The Boring Co.
He tabbed Super Excavators as temporary consultants to help get the machine up and running.
The previously unearthed ties between The Boring Co. and Super Excavators reveal fresh insight into how Musk has become serious about tunnel technology. In July, he teased that he had received “verbal” government approval to build a “hyperloop” rail
system to zip passengers in magnetically levitated underground rail cars running through tubes from New York to Washington, D.C., in 29 minutes — a 226-mile trip that normally takes nearly three hours by the fastest train.
“It’s always good to have an innovator looking at a process,” said Peter Schraufnagel, president of Super Excavators. “We’re excited to see what comes out of this.”
When a Musk confidant, SpaceX engineer and tunnels project leader Steve Davis, approached Super Excavators several months ago, the Wisconsin company had a ready-made solution.
The Canadian-made boring machine is several hundred feet long and 14 feet in diameter. The giant machine has bored holes for sewers in San Francisco and a flood-control project in Indianapolis.
Schraufnagel declined to say how much Musk paid, but buying a used tunnel boring machine can cost several million dollars.
“They pretty much knew what they were looking for,” he said.
The machine was shipped to Hawthorne, Calif., where Musk set up in the SpaceX parking lot to start boring a pilot tunnel.
Musk nicknamed his machine Godot, after the character in a Samuel Beckett play who never arrives. Musk’s goal is to create a machine that can tunnel through the earth as fast as a snail, 10 times faster than current technology.
“Victory is beating the snail,” Musk quipped in an on-stage interview at TED Talks.
He has also pitched a plan to build a network of tunnels underneath Los Angeles to transport cars on high-speed electric platforms to bypass congestion.
A Boring Co. official confirmed the company had leased the tunnel boring machine from Super Excavators.
Industry leaders said there’s room for innovation, but many remain skeptical because of the unpredictability in tunneling and navigating a thicket of government regulations.
“The stakeholder approval process is often far longer than the actual construction of the project,” said Mike Mooney, director of the Center for Underground Tunneling and SmartGeo at the Colorado School of Mines.