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Musk [...] said on Tuesday he’s aiming to create a city called “Starbase” in Texas, teasing a new idea on Twitter as his space company expands its footprint elsewhere in the state.
That footprint, first planted in the Lone Star state over a decade ago, is growing rapidly under Musk’s dogged effort to build a “gateway to Mars.”
— The Verge
Nearly a decade after launching the world's first commercial launchpad in Boca Chica near Brownsville, South Texas, SpaceX/Tesla/Hyperloop/Boring Company entrepreneur Elon Musk has shared a grand, and fashionably vague, announcement of a new urban stepping stone for his ambitious Mars colonization... View full entry
The first steps toward expanding The Boring Co. underground tunnel system throughout Las Vegas may be underway, as the Elon Musk-owned company has submitted special use permit and land use applications, according to an announcement from the Las Vegas Convention Visitors Authority. — Construction Dive
The underground tunnel, which will stretch the length of the Strip all the way to the recently completed Allegiant Stadium, is awaiting approval from the Stadium Authority, Construction Dive reports. View full entry
Dyson, the U.K. company known for its vacuums and air purifiers have designed a built a new ventilator in 10 days in collaboration with The Technology Partnership (TTP), reports Fast Company. The new machine has been dubbed "CoVent." It is a portable bed-mounted ventilator that can... View full entry
Friday, the boring machine broke through the last bit of a tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center. This completes the first section of drilling for the project. It’s part of the master plan to move people quickly around the facility. The convention center is in the process of expanding by 1.4 million square feet. That will bring the total convention space to 4.6 million in exhibition space. — KTNV Las Vegas
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) announced today that excavation is complete for the first of The Boring Company's tunnels for the Vegas Loop that will be located beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. As previously reported on Archinect, The Boring Company projects... View full entry
Elon Musk's tunneling company, The Boring Co. (TBC), will begin underground construction on a tunnel for a tram system at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Friday, Nov. 15.
The people mover project is contracted at $52.5 million and scheduled to be completed in January 2021, in time for the annual Consumer Electronics Show.
— Construction Dive
The company projects that the tunnel loop will move 4,400 passengers per hour. According to Construction Dive, aboveground work on stations and stops began last month, after TBC's boring machine was assembled on site. View full entry
In May, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority approved a $48.7 million contract for The Boring Company (TBC) to design and build a short underground transit system at the city’s Convention Center, using Tesla electric vehicles running through narrow tunnels. — TechCrunch
The Boring Company (TBC) has submitted construction drawings for their new tunnel system in Las Vegas. The plan is to "construct one pedestrian tunnel, two 0.8-mile vehicle tunnels and three underground stations, as well as modify and test seven-seater Tesla cars to carry up to 16 people," reports... View full entry
Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity is looking worse and worse. And its $1 billion solar gigafactory in Buffalo, New York, which the state built, subsidized, and equipped for SolarCity, seems to be primarily operating as a Panasonic plant. [...] In the more than two years since Tesla acquired SolarCity, its overall solar installations have plummeted by more than 76%. — Technology Review
In 2016 Tesla purchased SolarCity for $2.6 billion. Much criticism and backlash had been pivoted towards Elon Musk's decision to acquire the company due to his own personal ties with the company and its co-founders. Although ambitious, much like most of Musk's ideas for an ideal world, the Solar... View full entry
As noted in a recently published patent application, Tesla is developing a system that would allow the company to improve the aesthetics of the solar shingles even further. [...]
Tesla notes that in prior art BIPV roofing systems, the active solar portions of a roofing module end up being visibly different in appearance compared to inactive parts of the roof.
— Teslarati
Tesla CEO Elon Musk introduced the glass solar tiles as part of the automaker's growing range of energy products back in October 2016. Let's get technical: image from Tesla's patent application to improve the aesthetic performance of its solar roof tiles."Various embodiments provide a new and... View full entry
Elon Musk has filed permits with the city of Los Angeles to launch his Boring Company offshoot, The Brick Store LLC, which would produce interlocking bricks made from dirt collected by his tunnel-digging company's operations. As the Boring Company's LA test tunnel nears completion—an opening... View full entry
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) has unveiled the first of its full-scale capsules that it hopes will one day be used to transport passengers at 750 miles per hour, reports Bloomberg. The California-based company is one of several Hyperloop contenders that have sprung up to deliver on Elon Musk’s 2013 transportation vision. — the Verge
HyperloopTT will now take the capsule, called Quintero One, to the company's European HQs in France, where it has begun constructing a test track. With the goal of being passenger ready by 2019, the technology promises a travel speed of 750 miles per hour, meaning it may someday be able to take... View full entry
Elon Musk has revealed Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the potential first passenger to be launched to the moon by Musk's private aerospace company, SpaceX. Ranked the 18th richest person in Japan, Mr. Maezawa is the founder of the online fashion retail website Zozotown. He is also known... View full entry
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is back at it again with more outlandish ideas to solve Los Angeles' traffic. Earlier this month, Musk's latest venture–The Boring Company–resuscitated its flawed proposal to dig new car tunnels for Los Angeles, this time to connect the Red Line subway with Dodger Stadium [...] The Chicago tunnel idea is bad enough, but the Dodger Stadium plan is exceptionally poor even if one takes Musk's promises at face value. — urbanize.la
Alon Levy pokes holes in Elon Musk's public transit plans for Los Angeles. Musk's plan involves tunneling under Sunset Boulevard between the Dodger Stadium and one of three Red Line stops: Vermont/Sunset, Vermont/Santa Monica, or Vermont/Beverly. Levy cites major issues with construction... View full entry
I’m not saying America’s cities are turning into dystopian technocapitalist hellscapes in which corporations operate every essential service and pull every civic string.
But let’s take a tour of recent news from the metropolises.
— New York Times
Farhad Manjoo unpacks the extreme impact big tech companies have on US city construction citing cases from Amazon, Elon Musk's Boring Company, and Bird's electric scooters. Are these innovations simply breaking through the red tape of local government or are they dominating with no input from the... View full entry
Autonomous 16-passenger vehicles would zip back and forth at speeds exceeding 100 mph in tunnels between the Loop and O’Hare International Airport under a high-speed transit proposal being negotiated between Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s City Hall and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s The Boring Co., city and company officials have confirmed.
Emanuel’s administration has selected Musk’s company from four competing bids to provide high-speed transportation between downtown and the airport.
— Chicago Tribune
Musk's Boring Co. beat out established engineering firms, including Mott MacDonald and JLC Infrastructure, even though it has famously been in business for less than two years and only has a test tunnel near the company's headquarters in the Los Angeles area to show for as construction experience. View full entry
Back in March, Elon Musk announced that his Boring Company would be selling LEGO-like bricks made from leftover dirt, excavated to make way for his Boring tunnels. Land excavation is a costly endeavor and the question of "where will 550,000 cubic yards of dirt go?" poses many economic and... View full entry
