PRUFROCK BY THE BORING COMPANY | Fastest Machine To Build Tunnels!
Prufrock is designed to “porpoise,” meaning it launches directly from the surface, mines underground, and re-emerges upon completion. This allows Prufrock to begin tunneling within 48 hours of arrival on site and eliminates the need to excavate expensive pits to launch and retrieve the machine.
Prufrock is designed to tunnel at a speed greater than 1 mile per week, which is 6 times faster than The Boring Company’s previous generation TBM (Godot+). This is still 4-5 times slower than a garden snail…but Prufrock is catching up!
Prufrock’s medium-term goal is to exceed 1/10 of human walking speed, which is 7 miles per day.
“Prufrock,” likely a reference to the T.S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” could be a big step toward the company bringing tunneling costs down further. Musk first detailed the company at the start of 2017, with the goal of digging more tunnels for car traffic.
The company’s website outlines a number of ideas for making tunneling more efficient. This includes tripling the amount of power going to each machine, upgrading the cooling system to reach higher levels. It also involves modifying the machine, so the machine can tunnel while the team is erecting supports instead of switching off. The company’s goals also include automation, electrification, and research funding.
“Godot” dug the first tunnel in December 2018, a 1.14-mile test track in Hawthorne, California. The machine raced against a snail called Gary, running in May 2018 at around one-fifteenth of the speed and improving. Built at a cost of just $10 million, the cost pales in comparison to the approximately $1 billion per mile for other projects. Musk declared in February 2019 that “Line-Storm” would go online in the following month.
The Boring Company has now focused its efforts on its first public tunnel. The $52.5 million public transport system runs two miles and is designed to transport people from the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center to the South Hall. Two tunnels run side-by-side to offer bidirectional travel, and it’s expected to come online before the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show, a popular industry event that will essentially allow the entire tech world to test out its capabilities in real time.
But a number of question marks remain. How many vehicles will the tunnel offer for passengers, how will the planned “platoon” service work, and what about plans for a broader city-wide network? The project is a major test for the company, and “Prufrock” has come online at what could be a make-or-break moment.
A Boring History
Several years ago, Elon Musk was stuck in traffic on his way to the Los Angeles International Airport. The delay gave him time to think. When Musk thinks, sparks fly and things happen. The first brainstorm caused by that delay in traffic was the Hyperloop — a fanciful new transportation technology that would feature an electrically-powered capsule wafting along through depressurized tunnels at speeds of 700 miles per hour or more. That’s New York to LA in 4 hours kind of speed.
The Hyperloop idea spawned a number of companies who are trying to turn the dream into reality, but the technology is very futuristic and hard to do. Never one to wait patiently for things to happen, Musk pivoted instead to the notion of digging tunnels through the Earth that would use somewhat conventional vehicles to whisk people from place to place at speeds of 150 mph or so, whizzing along well below the gridlock above their heads.
So he started The Boring Company and purchased a used tunnel boring machine which he named Godot because it was so slow. He was convinced his engineers could take it apart, figure how to make it work better, and put it back together. According to Teslarati, it is believed that is the machine that dug the first test tunnel beneath the streets of Hawthorne, California near SpaceX headquarters.
After studying Godot, The Boring Company came up with Line Storm, a modified version of a conventional boring machine that is roughly twice as fast but still nowhere near the 10X improvement the indomitable Mr. Musk has in mind. Once again, it is presumed this is the machine used to dig the first of two tunnels in Las Vegas. We say “presumed” because getting the Tesla public relations people to respond to requests for information is a little like waiting for Godot — the literary character, not the tunneling machine.
Prufrock is alleged to be the ne plus ultra of tunneling machines, a whole order of magnitude faster than either Godot or Line Storm. And it is out there somewhere doing what it was designed to do. Perhaps someday, God willing and the creek don’t rise, The Boring Company will release some detailed information about what it is doing and where.
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