Bengaluru
Elon Musk will soon launch a China unit for his underground tunneling enterprise, The Boring Company, the billionaire entrepreneur said on Twitter.
One of Musk’s followers tweeted that Tesla Inc’s chief executive officer would attend the World Artificial Intelligence Conference of 2019 in Shanghai later this month.
Musk replied on the social media platform that he “will also be launching The Boring Company China on this trip.”
Musk started the Boring Company to build underground transport tunnels for hyperloop transportation systems, which he said would be far faster than current high-speed trains and use electromagnetic propulsion.
It has also emerged that Musk plans to expand his SpaceX facilities in Florida to make room for the space company’s forthcoming super heavy-lift launch vehicle dubbed Starship, according to a draft of the plans seen by Reuters on Friday.
Starship, a 384-foot (117-meter) reusable two-stage rocket taller than the Statue of Liberty, is a central piece of Musk’s interplanetary space travel ambitions as well as US space agency NASA’s goal to send humans to the moon again by 2024.
The Starship rocket is expected to launch up to 24 times a year from SpaceX’s current flagship launchpad 39A, the draft of the company’s environmental assessment said. SpaceX did not specify in the report when it would reach that cadence, but Musk said in September 2018 he wanted to be conducting orbital flights with Starship in two to three years.
SpaceX’s launchpad 39A would support NASA’s future moon missions from the same Kennedy Space Center site used for the Apollo lunar missions a half century ago.
“They’re moving very fast,” said Dale Ketcham, vice president of government relations at Space Florida, the state’s commercial space development agency. “This is actually getting closer to what Elon got into this business for to begin with. This is fundamental infrastructure to get to Mars, the early stages of it.”—Arab News
