
Making tunnels the way you make spaceships - jkuria
https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21736600-principles-mr-musks-approach-making-tunnels-way-you-make-spaceships
======
igravious
Cost.

That's what Musk wants to drive down. He has said so explicitly and
unambiguously many times. How to bring the cost of launches down? Don't throw
the rockets away each time. How to bring the cost of boring down? Increase the
speed of the machine (here the multiplicative factor is time, reduce time,
reduce cost, ergo increase speed.) How to not throw away rockets each time,
reuse them by making them land without damaging them.

I'm not sure he "makes tunnels the way you make spaceships". These are the
similarities.

(1) Search for a social problem: lack of cheap access to space, traffic
congestion, fossil-fuel propulsion

(2) Figure out what the factor limiting progess: rocket reuse, 3-d traffic
network, battery tech for EVs

(3) Focus all your energy on that problem: figure out how to land a rocket,
figure out how to bore tunnels for a fraction of the price, build a gargantuan
factory optimised to drive down the cost of battery production

Look folks. There's no magic formula here. It's not rocket science. (Except in
one case). I'd say what is common to all three ventures is Musk's personality.
Tackling enormous problems. Getting to the heart of the problem. Self-belief.
Drive. Focus. Tenacity. Bravery. Great engineering skills. Surround yourself
with talented people who get shit done and have the same optimism as you.
Wash, rinse repeat. What the biotech community need to be figuring out is not
how to clone monkeys, but how to clone Musk.

 _hagiography over_ :)

~~~
yohann305
A good chunk of the new generation of kids is watching SpaceX's success. This
drives the kids' attention to Musk which ultimately kids take him as a role
model. Kids will follow his steps and thread of thoughts, which is in some way
"nurture cloning". We cannot conceive what Musk is actually doing on the next
generation, it's going to be amazing

~~~
igravious
I watched the Falcon Heavy launch with my kid and she was gob-smacked. I don't
remember anything like that growing up.

~~~
VVyattPrentice
onions.

I could only draw on my experience of Challenger for reference.

Such contrast.

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jaggederest
I think there are a lot of things susceptible to this kind of analysis.

I also believe that the major jump is not this analysis per se, but the fact
that Mr. Musk has access to capital and the ability to follow through beyond
the average.

~~~
douglaswlance
So why aren't many other billionaires launching rockets?

Bezos and Branson have tried, with some success, but Musk clearly is in a
different class.

~~~
Xylakant
To add a little perspective: The falcon heavy has a LEO payload of 63 800kg,
the Saturn 5, a launcher designed and built in the 1960ies, has a LEO payload
of 140000kg, more than twice as much. There’s certainly a lot of cool tech
developed at Space X and landing and reusing the boosters is a thing not
achieved in the 60ies, but it’s always good to keep in mind that in terms of
lift capacity, today’s heaviest launcher is less than half as powerful than a
launcher half a decade out of service.

~~~
kore
Worth pointing out however that the Saturn V cost roughly $1.2B per launch,
compared to $90M for the Falcon Heavy. So it was roughly 6x more expensive per
kg to LEO.

Not to mention it required a nation state to fund its roughly $40-80B
development cost. Can only guess, but would expect the development costs of
the Falcon 1/9/Heavy were maybe $3-5B?

That said, Space X has benefited from all of the R&D done in the past. They
weren't building it in a vacuum.

~~~
lionpixel
In the press conference after the Falcon Heavy start a journalist asked the
question of how much the investment was. Elon answered “around half a billion
[silent for 1s] propably more.”

~~~
kore
Correct, but that was just the cost to develop the core booster of the Falcon
Heavy.

That doesn't include the original costs to develop the Falcon 9 and all of its
subsequent variants, nor the cost to develop the original Falcon 1.

------
Animats
I was expecting Musk's company to improve the back end of the TBM. Nobody
seems to pay much attention to that. There's spoil coming back, and ring
segments going forward. The usual setup is to lay a temporary narrow gauge
railroad behind the TBM. The back end of the TBM does much of the track
laying. Much of the TBM's length is for laying track, filing spoil cars with
dirt, taking ring segments off segment cars, and getting cars from the
incoming track to the outgoing track.

All those rail cars could be replaced with battery-powered self driving
vehicles. That would get rid of the railroad track and simplify operations at
the back end of the TBM. Self-driving work cars would be more maneuverable
than rail cars; they can get out of the way and pass each other.

~~~
geezerjay
> I was expecting Musk's company to improve the back end of the TBM.

IMHO that doesn't even start to scratch the main problem that they gloss over
or sometimes even appear to purposely ignore. The main problem with tunneling
in urban areas is subsidence, and all the financial compensations that must be
paid to those who see their property start to show structural problems due to
the resulting differential settlement. I never saw this issue being addressed
by either Musk's fanboys or any representative.

Tunneling takes time not because of the amount of dirt that needs to be taken
out but because even highly controlled tunneling operations can expect
differential surface settlements in the order of inches. Musk didn't suddenly
and single-handedly invented the concept of tunneling. People have been
tunneling for quite a few decades and these problems are still hard to handle.
Yet, somehow this issue is never addressed in these marketing blurbs.

~~~
yourapostasy
It seems that the subsidence is because the tunnel does not reproduce the
expansion-contraction characteristics of the spoil it replaces. A possible
modernization is massively-dense conditions sampling along the proposed tunnel
route, not just in the volume the tunnel replaces, but around it as well,
possibly all the way up to the surface. Conditions I can think of off-hand are
temperature, ambient moisture/humidity, drainage volume, and groundwater
baseline versus historical. Set up the sampling as many years in advance as
possible to establish good reference data. Then create hydraulically moveable
tunnel rings that push against a static ring, to re-create the desired
movement. Use machine learning to refine the model during the pre-construction
sampling period, and to refine results during operational period. The sampling
of the surrounding volume feeds into the machine learning datastream so the
hydraulic movements can be anticipated and performed very slowly over time.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
> Set up the sampling as many years in advance as possible to establish good
> reference data. Then create hydraulically moveable tunnel rings that push
> against a static ring, to re-create the desired movement. Use machine
> learning to refine the model during the pre-construction sampling period,
> and to refine results during operational period.

Yeah, it's definitely going to be cheaper to just pay for subsidence.

Not to mention that it's literally impossible to perform the kind of sampling
you're talking about. It's basically the ultimate wet dream of the oil, gas
and mining industries and they've poured trillions of dollars into developing
subsurface sampling for over a century, with nowhere near the resolution
you're thinking about.

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blackrock
I wondered if they could just use a high pressure water cutter, instead of a
TBM machine.

This would results in no actual contact with the rock, so no wearing and
tearing of the blades on the TBM.

Then, they can build out a robotic arm that will maneuver the water cutter.

Then, they can add Artificial Intelligence to the mix. The AI will sense where
to cut the rock face at the correct angles, to allow for continuous
collection. The rock pieces are carried away by a conveyor belt. And the water
is recycled.

The human operator just has to sit there and babysit the machine. And if it
encounters an edge case, that the robot cannot handle, then he can manually
maneuver the robotic arm himself.

Something like video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmlUzUl-h5c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmlUzUl-h5c)

~~~
rorykoehler
That's amazing tech. Would lasers not be better suited for underground cutting
for tunnels?

~~~
static_noise
Lasers would probably need _a lot_ of energy to cut that much material.

Can somebody do a quick analysis how much it would probably cost using
conventional/water/lasers?

~~~
Faaak
Actually they would vaporise the material, not cut it. So yeah, a _lot_ of
energy needed !

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frankharv
A boring machine that spits out "cinderblocks". I like creative engineering
solutions.

I live near the coast and the cost for underwater tunnels is outrageous.

~~~
Theodores
I don't see why it can't eject massively wide core sections of rock with a few
cinderblocks as a side portion.

If the tunnel is 10 metres diameter then instead of churning that rock to
'cinderblocks', a big long cylinder of 'rock' 9 metres in diameter or so could
come out, broken up into chunks that are 50 meters or so long.

at the far end of this tunnelling effort could be a harbour under construction
with the massive core sections being used to create things like the harbour
walls.

Imaginably this could be possible with some 'swarm' of 'Boring' robots that
could adapt the tunnel size as they go, maybe also moving the 'massive chunks'
out of the tunnel too. Maybe each robot could fit in the back of a pickup
truck and be fully electric.

~~~
Xylakant
Do you have a rough idea of how much such a cylinder weights? It has a volume
of about 3200 cubic meters. Soil has a density of somewhere between 2 and 3.3
metric tons per cubic meter depending on the type of soil. So you’re talking
about handling and lifting blocks of anywhere between 6 000 and 10 000 tons
apiece.

And that still assumes that the cylinder is made of solid rock that doesn’t
break apart.

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jaclaz
Previous (similar) discussion:

"Boring Company to use Tesla’s technology for its tunnel project under LA"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002501)

Till now the Boring Company was "playing" with existing, used, conventional,
TBM.

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jessriedel
This article makes an error I see alot: person/group uses unusual technique X,
therefore they foolishly _only_ (or over-) use X. In this case, it's Musk
thinking in terms of the underlying physics constraints. For effective
altruists, it's quantifying charitable impact.

~~~
loeg
That last sentence seems like a non sequitur (or, at best, a radical tangent).

~~~
mstank
I agree! I thought the article ended there because I ran out of free monthly
articles and I got cut off.

Seems like half of it is missing.

~~~
mchahn
Ditto. I was intrigued and eagerly reading and then looked for the "more"
button.

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amelius
What is bothering me: why do we only hear about Musk when it comes to his
companies? Surely he cannot be doing all the thinking. I'm more interested in
what the heads of engineering have to say about the technology.

Anyway, I couldn't read the article because of the paywall.

~~~
enkid
It's like Edison. He got all the geniuses together and gave them a place to
experiment. He probably got his hands a little dirty, but for the most part
someone else is doing the hard work. Having a single name attached definitely
gives the impression that Musk and Edison have/had a large ego, but there is
something to be said for creating such an environment.

~~~
amelius
Well, I guess you are right. It doesn't help to have a bunch of egos in
science or in your company. So what do you do? You place an even bigger ego at
the top. Makes sense, but still, it doesn't make for nice/interesting reading.

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AndyMcConachie
This article has about as much substance as Musk's Boring Company. Little to
none.

~~~
colordrops
The tunnel under L.A. is already quite long and now under the 405 freeway.

~~~
AndyMcConachie
So what? Do you really think it's going to relieve traffic?

