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Comment by barnacled | Hacker News Reader

I am extremely skeptical of the boring project. The claimed money saving (a 10x improvement vs. every single tunnel digger in the world without any evidence to back it up?) the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel or being brought up and down, the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels, etc. etc.

Road tunnels exist and have been built all around the world, these kinds of ideas have been tried and ultimately general underground road tunnels are just not economical or particularly safe.

Thunderf00t has done a series of videos debunking these claims [0,1,2]. Unfortunately Elon has a habit of frankly lying which I think does serious harm to public perception of these things.

These kind of infrastructure problems are just hard and have a ton of trade offs, there is no silver bullet.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBtL3qDvdZc [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs [2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyy-19qyNWE

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Rocket launch technology was at a standstill for 30-40 years until Elon Musk founded SpaceX. 15 years later they built reusable rockets. The cost of putting something into orbit is likely to drop by a factor of 100-1000 when SpaceX's next rocket is up and running sometime in the next few years.

It seems like such a waste of time for people to try and debunk these claims from people who are very competent and have access to the best in people and technology. Do they want a world where people don't try new things and make great improvements? One should really encourage people with a track record of getting people together to do amazing things to continue to do so. Elon Musk has stated that he thought that SpaceX had a 10% chance of success. I'm glad he could look at that chance of failure and tried anyway.

I don't follow rocket technology closely, but is SpaceX really unique in regard to reusable rockets? Didn't Blue Origin do each milestone (announcement, vertical landing, relaunch) before SpaceX did?

Blue Origin has a rocket that can go up to 100km and come back down. SpaceX's Falcon 9 is an orbital rocket which is a much, much more difficult achievement. But only the first stage of the Falcon 9 is reusable, with the second stage begin lost on each launch. The Starship rocket under development is being designed to be fully reusable with a quick turn around like an airplane. In fact SpaceX hopes to see Starship used for quick intercontinental trips on Earth.

Blue Origin is building a large re-usable rocket like the Starship called the New Glenn, but its first launch date keeps slipping. I would guess that Starship will be launching first but it is really cool that two groups are working on such rockets.

Why tunnels instead of the Japanese/German solution of ramps/viaducts?

In the same vein, why underground instead of light rail?

See, open air systems like those are much easier to service. Removing a crashed car from that requires just a big crane.

Underground doesn’t get affected by weather. I wonder whether simply having more tunnels side by side would help for servicing issues. Small, numerous tunnels instead of large tunnels.

Building wide tunnels is very hard and nullifies the main advantage of having the tunnel in the first place, which is easier routing.

Cost also vastly increases, likelihood of total failure as well. Big tunnels need big supports and big service ducts.

Because tunnels can go under buildings, roads and other tunnels with very little interference.

Bridges can also go above bridges, probably cheaper and safer as well

Its quite funny to me that literally everybody that is against Boring company is sighting these 'Thunderf00t' videos, and judging from some of his other videos he has a pretty clear bias. He is also a chemist and why his knowledge of engineering is better then those of the engineers at SpaceX and Elon Musk is highly questionable to me.

> the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel

The cars have front radar and can break. It would stop the line but I don't see how it is a safety issue. Most danger in tunnels is from bidirectional traffic that Boring avoids.

> the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels

The same could have been said about other Elon Musk projects. Nobody is surprised that an electric car can have better performance and power and yet a diesel driven tunnel boring machine can not be improved? Tunneling is incredibly conservative and uses both diesel driven tunnel boring and diesel driven locomotives to transport out the dirt. The inherent problems of having lots of diesel engines a tunnel are quite clear and eliminating it has clear operational advantages.

> underground road tunnels are just not economical or particularly safe

What the evidence for underground one-way tunnels not being safe?

> These kind of infrastructure problems are just hard and have a ton of trade offs, there is no silver bullet.

Therefore we should try to improve it with modern technology from other fields? Its not a silver bullet, it is tacking new technology from automotive and aerospace and applying it to tunneling and mass transportation.

> a diesel driven tunnel boring machine

!? I'm not a tunnel building specialist, but a cursory search seems to indicate that tunnel boring machines commonly already are electrically powered by simply using a very long high voltage cable stretching all the way from the tunnel entrance. Whether that cable then connects to the electricity grid, or to a bunch of temporary diesel generators stationed outside of the tunnel is a different matter, which in any case doesn't bear on the tunnel boring itself.

The boring company is a bet on improving tunneling machines for speed and cost. This might not be realized but there's no good argument that proves it to be impossible.

There are fields where physical limits were already reached, for example rocket engines specific impulse has barely improved since the 60s because of fundamental chemistry, but this is not the case for tunnels.

Provided enough funding it should be possible to dig faster, and cheaper per km.

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