SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday hinted at plans to deploy tunneling equipment from The Boring Company to help his dream of enabling a human settlement on Earth’s neighboring planet Mars.
What Happened: “Tunnels will be important on Mars,” Musk said in a post on social media platform X. The CEO was responding to a user who envisioned humans living in an interconnected web of tunnels on Mars owing to the dust storms on the surface.
“Prufrock fits nicely in the Starship payload bay,” The Boring Company also wrote on its official X account. Prufrock is the name of the company’s tunneling equipment. It launches from the surface, mines underground, and resurfaces upon completion, removing the need to excavate pits to launch and retrieve the machine.
The Boring Company was founded by Musk in 2017 as a subsidiary of SpaceX but spun off a year later. The company is currently making underground tunnels or loops aimed at resolving traffic in congested cities.
Why It Matters: Starship, the key to Musk’s dreams of taking humans to the Moon and Mars, is currently in the testing and development phase.
In September, Musk said that the first Starship launch to Mars is expected in 2026 and that it will not have a crew on board. Provided that the uncrewed flights do well, the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years, Musk then said, pegging the first crewed Starship flights to Mars for 2028.
Musk has often reiterated his dreams of taking humans to Mars and building a self-sustaining city on the red planet. The CEO in September said that the company is now eyeing building a self-sustaining Martian city in about 20 years.
However, Starship has had only five test flights to date and is yet to carry any payload to space. Its next and sixth flight is expected as early as Nov. 18.
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Image created with AI tools and official SpaceX photos on Flickr
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