Elon Musk Tunnel Machine: SpaceX Employee Shares First Photo Of Project

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been pretty vague about his tunnel building project, The Boring Co., but a SpaceX employee Thursday shared a picture of the company’s first tunnel boring machine on Instagram, Business Insider reported.

The employee’s Instagram profile is private, but the picture has since been circulated.

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Here’s what the tunnel machine looks like:

The white machine bears the company’s logo, which was revealed last month in a tweet posted by Musk of a hat that read “The Boring Co.”

Musk initially touted the idea of creating tunnels last December when he tweeted: “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging."

In January, Musk held a hyperloop competition outside SpaceX’ headquarters after introducing the concept of a ground-based mass transit system in 2013. Before the competition, SpaceX said on its website : “While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype.”

But things got real during the competition when Musk spontaneously tweeted : “And we start digging the tunnel tonight,” proving he was serious about tunnels all along.

SpaceX will hold another Hyperloop competition this summer. The Hyperloop Pod Competition II will be focused on maximum speed.

Musk revealed in February in an interview with Bloomberg he was digging a “demo tunnel” in the SpaceX parking lot, which would avoid the trouble of getting permits to dig. However, Musk needs to get permission from the city of Los Angeles to extend the tunnel project beyond SpaceX premises.

As for the future, Musk said in the interview he wants to build a much faster tunneling machine so he can dig thousands of miles. Musk plans to create a large underground network that would include 30 levels of tunnels for cars and high-speed trains, like the Hyperloop. He also pointed out that his tunnel idea is less crazy than flying cars in which other tech companies, such as Google and Uber, are interested.

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Meanwhile, Hyperloop One is preparing for the installation of a commercial tube that will connect Dubai and Abu Dhabi, about a 100-mile stretch, in just 12 minutes.

The company revealed photos its huge test tube, the DevLoop, last month. The first public trial of the tube, which is just 30 minutes from Las Vegas, is slated for the first half of this year. The DevLoop weighs more than 1 million kilograms (about 2.2 million pounds), is 500 meters (1,640 feet) long and has a diameter of 3.3 meters (nearly 11 feet). Trips with the tube between major cities in the Gulf region could take less than an hour, Hyperloop said.