Elon Musk gets permission to begin Boring Co. digging in Maryland

Elon Musk’s week is going pretty great thus far, between meeting the creators of Rick & Morty and now gaining permission to dig even more tunnels — besides the one he already got the OK to begin digging closer to home in Hawthorne.

The new tunnel will be a 10.3-mile route that undercuts a state-owned operation of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Maryland, and could eventually become the anchor point for a network that would span Washington to New York, with stops in-between at urban centers in Baltimore and Philadelphia, according to the LA Times.

The Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-digger operation, is gaining steam with a second boring machine ready to come online and start chewing away at the Earth. Maryland has offered Musk a conditional permit so he can start operations, though it’s not providing any financial support to the project at this sage. It’s probably not a huge risk on Maryland’s part, given the limited scope of the initial project — and if this works out, they can always turn the site into a tourist attraction for the start of the world-famous underground hyperloop network.

Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete Rahn told the LA Times that the tunnel really wasn’t any different from the various utility access points that it provides permits for all the time, so it wasn’t that complicated from a permitting perspective. Still, there’s a lot of red tape left to cut through to make a cross-state underground hyperloop an actual reality.

Musk will also have his hands full building a space plane for super-speed terrestrial travel, but you know what they say: Two if by underground super-low pressure capsule, three if by low-Earth orbital big f*cking rocket.