Sunday Supplement: It's Musk's Future, but We'll Live in It

This week there have been a lot of interesting Musk-related stories. First, there's the marvelously-named Boring Company, which is cutting the cost of tunneling dramatically, with a 5-10 year goal that's even greater. Grok (my research assistant) ran a report on it for me. Here's the abstract:

The Boring Company has already cut the cost of small-diameter vehicle tunnels by roughly an order of magnitude versus typical U.S. urban subway construction. Company targets for the next 5–10 years are another several-fold drop, to roughly the cost of a surface highway lane, though independent assessments are more cautious.

Grok turns out to make it very difficult to link a report it generates permanently. At least right now, there's a version here that will at least closely resemble what I originally got, and that link should work for the foreseeable future, but how long the foreseeable future is, I can't really say. 

If you want, you can prompt Grok with this and get something resembling what I got:

What is the cost reduction of using the Boring Company's machines to build tunnels? and what are realistic estimates for costs in 5-10 years?

And yes, I have raised that with xAI as a real flaw in the product. He grumbled.

Related: CNN Insiders Are Panicking Over This Bombshell Development

Anyway...

Boring Company is working on a simple, precursor Hyperloop tunnel between Austin and San Antonio (>200 mph).

Due to traffic congestion, that journey can currently take up to 2.5 hours. @BoringCompany can reduce that to a consistent <30 mins.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2026

In 2018, Elon stood inside The Boring Company’s first test tunnel and said:

“And then one day it will connect to the Hyperloop”

Then he ended with the part that mattered most:

The goal is to “give people more time for their friends and family”

Even back then, Elon was focused… pic.twitter.com/vxiov5twed

— X Freeze (@XFreeze) September 20, 2026

ELON MUSK: The goal of SpaceX is to make Star Trek real.

“We want to make Star Trek real, We want to make Starfleet Academy real, so that it’s not always science fiction, but one day, the science fiction turns to science fact.

And we have spaceships going through space, big… pic.twitter.com/9KhRf7uvqe

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 5, 2026

If you read a lot of the Heinlein juveniles, you regularly see people taking an automated taxi that goes through tunnels under the city point to point. 

Elon Musk explains how Tesla’s Cybercab fleet will work:

“Think of Tesla like some combination of Airbnb and Uber. There’ll be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates in the fleet, and then there’ll be a bunch of cars owned by the end user.

That end user can add… pic.twitter.com/2fCKDQNbli

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 5, 2026

With Cybercab and The Boring Company, it's coming.

Of course, another Muskivan (new word, just made it up, share wildly) intention is to colonize Mars — and the moon, more or that next week.

There was an interesting Wired video on that this week. It's about 20 minutes long, fair warning.

She mentions one thing that isn't widely known: Mars actually has much more water than we originally thought, as buried permafrost. Then one thing she mentions is the problem of perchlorate in the regolith, and it turns out that NASA has done a good bit of research on that problem. NASA has (at least) three potential answers.

Wash it out. Mix the perchlorate-laden soil with water, which washes out the perchlorate. They clean and recycle the water.

Cook it out. Perchlorates begin to break down around 250°C (around 500°F). The results are metal oxides or chlorides, chlorine or hydrochloric acid, and — special added prize — free oxygen.

Eat it. Seriously. Not people, but there are bacteria that happily reduce perchlorates releasing oxygen. 

Bio-engineering has some interesting possibilities along those lines. That's nearly an hour but the basic idea is they have engineered an organism that will bind regolith into something that can be 3D printed.

As well as the video, they published a 20-page white paper on their approach.

Texas A&M has another, similar, approach.

The graphic is a little goofy, but it's an interesting idea.

Related: NASA's Jared Isaacman Wants America Back on the Moon — and Beyond

I'm going to close this out with a video on Muskonomics (another coinage all my own) discussing why SpaceX is building Starlink and what it gets out of the business. TL;DR: about $13 million in revenue per Starlink over 5 years. And lots more in the future.

That's all for this week — although I could have done three times as much,

I'm still figuring out that I'm doing, so let me know if this was too focused on one general topic. Or if you like this deeper dive. 

I'll close out with some cool pictures.

A new perspective! 🛰️

Voyager 1 had been in space for two weeks and was 7.25 million miles (>11 million km) away OTD in 1977 when it captured this view of the whole Earth and the Moon in the same frame. It was our first image of the kind, but definitely not our last.

1. Voyager… pic.twitter.com/AdeZRaVrMk

— NASA History Office (@NASAhistory) September 18, 2026

Don''t forget Sky Candy every Friday — last week it was Titanic Sky Candy. The Sunday Supplement will come next Sunday.

And comment; it helps convince the management that it's worth running.