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The most interesting tourist attraction in Los Angeles County is one that's not in many guidebooks:
It's in the otherwise-untouristed southwestern city of Hawthorne, around SpaceX.
If you walk along Crenshaw Boulevard from Jack Northrop Boulevard to 120th Street, what you will see is a city of the future that's under construction. This is Musk city, an alternate reality, a triumph of futuristic imagination more thrilling than anything at a Disney park. On the west side of the street, a 156-foot-tall rocket towers above SpaceX headquarters, symbolizing Musk's dream of relatively low-cost interplanetary travel. This particular rocket booster was the first in human history to be launched into space, then recovered intact on Earth after separating, and then fired back into space.
On the east side of the street, an employee parking lot has been dug up and turned into the first-ever tunnel for the Boring Company, Musk's underground-honeycomb solution to traffic jams and the future home of all his terrestrial transportation projects.
Then, running for a mile beside Jack Northrop Boulevard, there's a white vacuum tube along the shoulder of the road. This is the test track for the Hyperloop, Musk's high-speed form of city-to-city travel.
Taken together, the dreams of Musk city promise to connect the planet and the solar system in ways that will fundamentally change humanity's relationship to two of the most important facets of its reality: distance and time.
