Boeing CEO Vows To Beat Elon Musk To Mars (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg sketched out a Jetsons-like future at a conference Tuesday, envisioning a commercial space-travel market with dozens of destinations orbiting the Earth and hypersonic aircraft shuttling travelers between continents in two hours or less. And Boeing intends to be a key player in the initial push to send humans to Mars, maybe even beating Musk to his long-time goal. "I'm convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket," Muilenburg said at the Chicago event on innovation, which was sponsored by the Atlantic magazine. Like Musk's SpaceX, Boeing is focused on building out the commercial space sector near earth as spaceflight becomes more routine, while developing technology to venture far beyond the moon. The Chicago-based aerospace giant is working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop a heavy-lift rocket called the Space Launch System for deep space exploration. Boeing and SpaceX are also the first commercial companies NASA selected to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing built the first stage for the Saturn V, the most powerful U.S. rocket ever built, which took men to the moon. Nowadays, Muilenburg sees space tourism closer to home "blossoming over the next couple of decades into a viable commercial market." The International Space Station could be joined in low-earth orbit by dozens of hotels and companies pursuing micro-gravity manufacturing and research, he said. Muilenburg said Boeing will make spacecraft for the new era of tourists. He also sees potential for hypersonic aircraft, traveling at upwards of three times the speed of sound.

Comments

Re:Sometimes being first isn't the best plan.

[Rei]

Except that not only are costs trends in the space industry not comparable to computers and smartphones... they don't even track with the general economy. NASA budgets based on the NNSI, the Nasa New Start Index. It's a higher inflation rate than common metrics like the CPI.

The reason for this is that common metrics are based on a grab-bag of consumer goods. Over time consumer goods have shifted from being hand-produced by domestic labour to mass produced in factories with cheap overseas labour. Meanwhile, however, rockets continue to involve large amounts of manual labour by highly trained individuals.

Nor does rocketry have some sort of amazing tech advance that's been driving it down. Fuels have changed little in recent decades. Engine efficiencies have drifted up and stage masses down, but there have been no spectacular leaps. Dreams of major leaps forward, such as the Shuttle, VentureStar, etc have played out poorly. That doesn't mean that they always will - it's just that the situation as it stands isn't rosy.

Don't get me wrong, I do think there's hope. One, companies like SpaceX that start from scratch and thus can apply "lessons learned" from scratch are at a big advantage, as well as not having to make hard decisions about what sort of legacy "baggage" is worth keeping around. Secondly, smart design approaches can help keep costs down. SpaceX, for example, manages to get some degree of mass production on its engines by using so many that are identical (or virtually identical, in the case of the vacuum versions with the extended nozzle) on every launch. And with the Heavy they'll step that up even more. The upper and lower stage cores are also very similar, and the boosters on the Heavy will also be very similar to the cores. So they get some degree of economies of scale, and a lot more unit testing on at least the engines (not as much with the cores, unfortunately, and that's come back to bite them - the downside to starting over is that it's a total reset on system reliability). From a technological standpoint, using new (by space industry standards) manufacturing techniques like friction stir welding, and balancing ground handling costs with rocket performance (aka, the "semi-balloon tank" design, where the rocket is strong enough to support itself unfilled but not strong enough to withstand launch forces without pressurant) also improve their cost performance. If someone - SpaceX or others - can mange to get cost effective stage reuse to work, then that would be another big boost. So there is hope.

But as far as the past decades have gone, comparing rocketry to computers and cell phones has been anything but an apt comparison.