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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.
Having a plan to survive interruptions in logistical support is literally a matter of life and death -- not just for interplanetary settlers, but even for ones just crossing an ocean. Rushing things when the support services are not yet developed is not exactly a safe plan. Bold, certainly, but quite possibly bordering on suicidal.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
and Elons plan is working perfectly. he cant build all the necessary tech and infrastructure himself. trigger a space race and the tech WILL get developed by a multitude of startups for those specific needs. It's a a sensible method!
Klik
open your mind too much and your brain falls out!
There is a finite amount of energy currently available to our species, both in an absolute sense and a per unit of time sense.
Currently? This has always been the case and will always be the case.
Every end has half a stick.
Musk announced SpaceX will try to get something to Mars every other year for the next 20 years.I'm not saying Boeing doesn't have the engineering talent but I seriously doubt it has the will to beat Musk to Mars. Musk said, this is what we're doing, this is when, and this is how. Boeing said, over the next few decades we're going to put tourists in earth orbit. There isn't even a competition at this point.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I'll take the surface with its sunlight, wide open skies, forests, beaches, cities, mountains, people, and all the other stuff we have here over orbit any time, thank you. But the rich are welcome to live in a stinking, unhealthy tin can that can fail disastrously at any moment with all their money...
That's a bullshit argument. It's bullshit because it can be applied to every single human activity, not just space.
Is energy a big problem? No, actually - we have plenty of it, and we know ways to generate far, far more. What we will run out of is fossil fuel, and that is a problem, but 'space' is not a big contributor to that loss (rockets don't run on oil). And even if energy were such a big problem, there is no need to give up on other research and development until we solved it - in fact quite the opposite, as large-scale research programs have always had major beneficial effects elsewhere in society.
...we could send all the CEOs to Mars, maybe we couldn't set up a colony there, but for sure we would make the Earth a better place where to live.
1. The Boeing that, indeed, did build the Saturn V first stage was not nowadays Boeing. The former was much smaller, more agile ("agile" not in the software engineering sense, but in the common dictionary sense).
2. Boeing is indeed heavily involved in the SLS program. That program's pace, however, is set by NASA, whereas Musk's SpaceX, being a virtual start-up, sets its own and dramatically different pace.
This is not to say that Boeing could not or should not be involved in what might became a "race toward Mars". I am, however, calling bullshit on the Saturn V and SLS arguments.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
A telltale symptom is the mind boggling stagnation in rocket technology. Look at main lift engine development: ULA is using Russian engines designed in the cold war. The rocket cartel hasn't invested a dime in big lift vehicles since the early 90's.
It took two outsiders, Musk and Bezos, to inject life into the US space sector. They were both technologists with no ties to aerospace. They independently realized that new booster technology was the key to 21st century space flight, manned or unmanned. They both spent their own money to build new rockets from scratch. Yes, they got federal funding, but they spent a lot more then that. (ULA has been developing new upper stage rockets, but that is a much smaller effort then building a new launch system from scratch.)
When ULA woke up and realized they were at least six years behind SpaceX in engine design, they went to Blue Origin. Their next generation main lift stage will based on the Blue Origin design. That's called being asleep at the switch.
Don't start whining about NASA, feel sorry for them. They are constrained by politics and budgets. If Congress only gave them rubber band and paper clip money they would still be making a valiant effort to get into space somehow.
Speaking of Congress, ten House Republicans are trying to squash SpaceX. They claim to be "greatly concerned" about the recent pad explosion and want the USAF and NASA to cut SpaceX off. What they are actually doing is shilling for ULA. Who gives a rat's ass about US technological leadership or actual capitalism when there are campaign contributions and jobs to protect in their districts? Congress are the real jokers behind the rocket cartel.
Why is Snark Required?
It doesn't matter. Our society is a mix of cultural left wing with economic right wing. Culturally we are sinking further and further away to extreme left, while economically we are sinking further and further away in extreme right. Cultural extreme left don't listen to reason, they only listen to their ideology. It doesn't matter how flawed that ideology, they are not open to criticism. Economic extreme right doesn't care when people end up in deep poverty. Everything is good news show, even when they fire half of the workers, only to please shareholders and lure more and more capitalists to invest in their good news show.
Some businesses invest in 'global warming is a hoax' science because it will convince potential investors that their businesses isn't responsible for global warming (since it doesn't exists).
Other businesses embrace 'global warming' as an excuse to promise 'green products' that are even better than the 'non green original'. They also convince lots of potential investors. Manny people are convinced that we can just replace the billions of vehicles with electric vehicles and charge them with solar panels and wind mills.
No matter how hard you scream, nobody listens.
House Republicans have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors!
Makes perfect sense to me that the gimp who capitalises space nutters as if it's a thing would agree with GP's incoherent rant.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
"Meanwhile the permanently unemployed poor stay on the surface and rot."
In a socially mobile country anyone can be made poor by temporary circumstances. But those permanently unemployed poor of yours are the people who lack the vision it takes to improve themselves. Perhaps it's being dedicated to an obsolete industry, perhaps it's BLM-style racial hatred, or perhaps it's falling into the black hole of addiction.
Exactly. If everyone had the will to be rich, everyone would be incredibly wealthy. 100 percent of us would be in the top 1 percent.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They don't have any rockets.
Even if he's considering ULA's rockets being nominally Boeing's, they're shutting down production of the Delta IV family, the Atlas V is on shaky ground with its Russian engines, and is supposed to be discontinued when the Vulcan starts flying, the development of which they are underfunding and as it stands, even when it's done, would probably not even be competitive with SpaceX's current Falcon 9.
Or are they planning to buy out LockMart's half of ULA, or compete with their own subsidiary with an undisclosed rocket design?
http://www.drboylan.com/xplane...
The TR3-B 'Astra' is a large triangular anti-gravity craft within the secret U.S. fleet. Black-projects defense industry insider Edgar Rothschild Fouche wrote about the existence of the TR3-B in his book Alien Rapture(10).
The TR3-B does not depend solely or principally on its hydrogen-oxygen rockets. It is a highly-reduced-gravity aerospace craft manufactured in secret "black programs" by Boeing. The reduced-gravity field it produces reduces the vehicle's weight by about 90% so that very little thrust is required to either keep it aloft or to propel it at speeds of Mach 9 or higher.
The TR-3B vehicle's outer coating is electrochemical-reactive and changes with electrical radio-frequency radar stimulation, and can change reflectiveness, radar absorptiveness, and color. This is also the first US vehicle to use quasi-crystals in the vehicle's skin. This polymer skin, when used in conjunction with the TR-3B's Electronic Counter Measures and Electronic Counter-Countermeasures (ECCM), can make the vehicle look like a small aircraft, or a flying cylinder - or even trick radar receivers into falsely detecting a variety of aircraft, no aircraft, or several aircraft at various locations!
A circular plasma-filled accelerator ring called the Magnetic Field Disrupter surrounds the rotable crew compartment and is far ahead of any imaginable technology. Sandia and Livermore National laboratories developed the reverse-engineered MFD technology. The plasma, mercury-based, is pressurized at 250,000 atmospheres at a temperature of 150 degrees Kelvin, and accelerated to 50,000 rpm to create a super-conductive plasma with resulting gravity-disruption [reduction of almost all of the pull of gravity and effects of inertia].
The MFD generates a magnetic-vortex field which disrupts or neutralizes the effects of gravity by 89 percent on a mass within proximity. The MFD creates a disruption of the Earth's gravitational field upon the mass within the circular accelerator. The mass of the circular accelerator and all mass within the accelerator, such as the crew capsule, avionics, MFD systems, fuels, crew environmental systems, and the nuclear reactor, are reduced by 89%. The current MFD in the TR-3B craft causes the effect of making the vehicle extremely light, and able to outperform and outmaneuver any craft yet constructed - except of course those back-engineered total-antigravity craft, which the government does not admit exist.
The TR-3B is a high-altitude, stealth reconnaissance platform with an indefinite loiter time. Once you get it up there at speed, it doesn't take much propulsion to maintain altitude.
With the vehicle mass reduced by 89%, the craft can travel at Mach 9 vertically or horizontally. My sources say the performance is limited only the stresses that the human pilots can endure. Which is a lot of reduction, considering that along with the 89% reduction in mass, the inertial G forces are also reduced by 89%. The crew of the TR-3B can comfortably take up to 40Gs.
The TR-3Bs propulsion is provided by three multimode thrusters mounted at each bottom corner of the triangular platform. The TR-3 is a sub-Mach 9 vehicle until it reaches altitudes above l20,000 feet - then who knows how fast it can go!
The reactor heats the liquid hydrogen and injects liquid oxygen into the supersonic nozzle, so that the hydrogen burns concurrently in the liquid- oxygen afterburner. The multimode propulsion system can operate in the atmosphere, with thrust from the Magnetic Field Disrupter powered by the nuclear reactor; in the upper atmosphere, with hydrogen propulsion; and in orbit, with the combined hydrogen/oxygen propulsion. The engines are reportedly built by Rockwell.
I think a lot of people confuse the possibility of social mobility with the probability of social mobility.
Think of it like the difficulty setting on a game. Difficulty settings can range from the ridiculously easy to the virtually impossible. Likewise, different players have different skill levels in how good they are at the game. If the game had the same difficulty setting for everyone, comparing in-game scores/accomplishments/times would be an easy way to compare how good players are at the game.
But it's not that way, because you have difficulty settings. A person can be quite good at a game, but still loose because they choose to play it on a tough difficulty setting. Likewise, a person can really suck at a game but still win because they chose to play it on an easy setting. Now, there always will be some people who are so good that they'll win at the toughest settings and some people who are so bad that they'll still lose on the easiest settings. But lots of quite good players will still fail when the settings are hard enough, and lots of quite bad players will still succeed when it's easy.
We enter life with a variety of factors that influence our "difficulty settings" that we all have to play on. A white cis straight man with wealthy, college-educated parents raised in a good household is probably going to be playing on "easy". A poor black gay or trans woman with poor, high-school-educated parents raised in a bad environment, with no healthcare, loaded in debt from day one, having to work to support their family, limited transportation options, etc? Not so much. Will some of the former fail, and some of the latter succeed? Of course! But the odds of it are skewed. Many if not most people who would have been quite successful had they been on a level playing field will fail, and vice versa.
I, for one, support giving everyone access to the easier difficulty settings. I don't think it's a good thing for an economy when you have potential talent not being realized and people who really should be working a cash register in management. More to the point, the cost to the economy is almost unfathomably large. So if it takes some money to make this happen? So be it. Social mobility isn't just about the technical possibility of moving from one economic reality to another; it's about the practical reality of it, and how much merit and ability are able to overcome social inertia for the majority of players in the system.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
"I'm convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket,"
Informing people that you are deluded isn't the best idea. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.