Boeing CEO Says Boeing Will Beat SpaceX To Mars (space.com)

Boeing's CEO says the megarocket his company is helping to build for NASA will deliver astronauts to the Red Planet before billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX. Space.com reports: According to Fortune, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg was speaking on CNBC today when host Jim Cramer asked whether Boeing or SpaceX would "get a man on Mars first." "Eventually we're going to go to Mars, and I firmly believe the first person that sets foot on Mars will get there on a Boeing rocket," Muilenburg said, according to Fortune. Boeing is the main contractor for the first stage of NASA's giant Space Launch System , which is designed to launch astronauts on deep-space missions using the space agency's new Orion spacecraft. (United Launch Alliance, Orbital ATK and Aerojet Rocketdyne are also SLS contractors.) NASA hopes to build a "Deep Space Gateway" near the moon before using SLS and Orion vehicles to send explorers to Mars. The first test launch is scheduled for 2019. "Do it," Musk tweeted.

Comments

None of this is gonna happen any time soon

[Solandri]

Unless you're talking about a one-way trip. The moon landings required about 8 days of total travel and loiter time. It's fairly trivial to package enough food, water, oxygen, fuel, and waste storage (the astronauts left bags of poop and urine on the moon) for a trip of that duration.

Mars requires (assuming a least-energy Hohmann transfer orbit) about 9 months to travel there, 16 months to wait for another Hohmann transfer orbit window for the return trip, then another 9 months for the return trip. That's over 1000 days in total. Two orders of magnitude longer than the moon landings.

Don't be fooled by the apparent ease with which we're sending robots to Mars. Robots don't need food, water, oxygen, and waste storage. And if they're solar or nuclear powered (as all of them have been thus far) they don't need fuel either. While it may technically be possible to launch people on a trip to Mars within the next decade or two, they either wouldn't be returning or would as corpses. We still have decades of R&D to do in creating a self-sustainable miniature ecosystem, maintaining human physiology for 3 years in space, and shielding space travelers from solar radiation, before a manned Mars mission will be feasible. Developing the rockets for the trip is the easy part.

Re:None of this is gonna happen any time soon

[drinkypoo]

Mars requires (assuming a least-energy Hohmann transfer orbit) about 9 months to travel there, 16 months to wait for another Hohmann transfer orbit window for the return trip, then another 9 months for the return trip. That's over 1000 days in total. Two orders of magnitude longer than the moon landings.

The duration is not the big problem. The ISS shows that we can sustain a mission for that period. The big problem is the mass. Such a mission requires a lot more mass than we can cost-effectively launch right now. So now they're working on that problem, as one would.