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

Meh. M. E. H. Meh.

[Frosty Piss]

Boeing is just "baiting" Musk to spend a lot of time and money on Mars because they - and the rest of the United Space Alliance - are feeling the hurt of all SpaceX's recent successful satellite launches.

Re:Meh. M. E. H. Meh.

[michelcolman]

It's unlikely to happen, but even if Boeing does beat SpaceX to Mars, I'm sure Elon won't mind one bit. His mission was to get mankind to colonize Mars. If Boeing does it, his mission will be accomplished. Without SpaceX, there wouldn't be nearly as much pressure on companies like Boeing to get there and the mission would keep getting postponed as it has been for decades.

Same for electric cars: of course he wants Tesla to win, but even if competitors drive Tesla out of business with better electric cars, his goal of accelerating the advent of electric cars will have been accomplished. He's actually encouraging other car makers to go electric.

Why did he start a tunnel boring company? Because he was sick and tired of being stuck in traffic and nobody was doing anything about it. He doesn't care if he makes money, he just wants to get rid of traffic jams.

Re:Meh. M. E. H. Meh.

[Viol8]

"It's unlikely to happen,"

Agreed. Its mainly a human survival (physical and mental) problem, not a launcher problem.

"Because he was sick and tired of being stuck in traffic and nobody was doing anything about it."

Perhaps Musk is from Mars, because people did something about it in the 19th century here on Earth - they're called underground metro systems. He should try riding one sometime.

Re:Meh. M. E. H. Meh.

[drew_kime]

Perhaps Musk is from Mars, because people did something about it in the 19th century here on Earth - they're called underground metro systems. He should try riding one sometime.

But if there's not an underground system where he wants to go, someone would have to build one first.

Oh, wait ...

Re:Meh. M. E. H. Meh.

[michelcolman]

Traffic flow studies show that traffic expands to clog the available capacity.

That's a myth. In the Netherlands, they've had traffic jams for decades between Rotterdam and Amsterdam because environmental lobbies kept saying that more lanes would only attract more traffic, Finally a right wing government decided to add more lanes anyway, and guess what? Drastically reduced traffic jams! Who would have thunk?

Boeing is first in everything

[phayes]

Yeah, just like Boeing was the first to develop reusable first stages for orbital class launchers... /s

Re:Boeing is first in everything

[Hal_Porter]

Boeing didn't need to do that because the United Launch Alliance - Boeing and Lockheed - had a monopoly on launches and so it didn't need to improve anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Now Musk is competing with them they're under a bit more pressure. Competition is a good thing.

In fact the only reason the US got to the moon was because of competition with the USSR. Post Cold War the US stopped doing manned space flight above LEO, and so did everyone else.

https://www.quora.com/Why-have...

(Almost) anything is possible technologically but as soon as you have a monopoly, progress will slow because there's no incentive to improve.

Re:Boeing is first in everything

[MrKaos]

Yeah, just like Boeing was the first to develop reusable first stages for orbital class launchers... /s

Bah, Boeing probably regrets not being able to boast about the secret missions to Mar they have already done.

Elon's Twitter reply

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do it"

These quotes are so inanely predictable.

[Nutria]

What else is the Boeing CEO going to say, that SpaceX is going to beat them???

First In Pork

[mentil]

Uh huh. If there are no delays, the SLS will be sent on its first Mars mission TEN YEARS after SpaceX is planning on sending humans to Mars. Not like SpaceX has never seen delays... but the question really becomes, who is better known for worse delays: Boeing, or SpaceX? OTOH if a private enterprise beats ALL governments to landing a human on Mars, that'd be a pretty big black eye for those other space programs with ostensibly larger budgets, authority and reach.

We've needed a Space Race for 45years

[aklinux]

Nothing like a little competion to inspire progress.

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.

Re:None of this is gonna happen any time soon

[Baron_Yam]

I'm going to go a bit 'space nutter' here - but I'm not insanely enthusiastic to the point of being oblivious to the difficulties

>We still have decades of R&D to do in creating a self-sustainable miniature ecosystem

Agreed... but we don't need one that is self-sustaining. We need one that can last a round trip plus margin of error, and requires less mass than just taking all the one-time-use supplies.

This may already be possible.

Even if not, we can launch supplies on separate rockets ahead of time and have them waiting on Mars for humans to use.

>maintaining human physiology for 3 years in space

Gravity's it. Vibrating beds based on cat's purrs don't seem to be in the news anymore, so I'm assuming that NASA's decided they're ineffective at maintaining bone mass. There's no way to keep human fluids where they belong in free fall, with the vision and other health problems that brings.

So... a crew cabin and counterweight connected by a tether and rotating around their center of mass. Not easy, but not beyond our current tech, either. That removes the dangers of muscle and skeletal atrophy due to free fall from the trip. More importantly, if we really wanted to do it we could put such a system into orbit NOW (for long values of 'now', because it takes time to design, build, and launch a space craft) and spin it up to say, 0.38g and test the long term effects of partial g on humans.

>and shielding space travelers from solar radiation

Well... I love the idea of a magnetically confined plasma shield, but that apparently requires a long wire made of a room temperature superconductor, so that's probably a no go for the foreseeable future. So you do your best with shielding based on mass allowance, then put a safe room in the middle of your water tanks and watch for solar flares so you know when to hide in it.

Compared to all the other risks of the trip, I think 'an elevated risk of cancer' rates near the bottom and wouldn't stop a single candidate from turning down the opportunity to explore a piece of Mars in person.

* * *

Essentially, I think you've focused on the wrong issues. I think keeping living space free of perchlorate dust for years might just be the biggest obstacle to a significant human visit to the red planet, because that's one that can't be solved right now with more money.

If its not Boeing.

[furry_wookie]

If it's not Boeing, I'm not going (to mars).