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

Posted by BeauHD on from the space-race dept.

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.

7 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Meh. M. E. H. Meh. by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Meh. M. E. H. Meh. by michelcolman · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Elon's Twitter reply by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Do it"

  3. These quotes are so inanely predictable. by Nutria · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  4. First In Pork by mentil · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
  5. We've needed a Space Race for 45years by aklinux · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nothing like a little competion to inspire progress.

  6. None of this is gonna happen any time soon by Solandri · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.