Boeing says it will beat SpaceX to Mars
But Elon Musk probably doesn’t mind if it does
Less than a week after SpaceX founder Elon Musk detailed his vision to get people to Mars, a rival aerospace company has intimated that it plans to beat Musk (and everyone else) to the punch.
However, Musk is probably OK with that.
Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO of Boeing (one of SpaceX’s biggest competitors) casually loosed the remark during a session of The Atlantic’s “What’s Next?” conference.
“I’m convinced that the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding on a Boeing rocket,” Muilenburg said during the recorded event.
Boeing has good ground to stand on with its claim, not the least of which includes some moon dust.
After all, it was the company that helped build the ultra-powerful Saturn V rocket, which blasted Apollo-era equipment and astronauts to the moon and back. NASA also contracted Boeing to build its similarly huge Space Launch System (SLS), which should eventually be capable of sending up to 20 metric tonnes — roughly five large, fully grown elephants’ worth of mass — to Mars after its scheduled debut in 2018.