SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has thrown down a gauntlet to his equal at Boeing in the race to Mars, after the latter said they would be the first to get there. Speaking on CNBC on Thursday morning, as reported by Fortune, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said he thought his company would be the first to take humans to Mars, beating out rival SpaceX in the process.
When asked whether he
thought he or Musk would get humans there first, he said: “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.”
Musk, though, was having
none of it. On Twitter, he had two simple words for the Boeing CEO: “Do it”.
Boeing’s Twitter account
responded with its own “Game on!”
It’s an interesting state of
affairs that we have at least two private companies in a race to Mars. There
are others too, not least Lockheed
Martin. Just in September this year Musk laid out how he plans to get
there, unveiling what he calls the “Big
F*cking Rocket” and suggesting that crewed flights could begin in the next
decade.
Boeing, meanwhile, is not
developing its own rocket per se, but is instead working on NASA’s Space Launch
System (SLS), which is expected to launch for the first time in the early
2020s.
Both rockets are still being
constructed, and it’s not clear yet which – if either – will actually get
humans to Mars first.
This isn’t the only arena
SpaceX and Boeing are battling it out in, then. Both are currently racing to
launch their new crewed spacecraft, Dragon
and Starliner respectively, under contract with NASA.
It looks like SpaceX is
winning that race at this very moment, with a launch planned on its Falcon 9
rocket in August 2018. Boeing expects to launch its first crew on Starliner,
aboard an Atlas V rocket, in late 2018 or early 2019.
Muilenburg has made similar
comments about Mars before, saying last
year that he was “convinced that the first person to step foot on Mars
will arrive there riding on a Boeing rocket”.
And despite these latest
comments, Musk has previously suggested that he doesn’t mind who gets there
first, as long as someone does.
“I think it's actually much
better for the world if there are multiple companies or organizations building
these interplanetary spacecraft,” he said in his talk at the International
Astronautical Congress (IAC) last
year. “You know, the more the better.” Or, you know, maybe he just
doesn’t see Boeing as a serious threat.
Via IFLScience
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