Posted on 10/06/2016 11:20:40 PM PDT by aquila48
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg believes that it's his company that's sending the first humans to Mars, not SpaceX. At a Chicago event sponsored by The Atlantic, Muilenberg declared that he's "convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket." SpaceX chief Elon Musk recently laid out his grans plans to ferry people to the red planet aboard the Interplanetary Transport System, a powerful ship the company's already working on. While Boeing has comparatively been quieter, Muilenburg isn't just all talk.
The older aerospace corporation has been working with NASA to build the Space Launch System, the agency's most powerful rocket yet designed to fly to our reddish-colored neighbor. Besides, Boeing has great track record: it helped the US beat the Soviet Union to the moon. If you'll recall, the company built the first stage of the rocket (Saturn V) that took astronauts to our planet's satellite back in the '60s and the '70s.
Musk didn't seem to mind Muilenberg's statement, though. When asked at the same conference whether he wants to be the first person to reach Mars, he replied:
"I think it's actually much better for the world if there are multiple companies or organizations building these interplanetary spacecraft. You know, the more the better. Anything, I think, that improves the probability of the future is good. And so multiple companies doing it, I think, would be great. So I wanted to come describe the architecture actually in the hopes that this would encourage companies and organizations around the world to perhaps do something like this."
Last we checked, SpaceX is aiming for a 2024 manned mission, while NASA and Boeing are looking to launch their first manned flight in the 2030s.
(Excerpt) Read more at engadget.com ...
It takes real imagination to even think up drivel.
I wasn’t suggesting he didn’t have an imagination, but rather an overly weird and dangerous one.
Nope, we stopped going there because we were told to stop going there.
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have accomplished what NASA could not.....developing recoverable booster stages, which is "the" fundamental missing part for economical access to LEO.
"And Apollo wasn't the result of an Ayn Rand free market fantasy."
We probably would have been better off if it had....
Because it is a tangible target. The real benefit is to perfect easy, inexpensive, and reliable access to LEO. And once that is available, a huge resource base becomes available to humanity.
We will learn how to handle it. That is what humans do.
"It is no “Plan B” for Earth."
At present. In the not too distant future, there will be many.
The 1960’s space race proved that our captured WWII German rocket scientists were better than the Soviet’s captured German rocket scientists.
Maybe the difference was that we fed them and let them out once in a while.
You did a great job of explaining conversion formulas of water to energy and back. However, it's going to be a while before fuel cell technology gets cheap enough for our cars (unless heavily subsidized).
I have a fuel cell driven toy car. It uses a solar panel to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen via a catalyst in a fuel cell, storing the gases in the toy car. Conversely, it uses the hydrogen and oxygen via the catalyst in the fuel cell to create electricity to drive the car while creating water as a by-product. It is very slow and doesn't go far. When I use a battery, the solar panel charges the battery, and the battery provides power to drive the car and it is much faster and goes farther besides charging more quickly than the electrolysis process.
I understand that fuel cells have long been in use in the space program. But they are expensive. I just don't see them becoming half the cost of the equivalent tank of gasoline to drive a car in use by the public. Not any time soon.
Yeah, we can make a lot of progress, if... (and I'm not betting on it either).
Back when Islam began, progress in areas of the planet that got overrun by muslims, came to a screeching halt. Our idiot president Obummer idolizes Islam and pretty much scuttled NASA in favor of outreach to muslims. If we don't keep the muslims from infiltrating our society, then kiss technological progress goodbye. We won't accomplish much in the next 200 years, or 1000 years.
Why are you such an angry person? We get it, you do not like the Free Market, or philosophy... heh heh. Without it, things don’t happen. Free market or no free market. Right that is why RUSSIA did so well,
I don't like Marx, Rand, Redbeard, LaVey or other such phonies.
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