Boeing CEO jabs SpaceX, says Mars explorers will ride his rocket

Enlarge / Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg gives a keynote speech during the SAE Aerotech Congress on September 22, 2015 in Seattle, Washington. (credit: Stephen Brashear/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, a week after Elon Musk's big Mars reveal in Guadalajara, Mexico, Boeing Chief Executive and Chairman Dennis Muilenburg was asked what big innovations his company had planned for its second century of operations. After ticking off a list of flight and aerospace innovations, Muilenburg came to deep space exploration. "First person on Mars. I'm convinced that the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding on a Boeing rocket," Muilenburg confidently said during a Boeing-sponsored tech summit in Chicago called "What's Next."

It doesn't manifest itself publicly all that often, but there is an intense rivalry between Boeing, a blue-blood government contractor with a long history of aerospace firsts, and SpaceX, which has come along in the last decade and threatened the larger company's space business by offering discounted spaceflight. About the closest thing to trash talking came in 2014, when John Elbon, the head of Boeing's space division, compared the two companies by saying, "We go for substance. Not pizzazz."

Boeing, of course, won't be sending anyone to Mars without collecting tens of billions of dollars in federal contracts for its Space Launch System rocket, for which it is NASA's prime contractor. An Ars analysis found that NASA will spend about $60 billion developing and flying the SLS rocket before there's even the possibility of landing four to six humans on Mars in the late 2030s, and that does not include the expense of spacecraft, deep-space habitats, and accommodations on the surface of Mars.