Boeing CEO Vows to Beat Musk to Mars

> literally translates to "Elon Musk wins". As opposed to anything else which you would also twist into Lord Elon winning.

Just because one of his goals is to drive competition into the race to mars doesn't mean it's his only goal. I don't doubt he not only wants to speed up the race to mars but wants to be known as the first.

No, everyone wins.

Where my cynics at?

Are we really so naive that we're just parroting whatever Musk's PR team says? Musk isn't doing this to further the human race, he's doing it to make money.

I'm not a Musk fanboy but I do have to admit, the minute a real, adult, aerospace company like Boeing lets Elon Musk set its direction for the future, he does win. The larger more mature company had the infrastructure in place for this for years, yet never considered it or took action on it; that makes them look timid and unoriginal. There's an analogous situation with the mainstream auto manufacturers and autonomous cars. They jump late onto a bandwagon they should've been piloting.

I still think it's a pie-in-the-sky project though. Musk compares the Mars initiative to building the Union Pacific Railroad, but the UPRR was heading somewhere full of plunder and gold, where the natives didn't even wear clothes because the weather's so nice. This operation's headed for... Mars, where for miles around, it TOTALLY SUUUUUUCKS SOOO BAD, as Louis CK might say.

That last bit - is a beautiful way to look at it.

>>Frankly, I'm thrilled to have Boeing keeping Elon honest, and vice versa. This is the system working here.

He isn't though. He's just posturing for PR purposes.

I mean, do we have any evidence that Boeing has a serious Mars program? How many launches have they done so far, and what were the results?[1]

As far as I'm concerned, this is the same thing as traditional car companies "vowing" to beat Tesla: it's just PR, backed by perhaps showing off concept cars in car shows.

[1]I meant launches that are specifically aiming for Mars.

> You're aware that SpaceX runs on a lot of corporate welfare, with SpaceX only existing because of NASA's COTS and Tesla only existing because of generous federal subsidies on electric cars and other handouts.

$7,500 on a $75,000 car is not a large enough subsidy to "run" Tesla. It's incentive for energy efficiency and all cars manufactures get it.

Moreover SpaceX does not get any "welfare" in any form. They have a contract job via the government's Commercial Space program.

> SpaceX only existing because of NASA's COTS

Falcon 1 and Merlin, Kestrel and Draco engines were funded with private capital; SpaceX was a space-faring company before NASA money got involved. COTS money went into developing the Falcon 9, and amounted to $278 million.

They did get a bunch of cash from NASA for launching crew to the ISS aboard Dragon v2: $2.6 billion. NASA also gave money to Boeing for their CST-100: $4.2 billion.

> Tesla only existing because of generous federal subsidies on electric cars and other handouts

The bulk of Tesla's cash comes from sales, stocks and bond sales - incentives from the government take the form of tax credits, or state agencies offering their own incentives because they are themselves competing to hitch a ride on Elon's business ventures. And who can blame them! Boeing gets considerable subsidies and tax credits as well, as do other car manufacturers and defense contractors, let's not suggest Tesla is alone here.

Also, Tesla was saved from near death by Daimler AG in early 2009, not by a "handout". In 2010, they received a low-interest loan from the government of $465 million, which they repaid in 2013 (the first automaker to repay their portion of the $8 billion loaned out).

Boeing makes less than a third of its revenue from defense and space spending, and yet has still received far more money through federal cost-plus contracts than SpaceX has received from all its revenue sources combined.

I don't think it's fair to characterize them as apples and apples here. Boeing keeps Elon honest by putting crew on ISS, or launching something to Mars, not by lobbying congress to slow Elon down with government red tape for matters that didn't pertain to the government to begin with. That's Boeing/Lockheed (ULS) using its position as one of the largest government defense and space contractors to keep their seat at the grown-ups table.

That said, the CST-100 Starliner is quite a good looking craft that evokes memories of the Apollo program, but I personally like the sleek and swooping curves of Dragon V2 - plus the whole "lands on its legs" thing they've got going on for it. :)

Photos of both can be seen here: http://www.americaspace.com/?p=73778

>This is an incredible time to be alive....

Yea? Why, because we have almost completely fucked up our home planet and will have to abandon it in few years. And we are happy, because we can see the associated fireworks?

Don't get me wrong. I like the progress with the space stuff. But I just don't like the idea just because of that everything else is sunshine and rainbows...It is not. And it is not really a great time to be alive. It is an extremely boring time to be alive. Imagine that you were living in a time period when electricity was invented. When radio waves were invented. Can you imagine how people felt when they saw the first cinema? When they heard voices that came across the town? When they saw the first locomotive? When they saw the first airplane? Imagine that you were living in a time when all the great people that we learned about in the history classes were alive.

Those were incredible times to be alive...

How many great people, how many great writers, how many great singers and poets of the current times do you imagine students after fifty years will be learning? Justin Beiber and Hilariy Clinton? How many great inventions of our times will they read with excitement? Elon Musks Hyper loop?

No. I really don't think so. So yea. We are living in incredibly boring times....

EDIT: This comment is not relavant anymore since the parent comment has been edited to include "time to be alive for space fans.."...

I think this is as good an explanation today as it was in 1970. You are the nun in this story.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

After they have conclusively proven the success of their large launcher with countless launches to get all the equipment and supplies in orbit and the SpaceX mission leaves for Mars what is SpaceX going to do? Sit on it's laurels and wait for the mission to reach Mars? Or maybe allow anyone to launch massive payloads into space on a very well proven platform.

If SpaceX can show they are have a very capable platform for heavy lifting before anyone else they can retain that position for a long time. Moon bases, Hubble replacements, long term space stations all need heavy launch capabilities. SpaceX wants to sell them their premier service.

> I firmly believe Musk is totally willing to bankrupt his company (and himself) to achieve his goal of landing on Mars, but are his investors?

It would seem so, yes.

> What about Boeing and Lockheed Martin (ULA)?

Doubtful. Their motivation is to earn profit. Elon's motivation is his "pioneerism" (the doctrine behind the act of pioneering).

> At least with a government landing on Mars, you can expect science to be conducted.

It's been 44 years since humans physically conducted science on another body. Robots are great for "doing science" that's planned out in advance, humans are great for "doing science" ad-hoc.

> What does a for-profit company do there, when there's not much to make a profit from?

I just don't see SpaceX as a for-profit company when its leader unabashedly says that profiteering would ruin his vision for SpaceX. The fact that people keep throwing money at them just underscores the human (and, yes, corporate) drive to stand behind him.

> What's the end-game here? We land and say "we did it!"... then what?

That's the most wonderful thing of all. We don't know what would happen next. To quote Richard Feynman (emphasis added): "Some people say, 'How can you live without knowing?' I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know."

I imagine this is to compete in the talent war heating up for Aero/Astro engineers, with sexy companies like Space X and Blue Origin siphoning the best talent from places like Boeing.

His plan isn't to land on Mars. His plan is to settle Mars. At the end of the day, it means that humanity will have a second planet to call home. If you have difficulty calculating the value of that, it's because it's incalculable.

(Of course in the process of landing a million people on Mars, he'll need to balance the books to make it financially sustainable. I do have some questions about how he'll do that, but can envision a handful of ways to make it work. The actual value, however, is almost entirely off-book.)

> what's in it for both companies - besides notoriety?

Financially:

(1) It's a wonderful tech demo and brand builder to attract customers who want to buy a ride to LEO on a very reliable rocket.

(2) To get to mars without a national-sized budget, they need to make the entire project stack cheaper and more reliable than ever before, which helps them sell rides to LEO cheaper than the competition.

(3) What's the end-game here? We land and say "we did it!"... then what?

Musk says he is dead serious about a permanent colony on Mars as insurance against human extinction on Earth. There's no end game - it's the beginning of life spreading from the Earth.

I think that the big play with SpaceX is that it will open up tons of avenues of that we haven't even thought about. Going back to his keynote a few days ago he is assessing multiple parts of space travel and trying to bring costs down orders of magnitude - and if they are the only group that can do it at those costs, then it seems like it will completely change what is possible to do in space.

First, as others have pointed out, there's a promise of profits that SpaceX can sell. Similar to Amazon, who were and are selling investors on the promise of growing and owning online retail, SpaceX can sell investors on the promise of growing and owning the space industry--travel, mining, government contracts, and more.

Secondly, it's worth noting that "billions" isn't as big of a number as you'd think in the context of modern capital markets. PwC published a paper recently that estimated there'd be $100 trillion in so-called assets under management (AuM) by 2020. (http://www.pwc.com/us/en/press-releases/2014/pwc-global-asse...) The market capitalization of Amazon _today_ is $400 billion.

Theoretically, SpaceX could easily raise all the money it needs and more. I don't know how practical that would be, or even if that's their plan at all. But the salient point here is that there's a _ridiculous_ amount of global capital up for grabs. This ain't the 1950s or 1980s. The rise of the third-world and the pace of global trade has created an almost unfathomable amount of wealth. Even if the markets crash tomorrow and it's cut in half, it's still unfathomable from the perspective of 20 or 30 years ago.

I remember reading an Economist article in the late 1990s (maybe early oughts) that showed using historical data that wealth tended to grow exponentially. (I haven't been able to track it down.) The point of the article was that wealth inequality will naturally increase dramatically because for any time span those with more wealth will accumulate even more wealth, proportionally, then someone poorer. The gap will naturally widen without forced redistribution.

Ignore issues about wealth inequality for a moment and think about what that phenomenon means for the amount of global capital available for investment. All that capital needs to be _invested_ somewhere. Even if appetite for risk never changes, it means the amount of capital available for the most risky ventures will grow dramatically. But perhaps as capital growth outpaces investment opportunities, appetite for risk will increase.

My point being, the practicality of a privately-funded Mars venture is likely to become more practical by the year. So even if it's starry-eyed today, it might not be in 5 or 10 years.

Well, you would require a bigger main engine without the SRBs. They were also reusable. Other rockets like the Ariane 5 also use SRBs

It might not have been the best solution but it was a solution

Boeing is sending astronauts to the ISS in 2018 with its CTS-100 capsule. They certainly have the space chops to be a credible competitor.

What do you think the chances are that the Boeing CEO would have said this if it weren't for Musk?

Competition keeps corporations consumer-centric due to the need to be the best available option. Competition creates different perspectives and solutions due to the need to innovate to survive. Competition drives people to do their best, due to human nature.

Competition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive. People cooperate to compete.

The only thing that matters is what people are cooperating and competing to accomplish.

>Why is it a good thing that two separate entities, with the exact same goal, are keeping secrets from each other

They don't have the same goal. Musk's goal is to get to Mars. Boeing's goal is to protect itself from obsolescence.

> Why is it a good thing that two separate entities, with the exact same goal, are keeping secrets from each other and inhibit the development towards that goal... Haven't you heard about open source?

Even in open source, there are often competing solutions to the same problem. Rather than have a joint committee decide the best approach (to the code, to the development process, etc), the decision is made by users choosing which software works for them. That's good.

The "keeping secrets" part is what's different. It would be nice for consumers if these companies shared knowledge while they compete, as open source software projects do. But 1) their secrets won't stay secret forever, 2) the ability to have secrets helps them compete, and 3) it's an acceptable short-term loss for the long-term gain of more effort spent on the problem.

>are keeping secrets from each other

We tried a "lets stop competition and just have the government run everything with everyone sharing everything." It was called Communism and was responsible for the deaths of 100m people, set up some of the worst regimes history has ever seen, had unparalleled human rights disasters, and people today are still paying the price of such mistakes in a variety of ways. If you think approaches like these work, then I suspect you have an overly-idealized view of human nature.

Trade secrets aren't that common. Most of what these companies do are taught at college. Implementation differences, marketing/advertising, finding new and different markets, etc matter. Innovation quickly spreads by its nature. Having different companies with different management styles and no company, ideally, being 'too big to fail' is a social benefit, not a liability. The tedium of reinventing the wheel is a small price to pay here, especially when you consider how quickly/cheaply this tedium is tackled in practice.

>Haven't you heard about open source?

FOSS has failed to take over many important markets. It is full of boneheaded decisions and PHB-type antics as well as teenage-level drama, forks, and angry fanboyism. Heck, a lot of open source 'successes' are only such because a proprietary commercial entity took an open codebase and layered closed and proprietary layers on top of it (OSX, Android, Safari, etc). Its not a fix-all for the human endeavor. Competitive approaches make sense and have been proved to be effective over and over to the point where this isn't even arguable. Imagine if someone told Elon that he should just get a job at NASA instead of trying to start his own company. If you heard that I imagine you'd be singing a different tune. Why the double standard with Boeing then?

I think a lot of young people are fed this kind of far-lefty politics from a young age to be anti-corporate anti-US and anti-competition without ever being exposed to the positive aspects of those things. I think if you grew up reading Chomsky/Zinn/Trotsky/Marx, you're doing yourself a disservice on how well capitalism works and the benefits of the US-led capitalistic experiment we're all part of that has been paying dividends for two hundred plus years and continues to with ex-communist nations doing nothing but copying our system as best they can. Even 'Socialist' nations are little more than capitalist democracies with token social welfare spending via taxation.

I wouldn't bury competition as outdated just yet. Those who have in history have themselves been buried.

Simple:you can't scale an engineering effort witout limits. However, you can have as many parallel engineering efforts as you like. They can cross pollinate ideas as much as they want to, but it's very hard to share parts of the process unless they are mundane components that can be outsourced.

Openness in itself is not bad but is not a requirement for unique engineering. See what Lockheed's Skunkworks did with SR-71 for example.

They boosted on decades of aeronautics research and individual talent - these provided the raw materials. They then combined these to reach the specific design intent.

In short: you can share a theory but not a chain of command or process without costs of then having a process to control this sharing.

It's also much better to have parallel vehicle designs at this early age of our space efforts than pour everything into a single megaeffort.

Who is "they" and how will they "make" SpaceX fail? Boeing has been in the space business for a long time. Why is the news only interesting when it involves an SV darling?

Oh, the conspiracies....

By fostering a larger talent pool competition insures a dynamic long term future, lack of it it often leads to creative stagnation. This is the case in natural systems as well.

Not true as exemplified by his Tesla company releasing the patents to their technology.

He knows he can't do it alone. He's elevating the bar for everybody.

Cooperation between parties with differing goals and management styles results in design (and subsequent dismissal) by committee, whereas competition unhindered by interference from the motivated parties results in landing humans on the Moon.

Yes, if everyone were altruistically motivated to get humans to Mars, we would all contribute our dollars and work together to make it happen.

But in the real world, a lot of people who don't care beans about Mars can still be motivated to invest in the effort by the prospect of investment gains. And those gains require for-profit competition.

This is a fantastic opportunity! We could come up with the next gen bogeyman for the coming century!

Guys, we've got to beat the dragon masters to Mars! There's no telling how much swooping they'll do from that high!

We knew how to keep people alive on the way to the Moon, alive on the Moon, and had a reliable way back. We didn't start off the race by declaring our intention to colonize the Moon.

So I look at the issues which made Mars 'hard' a while ago, and whether or not they're solved or if Musk is on the way to solving them. Micrometeorite shielding. Not solved Radiation shielding. Not solved Long term microgravity health effects. Not solved Sufficient understanding of the human microbiome to keep it thriving off-world. Not even addressed

Except the links are 100% identical, which is why I was asking.

And peace is boring too, so when we're not actually shooting at each other we use the economy as a weapon. This is no different, if only we could evolve to a point where we were better at working together instead of destroying each-others work, we would achieve a lot more in the short time we're on this planet. I get that this isn't reality (today), but when people make statements like that of Boeing's CEO...it just feels like we're not even trying (which i think is rather pathetic).

tl;dr; Jean Luc Picard wouldn't endorse this line of reason.