When it comes to spaceflight, there are crazy optimistic schedules like those that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sometimes tosses about, and then there's just plain crazy. Some recent comments from the chief executive of Boeing, an aerospace company that simultaneously holds the most lucrative contracts in NASA’s exploration, International Space Station, and commercial crew programs, seem to fall into the latter category.
Speaking at a recent forum about NASA’s plans to send humans to Mars, Boeing’s Dennis Muilenburg offered his own opinion. "I anticipate that we will put the first person on Mars in my lifetime,” he said. “I think in this decade, and the first person that gets there is going to be on a Boeing rocket."
This is a preposterous statement. NASA may one day send humans to Mars on a “Boeing rocket”—the Space Launch System—but it will not happen in this decade or the next. In fact, on the present schedule, and because the staggering development costs of Boeing’s rocket will measure in the tens of billions of dollars, NASA seems unlikely to land humans even on the Moon in the 2020s. Mars remains a distant, evanescent dream.
Muilenburg’s rah-rah rhetoric, moreover, is severely undercut by comments from NASA’s chief of human spaceflight. Although a recent remark from Bill Gerstenmaier didn’t get much public attention, it put to bed any grandiose ideas about NASA’s deep space exploration plans, and especially talk of Mars. During a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council in late March, in reference to planning for human deep space missions, Gerstenmaier said, “We’re going to try and live within flat budgets.”
