Boeing Co. once helped the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the race to the moon. Now the company intends to go toe-to-toe with newcomers such as billionaire Elon Musk in the next era of space exploration and commerce.

Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg sketched out a Jetsons-like future at a conference Tuesday, envisioning a commercial space-travel market with dozens of destinations orbiting the Earth and hypersonic aircraft shuttling travelers between continents in two hours or less. And Boeing intends to be a key player in the initial push to send humans to Mars, maybe even beating Musk to his long-time goal.

“I’m convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket,” Muilenburg said at the Chicago event on innovation, which was sponsored by the Atlantic magazine.

Like Musk’s SpaceX, Boeing is focused on building out the commercial space sector near earth as spaceflight becomes more routine, while developing technology to venture far beyond the moon. The Chicago-based aerospace giant is working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop a heavy-lift rocket called the Space Launch System for deep space exploration. Boeing and SpaceX are also the first commercial companies NASA selected to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.

Musk last week welcomed competitors as he unveiled a SpaceX craft that would dwarf the workhorse of Apollo missions of a half-century ago, hauling 100 travelers to Mars with cruise-ship-style amenities.

“The goal of SpaceX really is to build the transport system. It’s like building the Union Pacific railroad,” Musk told a space conference, as he laid out a plan to bring travel to Mars to a mass market with tickets priced one day as low as $100,000.

“I think it’s a fascinating area for us,” he said.

Muilenburg said Boeing will make spacecraft for the new era of tourists. He also sees potential for hypersonic aircraft, traveling at upwards of three times the speed of sound.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp. are among the space heavyweights developing experimental aircraft that could fly U.S. travelers at speeds right out of a science fiction movie.

Lockheed’s Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 is being designed to zip through the sky at Mach 20 (about 13,000 miles per hour), flying between New York and Los Angeles in 12 minutes. Boeing’s X-51A WaveRider, which relied on its own shock waves for compression lift, reached Mach 5.1 in 2013.

Costs will need to drop substantially before these experimental spacecraft can be seriously considered for commercial use, Muilenburg said.

“That business model isn’t closed yet. At some point it will,” he said. “The future of innovation has to include not only the technology, but economic viability.”

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the company would delay its 2018 Red Dragon mission to Mars at least two years to better focus its resources on two programs that a running significantly behind schedule.

“We were focused on 2018, but we felt like we needed to put more resources and focus more heavily on our crew program and our Falcon Heavy program,” Shotwell said at a pre-launch press conference in Cape Canaveral, Florida. “So we’re looking more for the 2020 timeframe for that.”

The mission will land a modified Dragon spacecraft on the martian surface. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he planned to launch Dragons to the surface every two years beginning in 2018, culminating in a crewed mission in 2024.

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO)  report says that both SpaceX and Boeing are running increasingly behind schedule in developing their commercial crew vehicles, which are designed to take astronauts to the International Space Station. Both programs are years behind schedule due to a combination of under funding, technical problems and bureaucratic delays at NASA.

The GAO report concludes that it’s unlikely that either company would be ready to fly astronauts to the station on a commercial basis before 2019. Each contractor must fly two flight tests to the space station — one with crew, one without — and have its vehicle certified before flying astronauts for NASA.

Shotwell expressed confidence that SpaceX would complete the flight tests and begin flying NASA astronauts in 2018. On Twitter, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote, “Provided Dragon 2 demo missions go well, SpaceX is highly confident of being able to fly US astronauts in 2018.”

Neither Shotwell nor Musk addressed any of the specific concerns expressed in the GAO report. They might be right, but Musk’s history of perpetual optimism on schedules and SpaceX’s constant delays — – problems the billionaire has acknowledged — raise doubts. They expressed confidence in Crew Dragon even as the company announced a delay in its Mars mission and prepared to launch a delayed resupply flight to the space station on Saturday.

The Falcon Heavy — which has three Falcon 9 core boosters as its first stage — is running about four years behind schedule. SpaceX is planning an inaugural flight test this year with a second flight by the end of the year.