At the Atlantic's "What's Next?" tech conference in Chicago last week, Boeing's CEO Dennis Muilenburg declared that it can beat SpaceX to Mars.

In his own words, he announced, "I'm convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket."

By the time a lot has been heard about SpaceX's plans of sending humans to Mars, Boeing's intention is of just providing technology NASA needs to land on the Red Planet, which is likely to happen not before 2034, according to NASA Plans.

However, it's just the half of the story. Earlier this year, SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk at a Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes promised to land an unmanned Dragon 2 spaceship on the Red Planet by 2018, which will be followed by a completely safe manned mission departing in 2024 and landing in 2025 beating Boeing's plan by nine years.

Boeing and United Launch Alliance partner Lockheed Martin jointly hold the record of most consecutive launches without any misfortune (111 so far) whereas the last rocket SpaceX tried blew up before launch.

Apart from Mission Mars, both the companies also talked about their current development on Earth, from Boeing's ideas of promoting space tourism and development of "Hypersonic Aircraft" flying around the Earth to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets which can accelerate up to Mach 23.

"We could transport cargo to anywhere on Earth in 45 minutes at the longest," said Musk. "If we had a floating platform off the coast of, say, New York ... you could go from New York to Tokyo in 25 minutes, or cross the Atlantic in 10 minutes." Muilenburg also tried to present the idea of "supersonic, hypersonic travel, the ability to connect anywhere in the world in a couple hours," via vehicles like Boeing's WaveRider hypersonic vehicle (top speed of Mach 5.1).