CEO Elon MuskElon Reeve MuskMusk Says ‘Canadian Truckers Are Reigning’ Ahead of Drivers’ Protest Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate On The Money – Economy Has Grown Post-Recession in 2021 Hillicon Valley – Presented by Cisco – The Feds Goes Ahead on ‘Nutrition Labels’ on the Internet MORE warned SpaceX employees that unless they ramp up production of Raptor engines for its next-generation Starship rocket, the aerospace company faces a “real risk of bankruptcy.”
In an internal email first obtained by SpaceExplored, Musk said SpaceX faces bankruptcy if the company cannot “achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.”
“Unfortunately, the production crisis at Raptor is much worse than it appeared a few weeks ago. As we dug into the issues after the departure of previous senior management, they unfortunately turned out to be much more serious than what was first realized. had been reported. There’s no way to sugarcoat that,” Musk wrote in the email, which was sent the day after Thanksgiving. “Unless you have critical family issues or are physically unable to return to Hawthorne, we will need everyone on deck to recover from what is, frankly, a disaster.”
The news comes just over a week after two high-level SpaceX employees, including one who was cut from Raptor engine development, resigned from the company, CNBC reported.
SpaceX’s Starship, which is being developed in Boca Chica, Texas, is the largest rocket in the world and is meant to be fully reusable for multiple launches. Musk recently told the National Academy of Sciences that he would launch a first test with the rocket and its booster, the Super Heavy, in January or February next year.
Musk doesn’t expect Starship to survive its first test flight early next year, but he’s confident SpaceX will pull it off in 2022.
Starship is then intended to take astronauts to the moon in 2023 part of a nearly $3 billion contract between NASA and SpaceX.
Musk shared plans to revolutionize space travel with Starship and similarly designed rockets. The rocket will one day take humans beyond the moon to other planets, the CEO said, and launch its next generation of Starlink satellites.
But development of the crucial Raptor engines, which are powered by burning methane and oxygen, is lagging behind, according to SpaceExplored, and Musk’s emails suggest the delay could have bigger implications for his plans for Starship and SpaceX as a whole.
