Elon Musk, the world's richest man and the CEO of SpaceX, has sent a shocking email to their employees warning about the company's signs going into liquidation. In the email, he stated that the ongoing SpaceX crisis is due to the lack of proper production of Raptor engines. If this looming issue wouldn't settle before it slips away from the company's hands, Musk contemplates the possibility of SpaceX's dead end.
The email was first sourced by Space Explored and CNBC news, where it reads the following: "Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago," Musk reportedly wrote. "As we have dug into the issues following existing prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this." He further addressed the issue in the mail by saying, "What it comes down to is that we face the genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year."
Though Musk didn't spill the beans directly while bringing up the discussion about SpaceX's previous top management, his references implicitly directed us to three of his former employees who left the organization, namely, Will Heltsley, the Former Senior Vice President of propulsion at SpaceX, Lee Rosen, Vice President of Mission and Launch Operations, and Rick Lim, Senior Director of Mission and Launch Operations.
Musk took the issue ruminatively, discerning the double whammy effect of SpaceX going down in flames and the top management leaving the organization. So, on a serious note, he wrote in his email by saying, "We face the genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year. I was going to take this weekend off, as my first weekend off in a long time, but instead, I will be on the Raptor line all night and through the weekend."
The SpaceX Starship's roadmap headway decides the success ratio of taking over Mars in this lifetime. In addition to that, the Starship's progress would impact NASA's timeline to see astronauts landing on the Moon by 2025. This project's favourable outcome would help SpaceX deploy 20,000 satellites of the Starlink broadband satellite constellation. It establishes proper internet connectivity to rural and remote areas worldwide. So far, Falcon 9 has launched more than 1,800 satellites. The downside of the Falcon 9 is that the company can only launch 60 satellites on one go.
"The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can't fly Starship, which means we then can't fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong," said Musk in his grim email about the Starlink satellites.
