Elon Musk sent an internal email to employees of his space development company SpaceX warning that a crisis in the production of the Raptor engine could tip the company into bankruptcy.
“Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago,” wrote Musk in the email first reported by Space Explored. “As we have dug into the issues following the exiting of prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this. 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 problems with the Raptor engine production threaten to ripple down to the launch program for the Starlink V2 satellites – a system of low-orbit satellites delivering internet communications services. The launch of the V2 satellites is urgent according to Musk because satellite V1 “is financially weak.”
The V2 satellites would require the launching of a Starship rocket using a Raptor engine once every two weeks in 2022 to avoid the risk of bankruptcy, according to the tech mogul.
“The magnitude of the Starship program is not widely appreciated,” wrote Musk in a tweet on Wednesday. “It is designed to extend life to Mars (and the moon), which requires ~1000 times more payload to orbit than all current Earth rockets combined.”
(By Feike de Jong)
