SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently sent an email to SpaceX employees, urging them to work on the SpaceX Raptor engine line, saying that the situation is a ?crisis.? In an email accessed by The Verge, Musk told employees that the company faces a genuine risk of bankruptcy if the production doesn?t increase to support a high flight rate of the company?s Starship rocket next year. The Raptor engine is a methane-powered engine that will be used to propel SpaceX?s Starship.
SpaceX will use the Starship to take people to outer space. In April this year, NASA awarded the Elon Musk-led company a $2.9 billion (roughly Rs 21,745 crores) contract to develop the Starship as a lunar lander to send astronauts to the Moon?s surface as early as 2025. SpaceX has been developing and testing Starship prototypes, but is yet to launch the vehicle into space.
SpaceX is aiming to conduct Starship?s first orbital launch in January or February of 2022, according to a recent presentation from Elon Musk that was cited in the report from The Verge. Musk?s mail, however, says that SpaceX needs to launch Starship at least once every two weeks next year in order to keep the company afloat.
Musk was quoted in the report as saying that the Raptor engine development is not on track. He said that after key senior management departed the company, the staff looked deeper into the issues surrounding Raptor and found them to be far more severe than previously reported. Two vice presidents recently left SpaceX ? one of them worked on the Raptor engine.
?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,? Musk was quoted in the email as saying. He urged employees to come in for an ?all hands on deck? situation unless they had critical family matters or could not physically make them present.
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