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Elon Musk has warned staff at SpaceX that the company faces a “genuine risk of bankruptcy” if it cannot fix its rocket engines by next year.
Musk’s space venture, which is developing the superheavy Starship rocket that the billionaire hopes will one day transport people to Mars, is said to be in crisis as it struggles to solve a problem with the craft’s engines.
n an email to staff, the Tesla chief executive said issues with the engine were “far more severe than was reported” and that the company’s solvency was at risk if it could not achieve at least one launch every fortnight in 2022.Credit:AP
In an email to staff, the Tesla chief executive said issues with the engine were “far more severe than was reported” and that the company’s solvency was at risk if it could not achieve at least one launch every fortnight in 2022.
The email, which was sent ahead of the Thanksgiving weekend in the US, came as Musk demanded staff cancel holidays to get “all hands on deck” at its Hawthorne headquarters. Musk said that following the departure of senior executives, the company had discovered problems with its rocket engine production were “worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago”, according to the email leaked to Spaceexplored.com.
Musk told staff: “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. We will need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster.”
He added: “What it comes down to, is that we face a genuine risk of bankruptcy if we can’t achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.”
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
Its Starship rocket has drawn headlines with its repeated explosive test attempts, and has yet to reach orbit.