Genius, billionaire, philanthropist and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk sent a companywide email, describing a dire situation with the development of Raptor rocket engines. Notably, the email was sent the day after Thanksgiving.
Elon Musk turned out to be very angry about the lack of progress in the development of Raptor engines for the Starship rocket. “We face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year,” Musk wrote in the email. At the moment, the company is testing the rocket prototype. However, to move to orbital launches, each prototype needs 39 Raptor engines. Engine production cannot meet the demand now.
“The Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago. We need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster,” Elon Musk said.
The production of engines has always been the most difficult part of creating SpaceX’s rocket. The situation deteriorated after the departure of former Vice President of Propulsion Will Heltsley at the beginning of the previous month. Interestingly, Heltsley had been taken off the Raptor development even before he left. After that, the company’s management dug into the program’s problems and discovered the circumstances “to be far more severe” than Musk previously thought.
