(PatrioticPost.com)- Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, recently found himself in some hot water for an email he sent employees that was leaked to the media.
The email that must sent on Black Friday urged employees to work during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend on a spacecraft engine the company is producing. In the email, he said the engine line called Raptor was in “crisis.”
If the company wasn’t able to step up production sufficiently to support enough flights on the Starship rocket — which is reusable — this year, then SpaceX could face a “genuine risk of bankruptcy.”
As a result, Musk said the company needed “all hands on deck” for the weekend, adding that he, too, would be spending his holiday weekend working on the production line for the Raptor engine.
After that email was leaked, people naturally attacked Musk for what he said. On November 30, though, he tried to defend what he said, tweeting:
“The magnitude of the Starship program is not widely appreciated. 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.”
In a subsequent tweet, he wrote:
“If a severe global recession were to dry up capital availability / liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starlink & Starship, then bankruptcy, while still unlikely, is not impossible. GM & Chrysler went BK last recession. ‘Only the paranoid survive.’ — Grove.”
The Starship project that SpaceX is working on includes a transportation system that is completely reusable — something completely new to the aerospace industry. The Starship rocket is designed to carry technology such as satellites to low-Earth orbit as well as even beyond.
Musk’s ultimate goal is to have the Starship rockets carry humans first to the moon and then, in time, to Mars.
The company received a contract worth $2.9 billion from NASA in April so that it could develop the Starship to be a lunar lander so it could carry crew members to the surface of the moon by 2024. The company has been testing prototypes in Texas, but it hasn’t yet reached an orbit in low-Earth.
In mid-November, Musk gave a talk to the National Academy of Sciences, saying his company was hoping to be able to launch the Starship for its first orbital flight next January or February.
The email Musk sent on Black Friday, though, would seem to indicate the company is in need of flights much more frequently than that if it’s going to be successful.
The leaked email said:
“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.”
The problem with this, according to Musk, is that the Raptor engine line is experiencing significant delays in production that is throwing everything off.
