SpaceX Bankruptcy: Is SpaceX going Bankrupt? Here's what Elon Musk has to say

Elon Musk has warned SpaceX employees that if they don’t increase production of Raptor engines for his next-generation Starship rocket, the aerospace company will face a genuine risk of bankruptcy. According to an internal email obtained by CNBC, Musk said that SpaceX faces bankruptcy if the company can’t achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year. He said that the “Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago”. 

“As we have dug into the issues following exiting prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this," Musk wrote in the email, according to CNBC. 

“Unless you have critical family matters or cannot physically return to Hawthorne, we will need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster,” he added. 

Separately, in response to the leaked email that Musk sent to his employee over the long Thanksgiving holiday, Musk on Tuesday said that SpaceX needs to produce a lot more of its next-generation Staships engines, and soon, to keep growing its Starlink broadband constellation and stay in business. Musk said that bankruptcy is unlikely. He, however, added that it is not impossible. 

‘Genuine risk’ of SpaceX bankruptcy 

Meanwhile, according to the media outlet, the latest news comes after two senior-level SpaceX employees last week resigned from the company. Will Heltsley, now the former Vice President of Propulsion, was taken off Raptor development before he left. In his email, Musk also wrote that the company’s leadership has been digging into the program’s problems since then and discovering the circumstances “to be far more severe” than Musk previously thought. The SpaceX CEO said that he would now personally work on the engine production line in a bid to avoid a “disaster”. 

He concluded by saying that SpaceX could face “genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year."

SpaceX’s Starship will get to space in 2022: Musk 

It is to mention that Starship is the massive, next-generation rocket that SpaceX is developing to launch cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars. The aerospace company is testing prototypes at a facility in Texas. It has flown multiple short test flights, however, to move to orbital launches, the rocket prototypes will need as many as 39 Raptor engines each – necessitating a sharp ramp in engine production.

Earlier, Musk had described the production as the most difficult part of creating SpaceX’s rocket. The firm has steadily built up its Starship production and testing facility in Boca Chica with multiple prototypes in work simultaneously. But the Tesla CEO has said that he wasn’t sure if Starship would successfully reach orbit on the first try but emphasised that he is “confident” that the rocket will get to space in 2022. 

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