Elon Musk warns SpaceX ‘faces BANKRUPTCY’ and demands that staff work weekends

BILLIONAIRE SpaceX boss Elon Musk has revealed the company faces bankruptcy in a leaked email.

The SpaceX CEO and founder warned staff about a “genuine risk of bankruptcy” because of a lack of progress in making its Raptor engines.

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The leaked company-wide email was first obtained by Space Explored and then later confirmed by CNBC.

SpaceX’s situation is said to be so dire that Musk claims the company would have to launch a Starship rocket every two weeks in the next year to avoid financial ruin.

The concerning email was reportedly sent by Musk over Thanksgiving weekend.

It states: “Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago.

“As we have dug into the issues following the exiting of prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported.

“There is no way to sugarcoat this.”

Musk and SpaceX typically try and portray the company as an overwhelming success so things must be pretty bad.

The “senior management” Musk mentions in the email is thought to be SpaceX’s former vice president of propulsion Will Heltsley.

He left the company in November around the time the Raptor engine development was struggling to make progress.

Musk vented his frustrations about the lack of Raptor development in the email and even asked staff to return to work on Thanksgiving weekend.

The leaked email states: “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.”

The SpaceX CEO added that he was no longer having time off for Thanksgiving and would “be on the Raptor line all night and through the weekend.”

SpaceX’s Raptor engine are of huge importance to the company because they’re intended to play a large role in the company’s plans over the next year.

The engines are intended to power Starship rockets and Super Heavy boosters.

Raptor engines should also be playing a role in taking Nasa astronauts to the Moon in a SpaceX rocket.

Musk has also stressed that a stall in Raptor production will negatively impact plans to put more Starlink satellites in orbit.

The billionaire has big plans for a second generation of Starlink satellites and even admitted: “Starlink V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.”

Musk ends the email by stressing: “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.”

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In other news, the brightest comet of 2021 is heading our way and it should be visible in time for some Christmas stargazing.

Nasa has warned that a giant asteroid bigger than the Eiffel Tower will break into Earth’s orbit in just over a week.

And, Nasa has plans to put a nuclear power plant on the Moon within this decade.

This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk