Skiddy Nipper
2 min readDec 17, 2021

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Musk issued a rather amazing, underwhelming, and unprofessional memo to his Starlink staff.

It read as follows:

"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.

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.

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 consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.

In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise.

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.

Thanks,

Elon

Source: https://spaceexplored.com/2021/11/29/spacex-raptor-crisis/#h-full-email-from-elon-to-spacex-employees

I found out about it via the highly entertaining You Tube channel of "thunderf00t"

https://youtu.be/EojxThnDPng

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Skiddy Nipper
Skiddy Nipper

Written by Skiddy Nipper

Slippery, immature, a bit of a crustacean, and dangerous to know.

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