SpaceX was almost out of cash. Thousands of miles from home on a tiny speck of coral in the Pacific Ocean, its engineers were working frantically to launch its Falcon 1 rocket. They had already failed three times.
The first rocket fired from Omelek island in 2006 suffered a fuel leak, burning up as it climbed. On a second attempt, its engines shut down minutes into flight. On the third, its two stages explosively collided at high altitude. The team was down to one final shot.
But fortune was on the side of SpaceX boss Elon Musk and the fourth attempt soared into orbit in September 2008. Engineers out in the Pacific partied on the beaches all night: SpaceX had achieved the first private rocket launch in decades.
Musk’s rocket company has grown to be worth $100bn today, all to fund his ambitions to one day colonise Mars. It has conducted dozens of launches of its advanced Falcon 9 rocket, able to return to earth for re-use, and is in the process of launching a constellation of thousands of internet-connected satellites.
But despite raising around $7bn and an order book worth billions of dollars, the company is again facing an apparent cash crunch.
In an email to staff ahead of the Thanksgiving weekend, Musk issued a dire warning. If the company cannot fix the rocket engines on its 400ft tall Starship launcher by next year, it risks going under.
“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 [rocket engine] line all night and through the weekend,” Musk wrote.
“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.”
“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.” SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
Last week, Musk reiterated his concerns in public. “Starship is a hard, hard, hard, hard project. It is so preposterously difficult, that there are times where I wonder whether we can actually do this,” he told a conference.
It is easy to brush off these comments as Musk being his typical controversial self, trying to motivate staff just recalled from a rare holiday with their families. But analysts say that what little can be gleaned from SpaceX’s finances suggests a company undeniably burning through cash and reliant on getting high-risk projects done just in time, suggesting a real possibility of bankruptcy.
Despite the huge success of its Falcon 9 rocket series, which is now widely used by NASA and has slashed launch costs, the much larger Starship is a different beast. It will be the tallest rocket ever built – larger than NASA’s Saturn V launchers for the moon landings.
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