So as we heard raptor production is the bottleneck right now, but does it need to be fixed so soon? If they can make Starship and Superheavy (at least Super Heavy) land consistently, they wouldn’t need to produce that many raptors that fast. Of course, that’s easier said than done, but I think catching Super Heavy might not be that hard of a challenge to get over. They can land Falcon 9 boosters with suicide burns, which are much harder, but with Super Heavy they can hover.
Catching with the arms might be a little difficult in the beginning but maybe they could add legs to the first ones and just take the payload hit? Again, easier said than done.
But if they managed to reuse Super Heavy maybe 5 times before some problem occurs or it fails to land, that would still save them 132 engines instead of making four more boosters. What do you think?
During all this talk about the Elon memo the past couple days, I noticed people saying stuff like, worst comes to worst, Elon could just toss a billion a year into SpaceX to keep it funded, the way Bezos does.
Well, personally I'm pretty new to all of this stuff, and I have no clue how much money SpaceX has been burning through on the stuff they've been developing the past couple years, but, I'm assuming it's a lot more than 1 billion a year, right?
So, I am curious, just how much do you think they are spending per year, at the moment? Are we talking 3-ish billion per year? 5 billion? 10 billion?
How much do you think they will spend in 2022?
I think, in order to get a ballpark idea of just how risky or not risky of a situation SpaceX is in right now, financially, the first big step would be to make a decent guess at how much they are spending per year these days.
I don't have even a rough estimate on it, and haven't seen anyone post one in any of the threads (apologies if I missed it), but, I haven't seen anyone directly prompt anyone on it so far, I don't think, so, I am curious if maybe some of you might have some decent estimates on it
If yes, so what will they be able to improve ? Merlin engines have gone through major development. So I was wondering how far can they push raptor and what will they focus on mainly improving ?
We've heard similar stories before the premiere of Model 3. Tesla burning cash and their existence depended on the success of their first, mass-produced car. But at the end, they made it and now the company is stronger than ever.
Now going back to SpaceX and the Raptor issue.
>What it comes down to is that we face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.
So despite the early development phase, it all boils down to three things (that are a bit far from today): mass production, rapid reusability and therefore, reliability. I think I could compare Starship to Boeing 747 here, it costs a lot to make one, so it has to fly as often as possible to work for itself. If not, you're making huge losses. As pointed in the email, those frequent flights are going to be Starlink V2 launches.
Assuming the bankruptcy risk is true, and it's not another corporate trick to overwork the employees, SpaceX is burning the cash like Tesla was during Model 3 development. They probably know when the company may run out of money if Starship fails. I'm not an economist, but it seems like high risk and high reward strategy. What complicates things is the departure of high-profile employees related to the Raptor development. As I read, Will Heltslay made mistakes while setting up the Raptor production and was covering them up. Once he left, Musk and SpaceX simply has to fix that.
For me, it definitely sounds like a crisis, bankruptcy may be an option if everything goes wrong, but I have no reason to believe that. SpaceX has been in far worse situations, and every time they managed to find a way and survive. I really recommend reading about their beginning in Liftoff by Eric Berger, what they've gone through is mind-blowing.
So, what do you think? Is this just another hurdle for SpaceX, or the beginning of an end?
