An aerial view of a Starship prototype stacked on top of a Super Heavy rocket at the company’s Starbase facility outside Brownsville, Texas.
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While Elon Musk earns daily headlines about the changes on Twitter, a major reorganization underway at his space company’s Texas launch facility.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell and vice president Mark Juncosa — two of the most influential executives at the company besides Musk himself — currently oversee the facility and operations of the company’s Starbase site, People familiar with the situation told CNBC.
Starship senior director of operations Shyamal Patel will be leaving the site to move to the company’s Cape Canaveral facility, after more than two years working on next-generation rockets in Texas, the people said. Patel was previously based in the Cape, before being promoted and moved to Starbase.
The space venture also quietly brought in Omead Afshar, a Texas-based company Tesla operations leadership, as vice president of Starship production.
Information previously reported new responsibilities to Shotwell and Juncosa, while Bloomberg first reported the addition of Afshar. SpaceX did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the reorganization.
SpaceX has gradually built up its facility called Starbase, outside the city of Brownsville in Texas, which will serve as the primary hub for developing, testing, and launching its nearly 400-foot-tall Starship rocket. The rocket is designed to carry cargo and people beyond Earth and is crucial to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon, with SpaceX already won a nearly $3 billion contract from the agency in 2021.
Appointments demonstrate the urgency within the company to get Starship flying. Both Shotwell and Juncosa have been at SpaceX since the early days of Musk’s reign.
Juncosa visited Starbase over the summer for what is supposed to be two weeks, one of the people familiar with the matter told CNBC, to give Musk and Shotwell an update on development progress at the site. .
That person called Juncosa’s findings alarming, with a launch attempt to orbit further than expected by company management. SpaceX had hoped to conduct its first Starship orbital launch as early as the summer of 2021, but delays in progress and regulatory approval have pushed back that timeline.
NASA last month said that SpaceX most recently told the agency that Starship’s first orbital launch could take place as early as December.
An aerial view of the company’s Starbase facility outside Brownsville, Texas.
space
The The Federal Aviation Administration has completed its long-awaited environmental assessment of the Starbase facility in June, the key to getting the company a license from the federal regulator to launch Starship. However, as a result of that FAA decision, SpaceX was forced to take more than 75 steps to reduce its environmental impact – and it is not yet known if those actions have been completed. The FAA did not respond to CNBC’s request on Friday for an update on the process.
The Starship rocket and its Super Heavy rocket booster are powered by SpaceX’s Raptor series of engines, and the entire system is designed to be reusable – unlike the partially reusable parts of the company. the company’s Falcon series of rockets.
A year ago, Musk describes a “crisis” with the production of Raptor engines, which resulted in the removal of a vice president from the program, who had left the company. Since then, SpaceX has ramped up Raptor production at a rate of seven engines per week – crucial, since each Super Heavy booster requires 33 engines and each Starship rocket has six.
While Musk has long pushed employees at its Hawthorne, California headquarters to move to Starbase to support Starship’s efforts, the company is encouraging further relocation.
Last week, SpaceX made an offer to paid employees with a 10% to 25% increase if they move to southern Texas, people familiar with the situation told CNBC. The company also increased hourly wages for unpaid Starbase employees, according to CNBC, as well as adding performance-based incentives for 2023.
Musk’s company is launching its Falcon rocket into orbit at breakneck speed this year, as well as performing routine cargo and crewed missions for NASA and other agencies. But Starship is pivotal to the further development of $127 billion company: SpaceX needs rockets to effectively deploy the second generation of Starlink satellites, necessary to overcome what Musk has described as “financially weak” first generation.
SpaceX is building backlog of private astronaut missions on rockets.
The company made the last time Starship test flight in May 2021, with prototype SN15, but that’s only an altitude of about 30,000 feet – much less rigorous than launching into orbit would entail. In recent months, SpaceX has built momentum through successively more powerful “static-fire” engine tests of its seventh Super Heavy booster and its Starship SN24 prototype.
