SpaceX shakes up Starbase management in Starship push
An aerial view of a Starship prototype stacked on a Super Heavy booster at the company’s Starbase facility outside Brownsville, Texas.
SpaceX
While Elon Musk gets daily headlines over changes on Twitter, a major reorganization is underway at the space company’s launch facility in Texas.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell and Vice President Mark Juncosa ̵[ads1]2; two of the most influential executives at the company aside from Musk himself — are now overseeing the facility and operations of the company’s Starbase location, people familiar with the situation told CNBC.
Senior director of Starship operations Shyamal Patel is leaving to move to the company’s Cape Canaveral facility, after spending more than two years working on the next-generation rocket in Texas, these people said. Patel was previously based at the Cape, before a promotion and move to Starbase.
The space venture also quietly brought Omead Afshar, a Texas-based Tesla operations manager, as vice president of Starship production.
The Information previously reported the new responsibilities for Shotwell and Juncosa, while Bloomberg first reported the addition of Afshar. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on the reorganization.
SpaceX has been steadily building up its facility known as Starbase, outside the Texas city of Brownsville, which serves as the main hub for development, testing and launches of its nearly 400-foot-tall Starship rocket. The rocket is designed to carry cargo and people beyond Earth and is essential to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon, with SpaceX having won a nearly $3 billion contract from the agency in 2021.
The appointments demonstrate the sense of urgency within the company to get Starship flying. Both Shotwell and Juncosa have been at SpaceX since the early days under Musk.
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Juncosa visited Starbase over the summer for what was intended to be a two-week stint, one of the people familiar told CNBC, to bring a fresh perspective and update Musk and Shotwell on developments at the site.
This person called Juncosa’s findings alarming, with an orbital launch attempt further away than company management expected. SpaceX had hoped to conduct the first orbital Starship launch as early as summer 2021, but delays in progress and regulatory approvals have pushed that timeline back.
NASA said last month that SpaceX recently told the agency that Starship’s first orbital launch could take place as soon as early December.
An aerial view of the company’s Starbase facility outside Brownsville, Texas.
SpaceX
The Federal Aviation Administration completed a long-awaited environmental assessment of the Starbase facility in June, key to the company getting a license from the federal regulator for Starship launches. But as a result of that FAA ruling, SpaceX was required to take more than 75 environmental mitigation steps — and it remains unknown whether those actions have been completed. The FAA did not respond to a CNBC request Friday for an update on the process.
The Starship rocket and its Super Heavy booster are powered by SpaceX’s Raptor series of engines, and the entire system is designed to be reusable – unlike the partially reusable elements of the company’s Falcon series of rockets.
A year ago, Musk described a “crisis” with Raptor engine production, which led to the removal of a vice president from the program, who left the company. Since then, SpaceX has ramped up Raptor production to 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 for employees at its Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters to move to Starbase to help with the Starship effort, the company is further incentivizing the move.
Last week, SpaceX launched an offer to salaried employees for a pay bump of between 10% and 25% if they move to South Texas, people familiar with the situation told CNBC. The company also increased hourly pay rates for non-salaried Starbase employees, CNBC learned, as well as increased performance-based incentives for 2023.
Musk’s company is launching Falcon rockets into orbit at a breakneck pace this year, in addition to flying regular cargo and crew missions for NASA and others. But Starship is key to the continued growth of the $127 billion company: SpaceX needs the rocket to effectively deploy the second generation of its Starlink satellites, which is required to go beyond what Musk has described as the “financially weak” first generation.
SpaceX is building a backlog of private astronaut missions on the rocket.
The company last performed a Starship flight test in May 2021, with the SN15 prototype, but that was only to an altitude of about 30,000 feet — much less rigorous than an orbital launch would entail. In recent months, SpaceX has been building momentum through successively more robust “static fire” engine tests of its Super Heavy booster prototype number seven and its Starship prototype SN24.