Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

SpaceX plans to conduct its first orbital flight test of a starship by the end of this year. People familiar with the matter said the company is currently making major changes to the management of the Texas starship base and plans to raise wages for employees who move to the starship base.

SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell and Vice President Mark Juncosa are now personally responsible for Starship Base operations, people familiar with the matter said. Apart from Musk himself, these two are SpaceX's most influential executives.

Shyamal Patel, the senior director of starship operations who has been working on the new spacecraft for more than two years, will leave Starship Base for SpaceX's Cape Canaveral facility, people familiar with the matter said.

SpaceX also quietly hired Texas-based Tesla operations director Omead Afshar as vice president of starship production.

SpaceX is gradually building a starship base outside Brownsville, Texas, to serve as a major development, testing and launch center for starship systems. The Starship system, designed to send cargo and people into deep space, is critical to NASA's astronaut moon landing program. In 2021, SpaceX won nearly $3 billion in lunar spacecraft contracts from NASA.

Shortwell and Jonkossa have been at SpaceX since Musk's early days. The personnel changes suggest SpaceX is eager to move forward with the starship project.

A person familiar with the matter said that Junkossa visited the starship base this summer and planned to learn about the project through a two-week visit and report to Musk and Shortwell on the development progress of the base.

This person called Junksa's findings worrisome, noting that the starship's first orbital launch took place later than company executives had expected. SpaceX had hoped to launch Starship for its first orbital starship launch as early as the summer of 2021, but delays and regulatory approvals delayed the plan.

NASA said last month that SpaceX had informed Starship that its first orbital launch could take place as early as early December.

In June, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) completed an environmental impact assessment of the starship base, which is also key to SpaceX obtaining starship launch permission from federal regulators. However, the FAA has listed more than 75 environmental remediation measures for SpaceX, and it is unclear whether SpaceX has all been rectified.

Both the Starship itself and the Super Heavy Booster are powered by SpaceX's Raptor rocket engines, and the entire system is reusable. Falcon rockets, by contrast, are only partially reusable.

A year ago, Musk described a "crisis" in Raptor production that led to the firing of a vice president in charge of the project and his departure from the company. Since then, SpaceX has increased Raptor production to seven engines per week. The increase in engine production is critical because each super-heavy booster requires 33 Raptor engines, while each starship has six Raptor engines.

Musk has also been encouraging SpaceX employees at its Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters to move to Starship Base, and the company has recently stepped up incentives to relocate employees.

SpaceX last week announced a pay increase for fixed-salary employees that would range from 10 percent to 25 percent if they moved to work at Starship Base in southern Texas, according to people familiar with the matter. It is understood that the company has also raised the hourly salary of non-fixed-salary employees working at Starship Base and plans to issue performance awards next year.

SpaceX has been launching Falcon rockets at extremely high frequencies this year and regularly performs cargo and manned spacecraft launches for NASA and other agencies. But the development of starships is more important, and SpaceX needs starships to deploy the second generation of starchain Internet satellites, which is key to SpaceX's further growth.

In addition, many customers are waiting for SpaceX to launch private astronaut missions with starships.

SpaceX last flew a starship in May 2021, using the SN15 prototype, rising only 10 kilometers above the ground, far from the altitude of orbital launch. In recent months, SpaceX has conducted several static ignition tests of the Super Heavy Booster 7 prototype and the SN24 starship prototype.

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