Elon Musk company SpaceX to cut 10 per cent of staff

Elon Musk’s company SpaceX will cut around 10 per cent of its 6,000 staff, it revealed on Friday.

The company announced it would be parting ways with around 600 people due to the “extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead”.

“To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company,” a spokesperson said in an email.

“Either of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations.”

Musk fired seven senior figures in the company last June after becoming frustrated with the slow pace at which the team were developing and testing its Starlink satellites.

The Starlink project is competing with OneWeb and Canada’s Telesat to be the first to market with a new satellite-based internet service.

In December the company launched its first national security space mission with one of its rockets carrying a US military navigation satellite.

At the end of last year, SpaceX was reported as raising $500m (£389.14m) to increase its total worth to $30.5bn, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The company has announced plans for a trip to Mars to be achieved by 2022, with a manned mission set to follow two years later.

Another of Musk’s companies, Tesla, also announced redundancies in June last year, stating that it would be cutting nine per cent of its workforce, equating to thousands of jobs.