Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX will reduce its workforce by about 10 percent of the company’s more than 6,000 employees.
“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,” SpaceX said in a statement Jan. 11. “This action is taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.”
The cut is part of the firm’s strategic realignment to focus the California-based company on providing its global Starlink satellite broadband service and furthering CEO Elon Musk’s drive to make humanity a multi-planet species, according to Geekwire.
The vast majority of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s more than 6,000 employees are employed at its headquarters and rocket factory in Hawthorne, Calif.; hundreds of others are based in Florida, Seattle, Texas, and Washington, D.C.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. The company, along with Boeing Co., has a contract with NASA to fly American astronauts to the International Space Station on a spacecraft named Crew Dragon.
