On 25 November 2021, Elon Musk sent out this tweet:

Happy Thanksgiving to all! Hope you have a great day.
Your support over the years is super appreciated 😃

The next day, SpaceX employees received a more interesting message from Elon by an email that leaked in short order.

Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago. As we have dug into the issues following exiting prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this.

I was going to take this weekend off, as my first weekend off in a long time, but instead I will be on the Raptor line all night and through the weekend.

Unless you have critical family matters or cannot physically return to Hawthorne, we need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster.

The email went on to highlight the theoretical level of severity, up to and including the risk of bankruptcy.

The base at Boca Chica has had a busy December as a result, and while the results might not yet be an open statement that all is back to what qualifies as normal there, they do have things to show for their time. The new iteration of Raptor, the Raptor 2 is now being produced, and this will allow fitting more engines into Starship hardware. Naturally, this will increase the importance of getting into a state of smooth mass production.

As Elon Musk explained in an interview with Lex Fridman, Production is the challenge, not design or prototyping, and they’ve had to come up with completely new alloys. Here’s to hoping they get production worked out soon, and that maybe the Raptor 2 is a little easier on this front than the previous revision.