Elon Musk Fires 7 SpaceX Managers Over Slow Satellite Broadband Progress

Apparently, SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk flew to the Seattle (WA) area in June for meetings with engineers leading a satellite launch project crucial to his space company’s growth. Within hours of landing, Musk had fired at least seven members of the program’s senior management team, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites. Musk quickly brought in new managers from SpaceX headquarters in CA to replace a number of the managers he fired. Their mandate: Launch SpaceX’s first batch of U.S.-made satellites by the middle of 2019, apparently. The management shakeup and the launch timeline illustrate how quickly Musk wants to bring online SpaceX’s Starlink program, which is competing with OneWeb and Canada’s Telesat to be first to market with a new satellite-based Internet service. Those services - essentially a constellation of satellites that will bring high-speed Internet to rural and suburban locations globally - are key to generating the cash that privately-held SpaceX needs to fund Musk’s real dream of developing a new rocket capable of flying paying customers to the moon and eventually trying to colonize Mars. “It would be like rebuilding the Internet in space,” Musk told an audience in 2015 when he unveiled Starlink. “The goal would be to have a majority of long-distance Internet traffic go over this network.”