Earlier in this year, SpaceX announced that it would cut down 10% of its workforce at its California headquarters. During that time, the silver lining was that recruiting at the company’s Washington plant, signaling good things to come for Elon Musk’s SpaceX. But since those statements, job listings data discloses that recruitment at SpaceX has dropped by 63% from January 7, 2019, which is a decline of 391 job openings to merely 143 in 3 Weeks. The majority of the slackening is at the company’s California unit, where the mass of the company’s layoffs happened. Though, hiring at other units is down across the board. This is not necessarily the indication of bad things for the company. SpaceX in recent time declared possible launch dates for its upcoming Falcon Heavy flight.
The hiring lag came in the shadow of the U.S. administration close down, which made the FCC (Federal Communication Commission) flight licenses even harder to SpaceX. It is not clear if the close down is directly concerned to the hiring slowdown, as the cutoffs announcements did not mention it as a cause. Rather, the subsequent hiring slowdown and layoffs came in the middle of a funding round that experienced the sale of $273 Million worth of SpaceX’s shares to eight financiers. The round—worth of $500 Million—positioned SpaceX’s value at $30 Billion.
Recently, SpaceX was in news as its next Falcon Heavy liftoff might feature consummate center core landing. Reportedly, SpaceX was able to carry on the process of filing FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and FCC paperwork required to obtain permits for forthcoming launches, counting Falcon Heavy. One such filing about the first functional Falcon Heavy liftoff has disclosed a fairly remarkable statistic: included of three first stage boosters. SpaceX specified that Falcon Heavy’s center core will be landed on drone ship OCISLY almost 1000 Km away from its launch location, simply smashing the record for the maximum distance covered by a Falcon booster in flight.