What Gwynne Shotwell Just Did With Starship Shocked Whole Industry! No More FAA...

Elon has a president that he lets run the company, and her name is Gwynne Shotwell. When someone said, women and machinery do not mix, that is not certainly true of SpaceX. SpaceX's success is often associated with Elon Musk's face, but he couldn't have gotten this far without the support of his right-hand woman, Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX. In particular, Shotwell is also called the secret sauce behind the success of the Starship rocket, making Elon's dream into reality. Let's express our admiration for this talented woman through today's TechMap episode. But before we begin, let's subscribe to the channel to stay up to date with the latest space news. Gwynne Shotwell is the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, and is responsible for day-to-day operations, including production, launch, sales, mission management, and finance, as well as managing all customer and strategic relations to support the company. In short, she's in charge of selling rockets and dealing with Elon Musk. Shotwell is widely regarded as the secret sauce behind the company's remarkable achievements. Her strategic leadership, technical expertise, and ability to translate Elon Musk's ambitious visions into reality have been instrumental in SpaceX's rapid growth and success. Under her leadership, SpaceX has expanded exponentially, boasting a workforce of over 13,000 employees and achieving billions of dollars in revenue annually over more than two decades of development. This growth trajectory underscores Shotwell's managerial prowess and strategic acumen, ensuring SpaceX's sustained trajectory toward innovation and excellence in the aerospace industry. Most notable is her contribution to the Starship program. The Starship rocket has been growing at a breakneck pace so far as it prepares to embark on its fifth test flight, marking the first time it has been caught by the giant Mechazilla tower. When mentioning Starship's success, many people immediately think about the technical achievement. But a factor that is not less important is finance. Begun in 2012, Musk estimated that the Starship program would cost between $5 billion and $10 billion to develop. This year alone, SpaceX planned to pump some $2 billion into a rocket system. You should forget, or should not forget, that SpaceX lost $968 million in 2021 and $559 million in 2022. The company just earned a tiny profit of $55 million in Q1 2023. It is no doubt that Starship has made a large hole in the company's budget. Of course, even though Musk is the richest person in the world, he cannot pay Starship's expensive bills alone. So, as the president and bestseller, what did Gwynne Shotwell do to make SpaceX last and grow dramatically for more than 20 years? The revenue for the company primarily comes from the rocket launch service, under commercial contracts with national organizations like NASA, private companies, and individuals. Shotwell was responsible for leading the effort to build the Falcon Vehicle Manifest to over 50 launches, generating $5 billion in revenue. This included a commercial connection to the International Space Station for resupplying services where they were able to deliver cargo and supplies to the astronauts. Additionally, she has been a strong advocate for SpaceX's cost-cutting approach through the reusability of rocket parts. Under her guidance, SpaceX achieved significant milestones, including the first successful landing of an orbital rocket's first stage and the reflight of used rockets, which have become hallmarks of the company's operational efficiency. To maximize the revenue sources, Gwynne has come up with a clever and efficient business strategy called residual capability. SpaceX's main technology is rocketry, and Gwynne has come up with the idea to expand to other areas, such as Starlink satellite and Dragon spacecraft, and utilize SpaceX's rocket to launch them. Although neither of them does service directly to Mars colonization at least, could create a sustainable business on Earth and help build technology that will be needed on Mars. However, to survive in a market that has been monopolized by legacy space companies for a long time, SpaceX will find it difficult to develop without support from national agencies like NASA. Of course, everything was not easy in its early days. As Elon shared, there was a massive effort to block SpaceX from providing astronaut transport for NASA. That is where Gwynne Shotwell's exceptional negotiating comes in. Can't help but mention her top-notch sales skills in negotiating contracts with the tycoons in the aerospace industry. An interesting thing is that when Shotwell was a new member of SpaceX, she soon became the head of business development, and was immediately assigned an unbelievable task by her boss, selling some rockets that did not exist and had not flown before, of course. She began meeting with the United States government agencies and satellite companies to begin to persuade them to book launches on their still-unflown Falcon 1 rocket. Somehow, the then-young unicorn SpaceX landed its first contracts with agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Malaysian satellite startup, and above all with a large national organization, NASA, not to mention a dozen Falcon 1 flights to other clients. All this happened before at every reaching orbit. She is also the bridge for the long-term close cooperation between SpaceX and NASA. To be honest, during his time as a senator, Bill Nelson's relationship with SpaceX was not good. His opposition was primarily aimed at Musk's eccentric ways and volatile behavior as the lead of a company that could potentially have a global impact. Nelson was tapped to lead NASA in 2021, and so far, his cautious attitude toward Elon remains. This is because Elon Musk's decision-making has come under a lot of scrutiny in recent years regarding some of his other companies, X and Tesla. Take for example, in October 2022, when Elon Musk made a tumultuous Twitter takeover, Nelson feared that this could affect SpaceX's operation, and the first person he immediately thought of was not Elon Musk, but instead, SpaceX's president and COO, Gwynne Shotwell. A few months after Musk bought Twitter, though before he renamed it X, in late 2022, Nelson recounted to NBC News his relief when discussing the acquisition with the SpaceX president. ''Tell me that the distraction that Elon might have on Twitter is not going to affect SpaceX,'' Nelson recounted to NBC News that he asked Gwynne Shotwell. ''I assure you, it is not,'' Shotwell responded. According to Nelson, ''You have nothing to worry about.'' He also emphasized that the encounter ended up friendly because he knows Shotwell, not Musk, is running SpaceX. ''I hugged her with a smile on my face because I know she is running that thing. She's running SpaceX,'' Nelson said. Asked whether he has any concerns about SpaceX, Nelson said, ''No, I don't.'' Unlike a lot of other SpaceX employees who grew up fascinated by rockets, she wasn't. Born in Chicago, she is the child of an artist and a brain surgeon. Per her mother, she wanted her to become an engineer, but Shotwell thought those people just drove trains. So to help her daughter understand what they do, her mother took her to a Society of Women Engineers event. For the first time, she met female engineers, and the beautiful suits they wore fascinated her so much that she wanted to one day become a mechanical engineer like them. Her educational journey started with Northwestern, where Shotwell studied mechanical engineering with a minor in economics, as well as a master's degree in applied mathematics. Her original plan was to work in the auto industry, and began working for the Chrysler Corporation in engine research, a job she initially enjoyed, but later found tiring with its many levels of highs of approvals and rules limiting productivity and innovation. She then moved to Aerospace Corp. for 10 years to learn the business of defense contractors, where she was a thermal engineer and project manager. However, one more time she asked the question about the meaning of work, as the hands-on experience here could not keep up with her expectations. She felt like she was just suffering papers. To get more hands-on experience building and designing rockets, she moved to Microcosm, a small space startup whose mission was to design and build low-cost rockets and parts. In a typical environment like a startup company, where you have the opportunity to learn many things, experience a lot of practice, and maximize your creativity, Shotwell learned possibly the most important lessons that would benefit her later at SpaceX. On the fly, she learned about business development, including management skills, and how to sell aerospace products to the government and large companies. With her talent and efforts, she is widely known as the best saleswoman. Parallel to this, Elon Musk was in the early stages of developing SpaceX, a revolutionary and potential company in the aerospace industry. Like lots of other founders who hire adult supervision, when their companies start to grow, SpaceX's founders needed a business development talent who knew what they were doing as an engineer. Through a meeting at a fateful party, Elon truly found treasure, and then he convinced Shotwell successfully to become the employee number seven in his young company, SpaceX. And that just about wraps it up for today's episode. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you next time.