Elon Musk may dominate the headlines, but Gwynne Shotwell appears to get the rockets flying. This week, TIME Magazine placed SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell on its cover — positioning her as the steady force driving humanity’s ambitious return to the Moon and future journeys to Mars.
The Dallas Express has closely followed Elon Musk’s growing Texas footprint, from record Starship test campaigns at Starbase in Boca Chica to the recent announcement of the massive Terafab AI chip facility in Austin. Shotwell’s prominent feature in TIME’s latest cover story comes as no surprise. For nearly 24 years, she has been the operational backbone of SpaceX, transforming Musk’s visionary goals into tangible achievements.
Shotwell joined SpaceX in 2002, shortly after its founding, after convincing Musk in their initial meeting that the young company needed a dedicated business development leader. By December 2008, thanks in large part to her role in securing SpaceX’s first NASA Commercial Resupply Services contract, she was promoted to company president — a role she has held ever since.
“The most important part of my job is to keep my now-23,000 employees focused on the great work they do every day,” Shotwell told TIME. “I feel like we put our heads down, we plow through our very difficult jobs. Maybe my best contribution, other than revenue generation, would be keeping everybody focused, not listening to the noise.”
SpaceX officially relocated its headquarters from California to Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, in late 2024, with Shotwell helping lead the transition and anchoring operations on Texas soil. Today, her attention is sharply focused on scaling Starship production to support NASA’s Artemis program, targeting a crewed lunar landing on Artemis IV in early 2028. With dozens of Starship vehicles — including advanced Version 3 prototypes — now in various stages of assembly at the Starbase Starfactory, the company is pushing toward high-volume manufacturing of the massive, fully reusable spacecraft.
SpaceX’s proven Falcon 9 remains the gold standard of commercial spaceflight, having completed more than 630 successful launches overall, including a record 165–167 flights in 2025.
Starship, however, is built for an entirely new scale: its enormous payload capacity will enable the launch of dozens of satellites in a single mission, dramatically accelerating Starlink expansion and enabling a new generation of AI-powered satellites in orbit. The ship’s dimensions allow it to carry 50 or more satellites into orbit at a time, a critical capability as SpaceX aims to expand Starlink’s internet constellation network and launch a new generation of AI satellites.
SpaceX recently merged with Musk’s AI company, xAI, making the combined entity the world’s most valuable private company, and it is preparing to go public.
Shotwell said that she was fully supportive of the merger. She described it as “a force multiplier,” pointing to the growing role of AI already underway inside SpaceX’s factories — a role that will only grow now that Musk and his team have announced the world’s largest AI chip production facility, “Terafab,” coming to Texas next year.
Shotwell’s long-term ambitions don’t stop at the Moon. She envisions a lunar settlement and manufacturing base within the next decade — ideally in five years — where AI satellites could be built using materials mined on the lunar surface. The Moon’s lower gravity, she noted, would make launches from there far more efficient than from Earth.
From reusable rockets landing on Texas soil to AI in orbit and settlements on the Moon, it once sounded like science fiction. But it’s becoming reality — in no small part because Gwynne Shotwell has kept the trains running on time while Elon Musk dreams big.
Shotwell, now nearly 24 years into working alongside Musk, took the time to offer a candid portrait of the eccentric billionaire. She described him as funny, someone who gave her freedom and flexibility, and a figure who has become more comfortable simply interacting with people over time.
