I’ve long admired from afar the leadership of SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell. Despite overseeing the explosive growth of Elon Musk’s successful space company that’s put NASA to shame, Shotwell doesn’t appear to court the mainstream media, which speaks well of her. Many great business leaders are quiet achievers who don’t need or want the validation that comes with seeing their images gracing the covers of magazines and plastered on featured stories.
In fact, there used to be something known as the BusinessWeek curse. In the magazine’s former glory days, there was a statistically high probability that executives who were the subject of a fawning cover story would stumble and disprove all the accolades that BusinessWeek showered on them. Elon Musk once graced the covers of business magazines, but no longer bothers with the corporate media. Admittedly, Musk with his incessant tweeting is hardly a quiet achiever, but at least he has lots of groundbreaking achievements to justify his hubris.
Shotwell, who joined SpaceX in 2002 and was employee No. 7, has continuously taken the company to new and impressive heights, if you’ll pardon the inevitable pun. SpaceX, which now has nearly 15,000 employees, was slated today to launch a rocket for a groundbreaking mission. While rocket launches are routine and ignite sparse news coverage these days, SpaceX’s latest Polaris Dawn mission is groundbreaking because it involves four private citizens, including a billionaire taking the world’s first commercial spacewalk.
The mission was delayed because of a helium leak but SpaceX hopes to quickly address the issue and launch as early as Wednesday morning.
Two of the other private citizens are Sarah (Levine) Gillis and Anna Menon, SpaceX’s lead engineers who strike me as being imbued with Shotwell’s humility. It’s notable that SpaceX’s lead engineers are women because according to Trudy Schwartz, who taught Gillis when she attended University of Colorado Boulder, 90% of aerospace engineers are men.
Gillis, 30, is a classically trained violinist who was encouraged to pursue engineering by Joe Tanner, her high school mentor and a former astronaut. Menon is co-author of a children’s book called Kisses From Space, which she plans to read to her young children while flying her mission. Menon is donating some of the proceeds from her book to St. Jude Children’s Research hospital, a Tennessee-based health care facility that focuses on childhood cancer and other pediatric diseases.
The billionaire businessman is Jared Isaacman, 41, whose success is also inspiring and doesn’t strike me as the stereotypical tech bro billionaire. Isaacman dropped out of high school to start a payment processing company now called Shift4, and later founded Draken International, a company that employs military-trained fighter pilots who train student pilots for the U.S. Air Force.
Issacman sold Draken to Blackstone for what Forbes reported was a nine-figure sum. Isaacman also is a trained fighter pilot who was part of an air-show squadron called the Black Diamond Jet Team comprised of retired pilots and skilled civilians, performing aerial acrobatics at NFL games and the Indy 500. Space travel was Issacman’s childhood dream, and he provided undisclosed funding for the Polaris Dawn mission.
The fourth civilian member of the Polaris Dawn flight crew is Scott Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force Pilot and longtime friend of Isaacman’s who served as the mission director on the ground for a previous space mission Isaacman flew.
Among the reasons the Polaris Dawn mission is so groundbreaking is the flight is going farther than anyone has traveled since the Apollo 17 mission went to the moon in 1972. The mission involves considerable risk.
As explained by the New York Times, A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch a Crew Dragon capsule — the same spacecraft that takes NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, or I.S.S. — into an elliptical orbit that swings much farther away from Earth. The Polaris Dawn astronauts will pass through regions of intense radiation, and risk bombardment from tiny space rocks as well as bits of human-made debris that could puncture the spacecraft.
“This is a mission that sets out to accomplish a lot of things in a very short period,” Isaacman told the New York Times. “We have some pretty ambitious objectives.”
On the third day of the flight, Issacman and Gillis, connected by umbilical cords that will provide power, air and other life support needs, will move outside the spacecraft to conduct tests on SpaceX’s newly designed lightweight spacesuits. They also will try sending communications via laser pulses, instead of radio signals, between the Crew Dragon and SpaceX’s Starlink constellation of internet satellites.
Lots could go wrong, and in early mission testing much did.
“The first time we got into the simulator and we had to work as a crew, it went horribly wrong,” Gillis told the Times. “We had so much to learn because we weren’t able to yet work as a team.”
She added, “One of my most favorite parts of this journey is actually figuring out how we bring together these incredible skill sets to build a team that can go execute on these objectives and be successful as a team.”
Shotwell, an Illinois native whose father was a brain surgeon and her mother an artist, was responsible for building SpaceX and fostering its team culture. She holds an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Northwestern and a master’s degree in applied mathematics from the same suburban Chicago university where her father was a medical school professor. Shotwell began pursuing a PhD, but instead chose to launch her career.
Shotwell’s decisive and prompt handling of troublesome employees is how I first came to appreciate her leadership.
In June 2022, The Verge, a technology publication, published this story about an “open letter to SpaceX” some unnamed employees were circulating decrying Elon Musk’s behavior, arguing it was “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks.” The employees couldn’t have been critical because SpaceX had three missions scheduled within days of the Verge report and Shotwell promptly identified and fired them.
As I’ve previously written, I regard the company-wide memo Shotwell issued as HR poetry, a refreshing change from the jargon-laden gobbledygook issued by the “chief people officer” hacks working at many major corporations. I’ve read Shotwell’s memo multiple times, with the same fascination as when I first read it.
Here it is:
You may have received an unsolicited request from a small group of SpaceX employees
for your signature on an “open letter” yesterday and your participation in a
related survey. Based on diverse employee feedback, this has upset many. That
is, the letter, solicitations and general process made employees feel
uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter
pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views.
Employees also complained that it interfered with their ability to focus on and
do their work. We have 3 launches within 37 hours for critical satellites this
weekend, we have to support the astronauts we delivered to the ISS and get
cargo Dragon back to the flight-ready, and after receiving environmental
approval early this week, we are on the cusp of the first orbital launch
attempt of Starship. We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need
for this kind of overreaching activism — our current leadership team is more
dedicated to ensuring we have a great and ever-improving work environment than
any I have seen in my 35-year career.
We solicit and expect our employees to report all concerns to their leadership,
senior management, HR, or Legal. But blanketing thousands of people across the
company with repeated unsolicited emails and asking them to sign letters and
fill out unsponsored surveys during the work day is not acceptable, goes
against our documented handbook policy, and does not show the strong judgement
needed to work in this very challenging space transportation sector. We
performed an investigation and have terminated a number of employees involved.
I am sorry for this distraction. Please stay focused on the SpaceX mission, and
use your time at work to do your best work. This is how we will get to Mars.
I doubted that Shotwell, 60, drafted the memo, but there’s a good possibility she did. While researching this post, I came across the recent fireside chat featured below that Shotwell had with Jase Wilson, CEO and founder of Ready.net, a company “helping broadband professionals monetize, and connect more people to better services.” If you understand Wilson’s business, your technical smarts are far superior than mine, an admittedly very low bar to beat.
Wilson is an excellent interviewer, and I was mesmerized watching and listening to Shotwell, whose manner and style seems very consistent with the HR memo I so admire. Throughout the talk, Shotwell emphasized the importance of teamwork and that SpaceX’s success isn’t entirely her own doing.
“SpaceX is fantastic and great because of the people who work there,” Shotwell said. “We have nearly 15,000 employees and they are the ones who are building the rockets and launching the rockets. You know I’m really there at launches to speak to the press in case we have a failure.”
Compare Shotwell’s repeated emphasis on teamwork to the attitude of Boeing’s former failed CEO Dave Calhoun, who once said the company’s headquarters was where he and the CFO happened to be. While Boeing is headquartered in Virginia, Calhoun operated from his luxury homes in South Carolina and New Hampshire.
Little wonder that NASA is looking to SpaceX to rescue astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore who became the first to travel on Boeing’s Starliner in early June, for what was supposed to be a space visit of about one week. They’ve been stranded in space for months, and SpaceX will bring them home on a previously scheduled February flight aboard the company’s Crew Dragon.
Shotwell is the real deal, the gold standard that American CEOs should emulate but most can’t come close, let alone match. I urge you to watch at least a portion of the video to listen and learn from one of America’s unquestionably greatest business leaders.