Gwynne Shotwell

, Shotwell is listed as the 31st most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.

Gwynne Shotwell ( Rowley; born November 23, 1963 ) is an American businesswoman and engineer.

She is the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, an American space transportation company, where she is responsible for day-to-day operations and company growth.

In 1969, she watched a television broadcast of the Apollo 11 mission with her family, but remembers finding it "boring" and was not interested in space at the time.

Shotwell excelled in both academics and athletics in high school, where she was on the cheerleading and varsity basketball teams while achieving at the top of her class.

Her interests changed during high school after her mother took her to a panel discussion at the Illinois Institute of Technology by the Society of Women Engineers, where a mechanical engineer in particular inspired Shotwell to become an engineer.

Following this, she decided to apply to Northwestern University, where she received a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, and later a Master of Science degree in applied mathematics.

At the beginning of her career, Shotwell had an interview with IBM on the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which disturbed her and she did not get a job offer.

Instead, Shotwell took a job in the automotive industry at Chrysler Corporation's management training program, which she initially enjoyed but later grew tired of and left to return to Northwestern for her graduate degree.

In 1982, she graduated from Libertyville High School.

In 1988, Shotwell began work at the El Segundo research center of The Aerospace Corporation, and did technical work on military space research and development contracts.

An early project she worked on was STS-39.

During a ten-year tenure, she worked in thermal analysis.

Shotwell worked in both space systems engineering and project management positions.

She left The Aerospace Corporation in 1998 to become director of the space systems division at Microcosm Inc., a small rocket company in El Segundo.

There, she served on the executive committee and was responsible for business development.

Shotwell left Microcosm in 2002 to join SpaceX, a private, commercial, space exploration company founded by Elon Musk in the same year.

She was introduced to Musk through her former Microcosm colleague Hans Koenigsmann who had joined SpaceX.

In that meeting, she convinced Musk that SpaceX should hire a dedicated employee to work on business development full-time, but had not planned to join the company herself.

Shotwell took the job two weeks later in September 2002.

Shotwell has served on the California Space Authority Board of Directors and its executive committee after she was elected in 2004.

She has served as an officer on the AIAA Space Systems Technical Committee and participates in a variety of STEM related programs.

She led a committee that raised over $350,000 in scholarships for the Frank J. Redd Student Competition over 6 years.

Shotwell has been criticized for her response to several cases of sexism, sexual harassment and assault at SpaceX.

Following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Shotwell led negotiations with government agencies for requested Starlink satellite services in the country, which were at first donated by SpaceX.

These arrangements were later formalized in a DoD contract to buy Starlink for Ukraine.

Earlier, Shotwell had announced that her company took measures to prevent the use of Starlink to control combat drones.

She stated Ukrainians had used the service in ways not part of the agreement, as she had accepted to donate Starlink satellite services for communications, defense and humanitarian purposes such as "ambulances, hospitals and mothers" but had not intended it to be weaponized for drone strikes.

In December 2008, Shotwell was promoted to company president following her role in the successful negotiation of the first Commercial Resupply Services contract with the NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier.

This followed SpaceX's first successful launch of the Falcon 1 on its fourth attempt earlier in the year.

She was responsible for leading the effort on building 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.

Shotwell is currently the President and COO of SpaceX, responsible for day-to-day operations and managing all customer and strategic relations to support company growth.

She oversaw the first landing of an orbital rocket's first stage on land and on an ocean platform, the first relaunch and landing of a used orbital rocket, the first controlled flyback and recovery of a payload fairing, and the first re-flight of a commercial cargo spacecraft.

SpaceX has a multibillion-dollar contract with NASA to deliver astronauts and science instruments to the International Space Station.

In 2018, she was listed as the most powerful female engineer by Business Insider.

Shotwell was born in Evanston, Illinois, as the middle of three daughters to a brain surgeon and an artist, and was raised in Libertyville, Illinois.

In February 2019, Polaris Industries announced that Shotwell would join their board of directors in March.

In 2020, Time magazine named her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

On May 30, 2020, SpaceX became the first private company to launch two astronauts to Earth orbit.