All right, we're powering through. I tell you, every panel session gets better and better, and I am sure this one will be no exception. It is an absolute privilege and an honor to introduce this next panel. I've had the real fortune of working with Gwynne Shotwell—I think since 2003.
So 21 years. Hire math, I'm a Clemson major, ran out of fingers. But I will tell you—an incredible leader, an incredible person, a leader that helped build a company but more than that helped really change the domain of space by reducing the barriers to entry into space. Has really enabled what we all enjoy working in, and it's really, really thriving. I can't think of a better person to be here to share some thoughts on her perspective. I'm grateful that you're here and looking forward to the conversation.
So welcome, Gwynne Shotwell, the President and COO of SpaceX. She doesn't do many discussions publicly like this, so it is really a privilege to have you here. Thank you for coming.
I heard there'd be young Guardians in the audience, so I had to say yes.
We have several here, and I'm going to encourage you all to ask questions. I will get to as many as I can. I first met Gwynne back in the 2007, 2008 time frame when I was a congressional staffer. I remember visiting the Hawthorne facility, and you personally gave us a tour through each step of the development and manufacturing process of the Falcon rocket. You briefed it to such detail—I thought I was an aerospace engineer, but you were way beyond me. That really stuck with me. She has guided stunning successes and growth in commercial launch, commercial human spaceflight, and now landing a 230-foot, over 600,000-pound Super Heavy booster in chopsticks. I know we'll talk more about that. Gwynne has received numerous awards—not just Forbes and Fortune, but hardcore engineering awards as well. You are very passionate about engaging on STEM issues and with the next generation, so that's why I'm so pleased we have so many young folks here today. I thought I'd start—when we met again 15 years ago or so, SpaceX was starting to get attention. You had your first successful launch of Falcon 1, you were developing Falcon 9, really high cadence of test activity. Do you mind reflecting on what attracted you to SpaceX in the first place and a bit of the arc of your journey with SpaceX to the present day?
Sure. I'd been in the industry for roughly 15 years when I met with Elon and thought about the opportunity. I started out very excited—space is super cool, even though in general I'm a car person. Growing up, I was more interested in cars than space, but that flipped a little bit later on. But I was really disappointed with the pace of execution and the pace of technology and innovation after those 15 years. I thought, this isn't very vibrant. It doesn't feel super exciting to me. And so when I met with Elon, I said this will be my last job in this industry. Either I'm going to stay there till I retire, or space is going to continue down what I thought was the path of boredom and constipation, and then I'll just go be a barista or sell real estate or something. Luckily, it was the former, not the latter.
I think none of the early folks thought that we would be successful. We certainly hoped we would be successful, and we were certainly all in on that. But it's a really hard industry to break into. It was then—I think it's so much easier now. And by the way, that's what makes things—this industry very vibrant, because the barriers to entry have been lowered. They're still high, but the barriers to entry have been lowered because of the work that we've done and others as well. Now you get bright-eyed, star-eyed entrepreneurs and startups in this space that just did not exist. I think Orbital Sciences was probably a startup 25 years ago, and maybe there was another few, but not like today.
So you asked about the trajectory. We were a bunch of goobers sitting in a small building in El Segundo trying to figure out how to build rockets. We suffered failures, of course. If you're starting from a clean sheet design—we certainly didn't start from nothing because we had decades of history to look at and evaluate, pick and choose the technology paths we wanted to take. But you start with a clean sheet design and you're going to have a ton of failures. We had our share for sure with the Falcon 1 program.
But after the third flight of Falcon 1, when we got the video and I saw what happened, I was like, okay, we got this. I know what happened. We're going to get back to flight. We had another vehicle in Kwajalein because we had to fly from Kwaj. I think six or eight weeks later we flew and got Falcon 1 to orbit successfully. So that was amazing—that was 2008, September 2008.
Then in 2010, we flew Falcon 9 successfully for the first time—I think it was June 2010. In the meantime, we were working on the Dragon program. NASA started this extraordinary program, started the groundwork in 2005. We were actually a Space Act Award winner in 2006 for the Dragon program. We hadn't gotten to orbit yet on Falcon 1. We got to orbit in 2008. The Commercial Orbital Transportation Services—COTS—Space Act Agreement that we did with NASA was really to do test flights of Falcon 9 as we developed that vehicle and to do some test flights of Dragon.
So in 2010 we flew a version of Dragon, and then in 2012 we actually got Dragon berthed—for jargon's sake, attached—to the International Space Station with cargo. So Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Dragon. Everyone said, ah, they're not going to make it, they're never going to get to orbit. Took us a little bit, we stumbled, but we got there. Well, they'll never get a real rocket to orbit—did that in 2010. Oh, they'll never touch the space station—we did that in 2012. We landed a rocket in 2015. Flew a Heavy in 2017, 2018?
I'm old. Then Starship last year. So you've kind of seen the technology spin, and certainly the rockets get bigger with age—that part's nice. And then catching Starship in the arms this past few months was really extraordinary. That was kind of the moment, actually.
You know, the landing the rocket in 2015 was the moment—at that day, that night, when we landed that first stage. It was an Orbcomm mission, actually. And then I knew we were set. You know who didn't predict we would do as well as we had? But we landed the rocket, I knew we would get reusability working, and I felt very comfortable that the company's going to do just fine.
By the way, I don't know if you recall that flight. That was a brand new design of a vehicle that we launched. The previous launch we failed—the launch just before that launch where we landed that rocket for the first time was CRS-7, a Dragon mission to space station, which we blew up on Elon's birthday, which was not a very good birthday present for Elon.
So we've had extraordinary success, and we hope to fly 136 times this year, maybe 175 or 180 next year. We're going to ramp up Starship as well.
For someone now that's been in this business for over two decades, that's disruption. That is disruption to our ecosystem. I think of it as acquisition disruption—you mentioned fast design, test, maybe fail at a rate, more, do more testing. Production disruption—Starlink, if I start doing the math, you're pumping out like what, six or seven satellites a day off your production line? Cost disruption—I like to go through the math. EELV was $150, $180 million to launch one satellite. Falcon 9, $50, $65 million, I can launch 50 satellites—so about a million. Starship is going to revolutionize that even further. So share how you approach disruption, how you approach these development programs, what were the unique ingredients that enabled them, how you think about risk, and how you think the government should think about this as well.
Great. So that's a multi-part, and I'm old, so you're going to have to coach me through A, B, C, and D.
Let's talk first about risk, because I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned in managing risk. It's all about managing risk—it's not avoiding risk. You need to certainly understand your system as much as you possibly can, because the more you understand it, the less the unknown unknowns are. But they're always there. By the way, we still have issues on Falcon, and we've flown 400 times—three, like a lot of times.
Understand the risk to the max extent possible. I think what's key is, in the development phase, we push the limits in testing so that we break stuff. So we know where it breaks, and if it breaks sooner than we actually want it—we want the system to be more robust—we know where it broke, we'll fix that element of the design, and go back and push it again. And then another thing breaks, and so you go and work on that until you end up with an incredibly robust system design.
And you know, we have the luxury because development we don't generally do on a government program—we generally do development on our own. There are some elements of development that the government pays for, but I think there's a different risk perspective when you're using taxpayer direct dollars to fund a thing. You don't want to fail. That's where our head space is right now, and I think that's a huge mistake, because you learn so much from your failures. You don't learn a lot from success—except that one thing worked. That's what you learned. You learn from failures. That didn't work, and you better go fix it. The more failures you have, the more you understand your system and its limits.
So we had that luxury. I really hope government procurement going forward embraces failure on development—not on operation. I'm not saying operational failures are okay. Not okay. But you experience a lot of failures. Fail fast, learn fast, make your design robust, and then your operational issues hopefully should be far less. So manage risk—don't avoid it. The safest flight or launch is the one you never fly. And then where would we be? Carving tools out of stone and lighting a fire with flint. So I think failure is a really incredibly important part of the development phase.
So that was risk perspective. Unique ingredients—one was we wanted to do development on our own dime so that we had the freedom and flexibility to run things the way we wanted to run and pivot when we found something that wasn't right. We could pivot the design as opposed to working through—I mean, we all know how big government programs go, and they're that way with purpose. And now what I want to do is get everybody thinking about how we can kind of flip that perspective. You see issues, pivot quickly, and have the development process be—like, the high-level stuff, the high-level requirements obviously are set by the customer, but how you get there should be set by the company.
Every company is going to have different genetics, different strengths. Let them find their way. And that was one of the extraordinary things about that NASA COTS program—we had high-level requirements. There are established set of requirements before you berth with the International Space Station, and once you're on station, but other than that, we got to do things largely the way we wanted. So it was incredibly important. I think we went much faster than they—I'm sure we went faster than you otherwise would on a more traditional program.
So we're here celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Space Force. Talk about the evolution of SpaceX and Space Force—pre-Space Force, now Space Force.
So I think we had a rough relationship early on with the Air Force. But over the last probably 10 or 11 years, I think we've developed a really great relationship. Frankly, I think it takes a long time to build trust, and I think we're finally there.
I think last night's launch—by the way, the Rapid Response Trailblazer—was extraordinary. Space Force called and said, how fast could you? And we did it in I think four months from the time we got the call to liftoff—maybe four months and a few days because we had some bad weather. But roughly four months. And that's not something that the Space Force or the Air Force and SpaceX would have engaged in 10 years ago. So I think it's a really great example of the trust that's been built by working together. That's how you build trust—you work together, you fail together, you win together, you understand each other. So I'm quite proud of how far we've come with the Air Force and now Space Force.
Well, I'm going to start weaving some questions in because these are similar to some of the ones I want to ask, and actually these ones are better. This is from a Space Force civilian: SpaceX transformed the national security space launch enterprise and is a model for innovation. What can Space Force learn from the SpaceX business operating model to enhance warfighting capabilities? And as you look forward, what do you see as some of those key challenges and opportunities for the Space Force?
So reusability for sure has to be embraced, and the Space Force has embraced it. In fact, I think the Space Force has approved kind of longer-life items than some of our NASA customers. I think reusability is absolutely key if we're going to stay on top in space. It's all about reusability—it's just too expensive to fly the other way, and it's just a waste of resources as well. So embracing reusability, kind of embracing fail fast, learn fast on the development cycle, very important.
And then I think the kind of the concept or the mindset of can-do—and this sounds so old, like I've heard that forever—but like, really, there's so much that we can do. Let's try to do these crazy things. And last night's launch, Trailblazer, was a great example of that. We've been pushing—not necessarily Space Force, but other government organizations—to try to do this exact thing. And oh, we don't want to fail, you know. I don't know how useful it is. Well, I think we all understand now the utility and rapid launch, right? And it doesn't have to be rapid tiny launch—rapid tiny launch is good—but rapid big launch is really important too.
That's a great point. We talked—SpaceX was once the new kid on the block and was trying to get its way or get into an existing competitive arena. Now you're in the dominant position as others are seeking to compete in launch. How do you think about competition and the state of the industrial base in your business area? You've got others now on your heels.
So I think people didn't take a hard enough look at us in 2005, 2006, and 2007, and probably regret that. So we learned that lesson, and we make sure we are moving hard, moving fast, moving forward so that we don't get complacent. We do worry—you don't want to be in front, right? You want to be a fast follower so that you've always got someone to run harder and catch up. So we are very focused on ensuring that we are not complacent and that we try harder. I think China is a formidable competitor—that's always something to run to the cliff to. But also, if you just keep challenging yourself with harder and harder goals—
Last year we wanted to fly 100 times. I think we flew 96. This year we wanted to fly 148—well, it was 144 plus the four we missed last year—but we didn't get to 148, but it was still a good goal. I think we'll get to 136—knocking on all the wood. And next year again we want to fly even more. So just keep raising the bar on what you're trying to do, turn your vehicles around faster on the pad, turn your recovery around. We used to stay for days in port on the drone ship. Now the drone ship comes in, we offload the vehicle, and they head back out to sea because they've got about three and a half hours to get back out to catch the next rocket. So you just keep pushing the limits, and that's how you stay in fighting weight.
And that cadence is so revolutionary in our industry.
Yeah. And Elon's like, we gotta launch a thousand times a year. Like, okay, gotta figure that out. But that will be with Starship, not Falcon.
Well, and you mentioned China, and I want to hit on competition with China. The Department of Defense describes China as the pacing challenge. It is both a commercial and a national security competitor in space. SpaceX right now has that first-mover advantage, but China is doing all it can to quickly develop its versions of Starlink, its versions of Starship. How do you look at strategic competition with China, both from a national security and an economic perspective?
So they are a worthy competitor. They are worthy of our attention. I have enormous respect for the Chinese. Their work ethic is extreme and extraordinary. They work incredibly hard, they're very focused, and all parts of their government support. I don't think the bureaucracy in China holds back space launch. So I do think we need to rethink very quickly the regulatory regime for space launch and space comms and other space capability, to make sure that regulation—which is important, by the way—I'm not saying no regulation, regulation is important—but regulation needs to keep up with technology. And I think that's going to be incredibly important.
I never hear Chinese companies complaining about Chinese regulatory regime. I think it's quite the opposite. I think the government is incredibly helpful to push those technologies forward fast. So I think that's a lesson that we need to learn as well, from the president on down to the local level.
Well, we spent a lot of time today just talking about how much the space security environment has changed. The growing threats from China, Russia, and others. You have a lot of assets on orbit. How are you dealing with that—both the growing, I'll say the benign threats of just much more stuff in orbit, risk of collisions, but then also those malicious threats in space? And what's the role that you see between, say, your company and the government? What does that look like?
So you know, there is plenty of things and elements of that that we are not privy to. We do have a small and valiant cleared team, but most of the SpaceX employees are not cleared. So we try to find ways with customer support, of course, to do things out in the open, and then only do those very specific things behind closed doors in the proper rooms. So there are lots of features of Starlink that I think are quite helpful if you were to think about space being a contested place. And it's not just the numbers—I think there are some elements of the technology that could be quite useful to survive. Numbers help as well if there were to be kinetic-style events. But you don't want to crap up the environment for everybody.
You're not even talking about space in a contested way. We want to operate in space. We have a ton of assets in space. There are people in space—Chinese space station, our International Space Station. So you want to make sure space stays clean and sustainable.
So from that perspective, I really think communication is key. And that sounds like a little dumb—like, what do you mean, communication? When we fly into an orbit, we let the FAA know and we let other people know we're going to that orbit, we're going to drop off in that spot. Not everybody provides that same information. And if you don't know where things are getting dropped off, then you don't know how to predict whether there's a collision or not, and whether you need to move out of the way. So I think the most important thing to do with respect to avoiding unintentional collisions is to ensure that there is a regulatory framework that demands that you tell where you're going. Or if it's a classified situation, there's someone that has the tickets, knows where that is, and has access to the orbit propagation to know that there might be a collision.
Well, then as China says, okay, I see you Starlink, I'm going to raise you by three or four. We've heard they've got three constellations in the works. Do you think it's feasible for the U.S., whether it be government or the commercial sector, to engage in a dialogue with the Chinese?
We should engage in dialogue with the Chinese 100%. Deconfliction rules, etc. They're flying a lot, we're flying a lot. Everybody that's flying a lot—and then the one satellite that loses its propulsion capability, that can't do anything. Hopefully it comes in quickly. But then we all have to avoid that piece too. So communication is really key.
Right. So I want to ask you about Ukraine. Some have called Ukraine the first commercial space war, in large part due to Starlink and really its power to keep people connected—whether governments, keeping the military connected with each other and the outside world. I'm going to do two parts here. I often get the question, so I'm going to throw it out here on this assertion that Starlink turned off services in Crimea. Can you help us set the record straight there? But really let me broaden it and say, what are the lessons that you're learning from Ukraine?
So first of all, have good passwords on your systems, right, so that you don't get hacked right away and take the entire—that wasn't us, by the way. That didn't happen to us, happened to others. But jokes aside, what did we learn from Ukraine? First of all, they needed help, and we leaned in and gave them a lot of help. But then we found that this is a commercial system. It was built for commercial purposes—not that the military can't use it for their comms and morale, health, and welfare and those kinds of things. This is a commercial system, and we had no intention of being in the middle of conflict. We didn't want to be in the middle of a conflict. That's between governments. That's not between commercial companies and governments.
So to answer your first question, let's be super clear: we never turned off comms in Ukraine. Never turned off comms in Crimea. Did not.
Isaacson was wrong. That book—wrong.
