While Musk is widely considered the face of the company, SpaceX has another key executive,
Gwynne Shotwell, who is the company’s president and the chief operating officer since 2008. (She joined SpaceX in 2002 to lead business development and got promoted to president after scoring a major NASA contract.)
In an 2016
interview with Y Combinator founder Sam Altman, Musk said Shotwell manages every aspect of SpaceX except design and engineering so that he can focus on just those two things.
“A lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on business-y things. But actually almost all my time, like 80 percent of it, is spent on engineering and design….developing next-generation product,” Musk told Altman. “She (Shotwell) manages legal, finance, sales, and general business activity. And then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team, working on improving the Falcon 9 and our Dragon spacecraft and developing the Mars Colonial architecture.”
Both Falcon 9 and Dragon are part of SpaceX’s operational fleet now, regularly launching satellites, payload and astronauts for NASA and commercial clients.
Another key person behind many of SpaceX’s early spacecraft is the rocket engine expert
Tom Mueller, who is also a founding member of the company. Mueller headed SpaceX’s propulsion team until about 2016 and has since then gradually retired.
Musk said in a 2019 tweet that Mueller had been “semi-retired” for about five years and didn’t work on SpaceX’s latest Raptor engine, which is used in the current version of Falcon 9 and Starship. The Raptor engine was a “team effort” with “
no single leader,” Musk said.