Gwynne Shotwell, the woman making SpaceX’s moonshot a reality
Born Gwynne Rowley in Illinois in 1963, Shotwell grew up in Libertyville, a suburb of Chicago, where she was a straight-A student and cheerleader. During her teens, her mother dragged her to a Society of Women Engineers conference — an event that changed her opinion on engineers as “nerds, social outcasts, nose pickers”, she said in a 2012 interview with the alumni magazine for Northwestern University, where she studied mechanical engineering and applied mathematics.
Her first professional role was at Chrysler, before joining The Aerospace Corporation and then rocket company Microcosm. In 2002, an ex-colleague introduced her to Musk, who offered her a job the same day. She joined as the seventh employee of SpaceX — one co-worker remembers her having the nickname “007” — hoping to galvanise space exploration out of a period of “stagnation” and “constipated” bureaucracy.
