While SpaceX founder Elon Musk may be dead set on one day living on another planet, the firm’s chief operating officer says she plans to keep things terrestrial, for now.
“I think Elon wants to retire on Mars. I’m not interested in Mars,” Gwynne Shotwell, the SpaceX president and COO told Baron Capital founder Ron Baron at his firm’s annual investment conference last week. “I don’t like camping, and I think it will be a long time before Mars is nice enough — probably not in my lifetime.”
Nevertheless, like her boss, Shotwell’s visions for SpaceX remain stratospheric: accessible space travel for all, global proliferation for satellite internet, and yes, eventually, interplanetary travel and living.
The company’s trajectory has investors seeing stars, too. SpaceX, unlike Tesla, is not traded as a public stock, and is therefore not required to post financial results. But Baron assured his investors — who can own SpaceX exposure through some of the firm’s mutual funds — it has been a profitable play.
“We have made, since the time we started investing in 2017, seven times our money,” Baron said, adding that he expected their shares to triple over the next half decade.
That doesn’t mean the company has a perfect track record. SpaceX’s financial results have reportedly been up and down over the years, and this week, a highly publicized test launch didn’t go totally according to plan.
Nevertheless, Baron and an auditorium full of his shareholders wanted to hear what Shotwell says the future might hold for her firm. Here are three things she sees coming.
1. Affordable space travel
SpaceX’s latest innovation is the company’s ability to “catch” and relaunch its rockets, a paradigm shift that Shotwell said could eventually drastically cut the cost it takes to go to space.
“What we’re hoping to do with the work that we’re doing is to allow ordinary people to go to space,” she said.
And while Shotwell isn’t looking at any Martian real estate, she said that getting people to Mars — and beyond — is part of the company’s long-term game plan.
“We want people to fly to other planets, go to the moon, and hopefully — maybe not this century, maybe, hopefully next century — our great grandchildren could fly to other planets beyond our solar system,” she said.
2. A chance for growth… and competition
In the meantime, SpaceX has plenty of work to do on Earth. The company launched its reusable Falcon rockets more than 100 times this year — with the next closest competitor reaching orbit about a dozen times.
SpaceX’s Starlink internet network has about 7,000 satellites in orbit and currently serves about 5 million customers.
These numbers illustrated enormous potential for growth, Shotwell said. “There are close to 8 billion people on the planet, and we’re serving not quite 5 million,” she said. “The market is huge.”
When Baron pointed out that some 30% of those 8 billion don’t have access to broadband, Shotwell said that, while she’d love for SpaceX to serve all of them, she expected stiff competition — and that that wasn’t a bad thing.
“I hope others can catch up, right? Competition is good for industries…It keeps us tight; it keeps us very focused,” she said.
3. Reinvented regulation
The one thing holding SpaceX and other tech companies back from expanding at the pace they want, Shotwell said: regulation.
“Technology is easy. Physics is easy. People are hard,” she said. “And regulator people are hardest.”
Shotwell recognized, of course, that government regulations are meant to protect workers and consumers and to keep industries fair, but nevertheless expressed frustration with the pace and complexity of government oversight.
“I think everyone is starting to recognize in all industries that regulation really needs to be reinvented…I probably spend more than half my time working on regulatory issues, and I would love to be spending that time meeting with my welders and meeting with the folks building Starlinks and Starships,” she said.
As one audience member pointed out, Shotwell’s boss has been tapped to head a new agency aimed at increasing government efficiency. She didn’t say whether she thought changes to current regulatory frameworks would be coming, but expressed hope a new administration could cut some of the red tape she sees holding her industry back.
“It’s certainly the hope that we can figure out together how we make the regulatory organizations more efficient, make the regulations more efficient and, frankly, better. Not just faster, but better.”
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