SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell will assume oversight of the company’s Starbase facility in Texas that is building Starship, the rocket planned for a trip to Mars, according to two people familiar with the change.
The appointment is part of a reorganization at Starbase that follows a summer of strategy shifts and delays on Starship, a pet project of CEO Elon Musk, who had largely overseen the program before getting wrapped up in his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Last June, Musk called for SpaceX employees to relocate to the Texas facility to help speed things up.
