Meet the Team That’s Making Elon Musk’s Space Fantasy a Reality

The billionaire space race took off in 2021.

This past summer, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic made history by sending its first space tourism flight into orbit— just days before Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin was set to do so. Then, last weekend, Blue Origin sent its first six-person tourist flight into space. However crowded the space tourism game is getting, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has long been a player in the game.

Started in 2002, Musk’s SpaceX has built rockets capable of launching satellites and cargo into space and has successfully built the most powerful rocket in operation, the Falcon Heavy.

While the company has certainly opened its doors to space tourism, it’s been focused on a new frontier all together. SpaceX is developing its massive Starship rocket, a vessel which would send both cargo and people to Mars once approved. Last month, Musk told CNBC that the company is “hoping” it will be ready and approved to launch for the first time in January 2022.

Down on Earth, however, the aerospace engineering company that has won major contracts from NASA and the U.S. government has also been battling internal accusations of workplace harassment and sexism. The company has also grown an ardent fan base that is supportive of SpaceX and Musk’s every move, drawing even more criticism to its eccentric billionaire founder.

As Musk once said in an interview, he’d like “to die on Mars, just not on impact.” The Org looked into the org chart at SpaceX to see the team trying to make that morbid goal a reality.

Elon Musk may be the founder and the face of the company, but President & COO Gwynne Shotwell is running the show. Shotwell is responsible for the day-to-day operations and for managing customer and strategic relations to support company growth.

Shotwell joined SpaceX when it started in 2002 as VP of Business Development and helped build out the Falcon vehicle family, which has seen 70 launches and has brought the company over $10 billion in business. She also serves on the SpaceX board of directors.

Before SpaceX, Shotwell worked as an engineer and a project manager for more than 10 years at Aerospace Corporation. She was later promoted to chief engineer of an MLV-class satellite program, managed a landmark study for the Federal Aviation Administration on commercial space transportation and completed an analysis of space policy for NASA’s future investment in space transportation.

SpaceX is ultimately a company of world-class engineers, as many engineers see the company as the gold standard of working in aerospace dynamics. The company’s C-suite reflects just how many different engineering teams work together to give SpaceX its stellar repuation.

Mark Juncosa leads vehicle engineering at the company. Vehicle engineering at SpaceX focuses on the development of its reusable launch vehicles like the Falcon Heavy rocket, Starlink satellite and the upcoming Mars rocket Starship. Juncosa has held a variety of technical leadership roles since he joined in 2005. He became Senior Director, Structural Engineering in 2011 and was promoted to VP of the same team two years later.

He’s been in his current role since 2015. Prior to joining SpaceX, Juncosa worked at Works Performance, a mechanical and industrial engineering company headquartered in Los Angeles.

Another top engineer at SpaceX is Will Heltsley, who leads the Propulsion Engineering team. Propulsion engineering is a speciality in aerospace engineering that helps design the engines that provide rockets, satellites and other spacecraft the means to accelerate for launch or flight in space.

Heltsley joined SpaceX in 2009 as Director of Propulsion Engineering and was named to his current position in 2018 when former CTO of Propulsion Engineering Tom Mueller moved to an advisory role.

Charles Kuehmann is VP of Materials Engineering at both SpaceX and Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla. A former product design leader at Apple, Kuehmann splits his time between the two companies working on the future of electric cars and interplanetary travel. It’s a literal split in time as well, as Kuehmann flies Surf Air three times a week to and from Tesla’s Austin, Texas headquarters and SpaceX’s homebase in Hawthorne, California.

Starting at both companies in 2015, Kuehmann drives development of materials innovations with the goal of enabling the commercialization and colonization of other planets. His team analyzes every rocket launch, studying what worked and what didn’t.

Before doing double-time for Musk’s companies, Kuehmann ran a computational materials engineering firm called QuesTek for 18 years with his college professor, Gregory Olson. It was sold in 2012 to an unnamed buyer. The two pioneered the commercialization of materials design technology, the very thing Kuehmann studied under Olson for at Northwestern. Musk reached out to Kuehmann after hearing about their research.

Overseeing all the different launches engineering teams work toward is Lee Rosen is VP of Mission and Launch Operations. A retired U.S. Air Force colonel, Rosen has more than 28 years of industry and military experience in space systems engineering, acquisition, operations, maintenance and mission insurance.

Rosen retired with the rank of Colonel in May 2011 as the Commander of the 45th Launch Group in Cape Canaveral. He’s also held several senior leadership positions, including classified programs. He’s had experience managing budgets of over $7 billion in assets and delivered critical space capabilities to warfighters and customers worldwide.

Managing the risk of all of those missions and launches is Chief of Emergency Operations Randy Rees. He and his team produce risk probabilities, potential debris patterns, and related activities that help SpaceX understand and execute safely during test launches. He joined the team in 2015, more recently than his other leadership counterparts, as an Environmental Health & Safety Manager. He was promoted to his current role in 2016.

His background before coming to SpaceX was in health and safety, interestingly with organ donations. He previously worked as a Donation Specialist for the Iowa Donor Network, and before that he was a Lead Inspector for HDR Inspection.

Each org chart tells a particular story about a company, and SpaceX’s story is that engineering isn’t just what the company excels at, it is at the core of everything the company does. All eyes will be on the Starship rocket in 2022 to see if this team can make a Mars mission a reality.