Gwynne Shotwell Quotes

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

It is true that SpaceX is partially a government contractor, but it would be unfair to say that SpaceX is entirely a government contractor.

There isn't one thing the federal government does that anybody in Big Business would emulate, at least not in the profit sector.

A government enterprise can never be “commercialized” no matter how many external features of private enterprise are superimposed on it.

SpaceX lowered the cost of going into space by 10x.

Before SpaceX, no space company was worth a second meeting.

SpaceX has reopened the cosmos, and the space race is back on, only this time it is in the private sector.

Competition like that seen between Blue Origin and SpaceX is key to rapid progress in space.

The economics of the space industry are changing. Within so called 'NewSpace,' not only are new entrants being created almost daily, the business models and capital sources have proven to be dramatically different from traditional models built upon large government contracts and defence-related spending.

If we were to start today on an organized and well-supported space program I believe a practical passenger rocket can be built and tested within ten years.

In the space business, space had gotten very much to be the aerospace industry. This is something that governments only do and it's where the Boeings and the Lockheed's and the Northrop's and so forth. And there's no way these small companies could do it.

In theory, the rules are strict enough to preclude all discretion that might corrupt the process. In practice they enable misguided, unsure, stubborn, or biased procurement officials to justify any decision.

When you lower the cost of access to space, a boom of innovation follows, just as low-cost fiber optics paved the way for the Internet and the cloud services that followed.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

When it comes to space, I see it as my job, I'm building infrastructure the hard way. I'm using my resources to put in place heavy lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space.

You cannot make a giant space company in your dorm room. Not today. And the reason is that the heavy lifting infrastructure isn't in place.

My quest to expand access to space began more than a decade ago, when I teamed up with Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites to build SpaceShipOne. This innovative air-launched vehicle was the world's first private spacecraft to carry an astronaut into sub-orbital space.

The commercial space industry is enormous and ripe for disruption.

My brother is about energy. SpaceX is his passion, and I love being a part of that company. Energy is where he spends a lot of his time and thinking in terms of having an impact on the world.

Many people may not recognize that the development of space exploration technologies has already helped benefit Earth in many ways, especially when it comes to communications, Earth observation and even fostering economic growth. Space technologies are surprisingly critical in impacting government, industry and personal daily decision-making.

I have more than 70 space companies in the pipeline.

I don't feel like a hero - just another person involved in the space business. I'm hoping to encourage young folks to become explorers.

Companies that have the capability to settle space don't have the ambition and companies that have the ambition don't have the capability. Voyager was founded to do something about that.

Government paved the on-ramp to space. Now, the vehicles taking us up to the space highway are being built by citizens, leveraging off government-catalyzed technologies and needs.

I've been doing a few interviews since the loss of the SpaceX Dragon on its way to the Space Station. Each one very quickly questions the viability of what they call commercial space in light of the failure. I tell them space is hard: this is what happens early in a program with new technology.