More big news:
This is still unconfirmed, but CNBC is reporting that
Kathy Lueders has been hired by SpaceX!
She will reportedly be working as "General Manager" for Starship at Starbase in Texas. She will report directly to Gwynne (SpaceX President and COO), who has been handling more of the day-to-day operations at SpaceX while Elon's attention is divided with Tesla, Twitter and Neuralink. Besides, Elon says he doesn't really enjoy management and sees himself more as an engineering visionary and big-picture guy. His official title at SpaceX is Chief Engineer (and company owner, of course). Elon is good at attracting and hiring top people and then delegating.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/15/elon-mus...eders.html
Kathy knows SpaceX inside and out, from her previous position heading up NASA's Commercial Crew Program. She was NASA's point person during the development of the Crew Dragon capsules and the man-rating of the Falcon 9 boosters.
Then Kathy was promoted to be NASA's Associate Administrator for HEOMD, the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. We know that this Directorate followed Starship development very closely and Kathy was ultimately the person who made the decision to award SpaceX the HLS contract.
That decision was very controversial in some quarters and Kathy faced a lot of push-back. When HEOMD was split into two new directorates, human exploration and operations, Kathy was taken off Artemis and given charge of the new Operations Directorate in charge of supply and crew-rotation flights to the ISS. That was widely perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a demotion.
Then Kathy retired from NASA. (Perhaps not for that reason, but just because it was time after 31 years there.) But she isn't out of the game and has followed the path to SpaceX blazed by the preceeding HEOMD Associate Administrator before her, Bill Gerstenmeier. (Who is now SpaceX VP for Build and Flight Reliability.)
Putting Kathy high up in the Starship management structure makes Starship leadership more of a known quantity in Washington DC and lends it credibility and gravitas. NASA and the whole human spaceflight community already knows Kathy.
Eric Berger says:
"SpaceX's hiring of Kathy Lueders to run Starbase will give government customers comfort and confidence that Starship is going to be a *real thing* around which they can base future plans and operations. It's a big deal. Big for future human spaceflight on Starship too."
https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1...8239656962
Along with Bill Gerstenmeier, Kathy Lueders' addition means that some of the biggest names in NASA have "trusted the force", crossed over and are now at SpaceX.