\u201cA lot has to go right,\u201d she concedes. \u201cEach of us, the company together, are thinking, \u2018Are there things we can do to go faster?\u2019 We\u2019ve had the benefit of working with NASA on the HLS for quite some years.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time Blue Origin is looking to take a bite out of SpaceX\u2019s portfolio, Musk, Shotwell, and the rest of the leadership team are expanding it. The IPO and the xAI merger, Shotwell believes, are not just business plays; they\u2019re part of the natural maturation of the overall enterprise.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are Elon companies,\u201d she says. \u201cElon makes these kinds of decisions, and as soon as we started talking about [the merger] I was incredibly supportive, especially as I was seeing more and more AI being used at the company. It made perfect sense. It\u2019s a force multiplier.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elon Musk\u2019s detractors may scoff at his plans to build a city on the moon, but he\u2019s already proved his chops by building one on Earth. In 2014, SpaceX began acquiring parcels of land in the town of Boca Chica\u2014at the toe of Texas on the Gulf of Mexico\u2014ultimately securing a 1.5-sq.-mi. plot on which to build a rocket factory, high bays, employee housing, and more. Musk dubbed the little enclave Starbase\u2014a moniker that soon became more than just a nickname. In May 2025, polls opened for the 500 Starbase residents to vote on whether to incorporate their little village into a city. The results weren\u2019t even close, with incorporation winning 212-6.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cA lot has to go right,\u201d she concedes. \u201cEach of us, the company together, are thinking, \u2018Are there…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,285,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-568693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-space","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}