Kathy Lueders isn’t out of the spaceflight game after all.
Lueders, who stepped down as NASA’s human spaceflight chief at the end of April, has been hired by SpaceX, CNBC reported (opens in new tab) on Monday (May 15).
She’ll work out of the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas, where development of the giant Starship deep-space transportation system is centered. Lueders will be a general manager, and she’ll report directly to SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, according to CNBC.
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Lueders is already quite familiar with SpaceX’s currently operational human spaceflight hardware, the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule.
During her most recent two roles at NASA — human spaceflight chief and leader of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program — she worked with the company to launch multiple astronaut missions to the International Space Station.
The latest of these, called Crew-6, launched on March 2. The next, Crew-7, is expected to get off the ground this summer.
As CNBC noted, Lueders’ move is not unprecedented: Bill Gerstenmaier, who led NASA’s human spaceflight program from 2005 to 2019, moved to SpaceX in early 2020 (opens in new tab), shortly after retiring from the space agency. He currently serves as vice president of build and flight reliability at the company.
CNBC learned of Lueders’ new job from unnamed “people familiar with the matter.” SpaceX has not publicly announced the hire.
