Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you can separate the two. It's like separating Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and giving 100% of the credit to Woz or Jobs. Certainly Shotwell has made the business and operational side of the Space Falcon business smooth and helped win commercial/government contracts. But do you really think it is shotwell who is aggressively asking people to throw away designs, delete components, and iterate quickly by…
No, you're literally just giving Musk credit for things he didn't do but which Shotwell did. If Shotwell were a man, nobody would put up with Musk stealing the credit for her work. The reason that they did install 29 Raptor engines overnight was because Musk was a whiny little s$$$ and forced the employees to do it on threat of termination. But the reason they could do it was because Shotwell had the company running…
And this has nothing to do with gender. Steve Jobs got all of the accolades for everything amazing that Apple did. He stole credit from Steve Wozniak, and from all of the other brilliant designers and engineers at Apple, but people mostly gave him a pass. But to deny Steve as the driving force for many of decisions, even if Steve had nothing to do with Apple's amazing supply chain management, or semiconductor team, is also distorting history. No Steve Jobs, no iPhone, no Mac. No Musk, no Starship. It's just that simple, Musk isn't an executive to set out to make a rocket company to make money launching satellites, he set out to make humans multiplanetary, and everything flows from that vision. His obsession with that dream is the core driver behind everything else.
Musk creates the 'urgency' at SpaceX. Blue Origin isn't doing jack because they are careful with money, Blue Origin is wasting money. They've spent $1 billion a year! They're not doing anything because they're running a traditional waterfall model of development and they have no urgency, becausefor Bezos this is a hobby. They're OldSpace dressed up in NewSpace clothing.
What you're doing is trying to remove the person who controls the purse springs, who is pushing his company to engage in risky, unsafe, but potentially revolutionary vision, from the story. Put a traditional CEO in Musk's chair and you'll get a guy managing a 5% YoY improvement in their existing Falcon 9 business lines every year. They'll rest on their butt milking the Falcon 9 with tweaks, and they'll be stuck in the innovators dilemma for fear of killing the golden goose, or risking the company.
And it's for that reason, since the 1960s, the basic formula for aerospace companies hasn't changed.
Also to be clear, I'm a big fan of Shotwell. But you can be a fan of both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, of the visionary risk taker with the obsessive personality, and the person responsible for executing it. With the ADHD and the OCD founders. You need both kinds of people.