SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell spoke at World Space Business Week. Photo: Via Satellite

PARIS — SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell spoke at World Space Business Week on Tuesday, giving insight into what SpaceX’s recent spectrum buy from EchoStar will mean for Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell business.

Last week, it was announced that EchoStar was canceling its plans for the direct-to-device (D2D) satellite constellation, instead selling spectrum to SpaceX that will be used for Starlink’s own D2D services in a $17 billion deal.

SpaceX already partners with telcos with a number of countries to use cellular spectrum for the services, but Shotwell said this gets “very clunky” when it comes to borders between countries. Having spectrum was clearly a missing piece here.

“So we started the hunt for spectrum. We’re rocket people, we’re satellite people — we are not spectrum people. We kind of refer to spectrum as it’s a hairball — very complicated transactions and frequency bands,” Shotwell said.

She said SpaceX spoke with EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen a year ago, then a few months ago. “Finally I said, we should really be working together on the spectrum,” Shotwell said.

The spectrum transaction marks the start of the next stage of work as SpaceX works with chip manufacturers to get chips compatible with the spectrum into consumer phones. It also changes the way SpaceX will work with telcos.

“We will be initiating discussions with telcos in a different way now,” Shotwell said. “It’s our spectrum, but we want to work with them, almost providing wholesale capacity to their customers. We have to work with the device manufacturers, the chip companies, and working with telcos on the end game. It’s really exciting, but it’s a huge amount of work.”

Shotwell also gave an update on the Starship program, saying the Starship teams “needed that win” with the recent test flight in August. After a string of failures this year, Starship’s 10^th test flight successfully deployed simulator Starlink payloads for the first time — a step toward its plans to launch Starlink V3 satellites via Starship. She said SpaceX met its objectives and learned a huge amount about vehicle reentry with the launch.

SpaceX has one more flight of Version 2 (V2) Starship left to fly, and will fly the V3 design “hopefully late this year, but maybe early next year.” V3 could be the version that takes humans to the Moon and Mars, Shotwell said. Propellant transfer demonstration is the key technical challenge with V3.

“That is the technology, in addition to the heat shield, that is really the tough thing in front of us. We know we can attach two vehicles, we’ve put Dragon on the International Space Station dozens of times,” Shotwell said. “But can we transfer propellant? And is that propellant still basically cryogenic — is it still cold enough? … Hopefully it’s not as hard as some of my engineers think it’s going to be. All of this is hard — we’re in the space business.”

Shotwell also talked about the evolution of SpaceX and how the company aims to keep its progressive approach to solving problems in the market as it becomes an even bigger company. Shotwell spoke about not wanting to lose the “magic” and become a large bureaucratic company. Providing really hard challenges to young engineers is key here.

“Young people are very impatient. I think it is very different now. Young people want to see their engineering in the field within a year. Now, maybe that it too optimistic, but we try and have cycles of around two years. It is almost like giving what seems an impossible job to your engineers,” Shotwell said. “You hire the best engineers and you give them really hard projects. They take on hard, crazy jobs and then they benefit as the company grows, and they then get a piece of it.”

Shotwell also made some interesting comments about AI. She said, “A year ago, we were hardly thinking about AI. Elon was thinking about it, but I wasn’t. But things have changed recently. I have people that are doing their performance reviews doing AI. You have to be careful, AI could help us, but it could hurt us. For example, we will be writing code using AI, and we will need to figure out how to check that.”