Kathy Lueders, former director of NASA's manned spaceflight, joined Musk SpaceX to oversee the starship program.

CTOnews.com, May 16-CNBC quotes a person familiar with the matter as saying that Elon Musk's SpaceX has hired Kathy Lueders, the former head of NASA's manned space operations, to help the company oversee the development of StarShip.

According to reports, Lueders has been working at NASA for 31 years and retired in April this year. In 2021, as an NASA official, she chose to award a $3 billion Artemis contract to SpaceX, hoping to land an American astronaut on the moon again after 1972. Of course, other companies have also selected many projects, such as the private lunar lander project.

Foreign media pointed out that Lueders is the second former head of NASA manned spaceflight to retire to SpaceX in recent years, and the company is developing a new spacecraft for NASA, hoping to send NASA astronauts to the moon within the next decade.

To put it simply, Lueders is one of the directors who led the NASA Bureau to shift to a public-private partnership model. This is a more cost-effective way for NASA. Under this model, NASA helps fund private companies to develop spacecraft and buy "tickets" for astronauts, rather than managing the spacecraft as the owner of the spacecraft.

In late 2021, NASA underwent a major restructuring, which made Lueders no longer in charge of the moon program, but as head of space operations for NASA, a position responsible for overseeing the activities of the International Space Station.

In addition to her, her former NASA colleague Bill Gerstenmaier retired from the agency's head of manned spaceflight in 2020 and joined SpaceX in a similar position.