Space vacations and retiring on Mars: SpaceX COO shares 3 visions for the company's future

While SpaceX founder Elon Musk may be dead set on one day living on another planet, the firm's chief operating officer says she plans to keep things terrestrial, for now.

"I think Elon wants to retire on Mars. I'm not interested in Mars," Gwynne Shotwell, the SpaceX president and COO told Baron Capital founder Ron Baron at his firm's annual investment conference last week. "I don't like camping, and I think it will be a long time before Mars is nice enough — probably not in my lifetime."

Nevertheless, like her boss, Shotwell's visions for SpaceX remain stratospheric: accessible space travel for all, global proliferation for satellite internet, and yes, eventually, interplanetary travel and living.

The company's trajectory has investors seeing stars, too. SpaceX, unlike Tesla, is not traded as a public stock, and is therefore not required to post financial results. But Baron assured his investors — who can own SpaceX exposure through some of the firm's mutual funds — it has been a profitable play.

"We have made, since the time we started investing in 2017, seven times our money," Baron said, adding that he expected their shares to triple over the next half decade.

That doesn't mean the company has a perfect track record. SpaceX's financial results have reportedly been up and down over the years, and this week, a highly publicized test launch didn't go totally according to plan.

Nevertheless, Baron and an auditorium full of his shareholders wanted to hear what Shotwell says the future might hold for her firm. Here are three things she sees coming.  

SpaceX's latest innovation is the company's ability to "catch" and relaunch its rockets, a paradigm shift that Shotwell said could eventually drastically cut the cost it takes to go