Closing Bell - Manifest Space: SpaceX Employee #1 with Impulse Space CEO Tom Mueller 6/22/23

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

The story of SpaceX hinges on a number of key early figures, including famed propulsion engineer Tom Mueller. Retiring from SpaceX in 2020 to start his own company focused on developing a space tug, Mueller joins Morgan to discuss his new venture, rocket science, his time at SpaceX and the economic potential of deep space.

Elon Musk may get much of the attention, but the story of SpaceX hinges on a collection of key early figures. One of them is Tom Mueller, or SpaceX employee number one. It was in 2002 when I got introduced to Elon through the Rocket Club, actually. That's how I met Elon. And he wanted to do a launch vehicle company, so I was the first one to sign. Mueller ran propulsion at SpaceX, spearheading development of the Merlin rocket engine that powers the Falcon 9 and the Draco engines that power the Dragon spacecraft. He was critical to cracking the code on reusability, the model SpaceX has pioneered and uses to dramatically drive launch costs lower. Mueller retired from SpaceX in late 2020 to start his own company, Impulse Space, which

is developing a space tug to capture some of the future business his former employer's new mega rocket is poised to unleash. Well, think of Starship as like a cargo ship, you know, coming into port. The port being just the specific orbit it goes into, typically low Earth orbit. And there's thousands of orbits, even in low Earth orbit. You can go anywhere there. So it just goes to one place and lets 100 tons of payload out. And most of those guys are going to, if there's a whole bunch of them,

like a rideshare mission, most of them are going to want to go somewhere else. And that's where we come in. We have a very highly propulsive, we have a lot of impulse on board, a lot of propellant, so that we can move them to other orbits. On this episode, the famed engineer details his new venture, reflects on his time at SpaceX, and outlines Impulse's own deep space ambitions. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Talk to me about Impulse Space and the startup and what you're doing.

Yeah, well, after I left SpaceX in 2020, I decided where the business is really at is in space. You know, I mean, the whole point of SpaceX is to move payloads into space. And with Starship coming online, able to take 100 tons at a time, I realized there's going to be a huge opportunity for moving things around in space. So I started Impulse, which builds spacecraft, sort of like tugs in space, that can move cargo to different orbits. We incorporated it, you incorporated it in mid-21s. We're almost two years old. And how far or how close, I should say, are you to having spacecraft in orbit? We have.

We're building our flight spacecraft right now. We did all the tests on a prototype spacecraft and it passed and now we're building the flight one and it's going to launch on a Falcon 9 out of Vandenberg here on the West Coast in october so you're moving very quickly yes it's getting really crazy here how are you able to move so quickly uh you know small team of very very um seasoned employees and motivated and you know just the SpaceX basically way of doing things. Yeah makes sense. So when I when I think about space tugs I think about maybe some of the other

companies that are out there in this market like a Momentus for example. How do you how do you compare? We're chemical propulsion so we have higher thrust which means things happen faster. They're kind of electric propulsion so so they're very low thrust. It takes a long time to move. People are in a hurry in space typically to start getting revenue. And also if you're somewhere, but you're passing through the radiation belts, and if you hang out there a long time, it tends to fry your avionics. So I think chemical is the right place for us to start,

but certainly electric has its place, definitely. Yeah. How big is this market, do you think? Or do we even know yet? There's predictions. The one we have is like 8 billion by the end of the decade. But I think that's conservative. I think that Starship is really going to change the paradigm. Yeah. We talk about Starship a lot on this podcast. I imagine you're probably watching that launch pretty closely. Absolutely. I feel like I had something to do with Starship. Yeah. And I want to talk to you about that. But I guess just a little bit more first on impulse space specifically.

When you do talk about Starship potentially changing the paradigm and and opening this market up in a bigger broader way um how i guess how how are you thinking of those possibilities well think of starship as like a cargo ship you know coming into port the port being just the specific orbit it goes into typically low earth orbit and both there's thousands of orbits, even in low Earth orbit. I mean, you could go anywhere there. And so it just goes to one place and lets 100 tons of payload out. And most of those guys are going to, if there's a whole bunch of them,

like a rideshare mission, most of them are going to want to go somewhere else. And that's where we come in. We have a very highly propulsive. We have a lot of impulse on board, a lot of propellant, so that we can move them to other orbits. And so as we do see more things, and I really, you know, you just said thousands of orbits, but as we do see the commercialization of low Earth orbit, for example, and we do see more types of spacecraft, both much smaller than we've seen historically and also much bigger when you start thinking about things like commercial space

stations. I guess what does that mean in terms of how big or how large your spacecraft are going to be to be able to service all of this? Right now, you know, it's been for a while, it's been small spacecraft. I think they're starting to get bigger, even like the Starlinks now are much bigger because they're going to start going on Starship, the version two. I think when you do a Leo constellation with a whole bunch of satellites, they can be pretty small.

But when you go to geosynchronous orbit, way out there where you're always at the same spot in the sky like where you'd point your direct tv dish that those will probably tend to be bigger because there's only so many spots there so you want to put as much bandwidth as possible there how many spacecraft do you think or how many space tugs do you think uh you're gonna you're gonna have in orbit after you get this first one up in October? When I get asked that question, I usually just say, we should be like SpaceX and Tesla early days.

We can't make them fast enough. We can sell them faster than we can make them. I think after we launch the first one, that could happen. Are you already talking to interested parties and customers? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. A lot of interest in Mira. Okay, we're on Transporter 9, which is the Falcon 9 going here in October. We're also on 11 and 12 next year and looking to start booking further up.

And we've got lots of potential customers we're talking to on those booked flights. Very cool. Now, I know you also recently announced that you're partnering with Relativity for the first ever commercial landing on Mars as well. Yeah. You're looking to beat SpaceX to that. It might be a race, yeah. So you have a vision that involves Mars as well? I do. I mean, I'm more about the moon, but certainly relativity is all about Mars. And they came to me and said, you know, where we want to do this audacious mission for the first flight of their new vehicle, the Terran R. And they said, would you be willing to build the spacecraft? And I said, absolutely. That'd be a perfect job for us to do something, something difficult that,

that, you know, sets our standard. Very cool. And when do you think you can do this? We missed the 24 opportunity because we just weren't ready. So we're going to 26, late 26 is the next opportunity. You can only go to Mars when it's on the same side as the sun as the Earth. So the next opportunity will be, it's like every 2.2 years. So this might be a really basic question, but how does that work? When you're talking about the first commercial landing on the Red Planet,

I mean, are both the companies self-funding this mission or are other folks involved? We're hoping to get some cargo, some paid cargo, but on a first mission, especially when you land on Mars, which has been historically very difficult, it's hard to get people to sign up. Hopefully we can get some pay. Otherwise, yeah, we're self-funding it. Wow. And it is historically difficult. But you've done a lot of things that are historically difficult that I wish that couldn't be done. So I wonder how you're how you're gaming out the risks and those levels of difficulty now with this. Well, that's true, Morgan. My whole career almost, or certainly my career since I started SpaceX has been, you can't do that. So I love to hear that because we prove them wrong and it's

fulfilling. But going to Mars, the hard part is, so it's called EDL, entry, descent, and landing. Remember those seven minutes of terror? NASA has figured that out and done it many times. So we are using exactly the shapes of an aeroshell, the exact same parachute and mortar, the same stuff. All the EDL we're copying are doing what NASA did because it's proven. It's just the lander that comes out of that aeroshell and lands that's pretty custom that we build. And also the cruise stage that gets us there. It's kind of like a mirror spacecraft that points us to Mars and gets us to hit the target there. Got it. You mentioned you're more excited about the moon. Why? Well, I think it's great that Elon cares about Mars and a lot

of people care about the moon, so both get serviced. But the moon has basically all the resources that we have on Earth. It has water, it has minerals, it has all kinds of chemicals that are in the shadowed craters at the poles. So I think when we start developing the space economy in low Earth orbit and we're taking material up from the surface of Earth, it doesn't take very long where people realize it's literally 20 times easier energy-wise to take it from the surface of the Moon because the gravity well is so much smaller that that will become a thing.

So I think that's just to offload the resource use of Earth, utilizing the Moon and near-Earth asteroids also will become important in the future. So it almost becomes like a natural resource play. Is that the way to think about it? Absolutely, yeah. That's fascinating. So let's talk a little bit.

I do want to talk a little bit about your background, your incredible background in all things propulsion and rocket science. So maybe you could just take me through a little bit of your tenure at SpaceX, especially as we did see that recent Starship launch, and you did have something to do with it. Sure. Well, I was at TRW, which is actually just a couple blocks from our office here, for 15 years where I learned rocket propulsion.

And I was also doing amateur rocket stuff out in the desert since 1990. And it was in 2002 when I got introduced to Elon through the Rocket Club, actually, that's how I met Elon. And he wanted to do a launch vehicle company. So I was the first one to sign because I said yes. So I ended up being employee number one in payroll because I signed first. And we started off, even before we incorporated the company, we already pretty much had the Falcon 1 architecture.

We're going to have a single first stage engine, you know, about 60, 50, 60,000 pounds of thrust. It could throw one ton of payload to orbit, like basically small launch, like many companies are trying to do today, small launch. So that's how we started out. I wonder what you think of the proposition of small launch versus some of these heavy lift rockets that are now under development.

Because it does seem like there is this market shift that's happening for all of these other startups that, you know, we're going to target small launch. And oh, actually, maybe the market's not quite as enticing as we thought it was. I think that the market was more enticing a few years ago, but with SpaceX doing rideshare, so much cheaper than small launch.

But rideshare doesn't always go where you want to go. It goes to one orbit, like this one we're going up on is going to 525 kilometers sun synchronous. Some of the guys want to go to other places. So that's where small launch comes in. But it's, you know, you can do rideshare for a couple million dollars and it's going to be like, you know,

15 to fly on a small launch. So using a space tug, we can now take them where they want to go without having to buy a whole rocket. So it has become a difficult value proposition for the small launch guys. I guess I do want to talk to you a little bit more about propulsion and about what you're able to do in terms of designing some of these rocket engines at SpaceX that were and are unlike anything we have seen in the marketplace? Well, I think it's kind of irrefutable now that the Falcon 9 is the most reliable launch vehicle in history.

It's flown more times without failure than any other rocket. And it's got 10 Merlins on it every time it flies, which is an engine that I designed and my team developed. So I'm pretty proud of it. It's just really cool. And I used to always worry, you know, in the early days that it was going to be a failure when we flew. I don't even worry about it anymore. It's like, this seems so reliable. Then I worked on Raptor also, which is the Starship engine. And it was actually burning hydrogen and oxygen when we first designed it. And then we kind of found out that, I found out that when you're on Mars, if you have hydrogen, you can easily, almost for free, make methane with it.

And there's actually eight times the mass of methane. So for every pound of hydrogen, you get eight pounds of methane methane because it's a heavier molecule so it basically was twice as efficient it cost wise to use methane as hydrogen so i switched the engine to to methane and then i was working on power on mars how to how to make propellant to get back so i kind of let the guys develop the the raptor engine so it's not my baby and i had stepped down as vp at that time so i can't claim that i that i developed the raptor but i certainly um you know hired and developed a team that built that built the raptor that initially did it anyway and now to see like version three of that thing running at the highest chamber pressure ever and it's pretty crazy and to

see you know that rocket take off with 33 of them on the first day it's pretty crazy. And to see, you know, that rocket take off with 33 of them on the first day, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, that's pretty incredible. When I hear you talk about that, how close are we just as a civilization, how close are we to cracking the code on what it's going to take to, because that's what everybody talks about. Once you go to Mars, at least initially, you're not going to be leaving Mars. So if we come, are we coming closer to cracking the code on what it's going to take to actually see some sort of return? To Mars? Yeah. Or to the moon? From Mars, yeah. Yeah, well, I think, yeah, I think we're within a decade of putting the first people on Mars, and I think it will probably be SpaceX, but Starship, Elon's, you know, just dedicated to that. And also, you know, within,

hopefully by the end of this decade, we'll have people on the moon again, too. So I really feel like, like, kind of like SpaceX got the party started in the second space age. And I mean, the real space age, I want this one to stay, you know, where people are going to stay in space, not just go visit and go plant a flag. So I'm pretty proud of stay, you know, where people are going to stay in space, not just go visit and go plant a flag. So I'm pretty proud of that, you know, that kind of shift that started with. I mean, other companies tried to do commercials on launch vehicles and failed, but we were the first one to be successful. And a lot of people have kind of followed the formula now so uh now there's competition and access to space is back you know the the number one company of access to space back in the us again

pretty cool i mean we often make the case that if if it wasn't for spacex we'd be begging putin to get to our space station right now what's your vision long long term, what do you envision this space economy becoming? I want to see manufacturing in space, offloading the resource uses on the planet Earth. A good example is compute, especially now with AI coming on strong, crypto. It's predicted that the amount of power just to run compute by about 2045 will be equal to all the power we use right now on the planet. And imagine it's going up exponentially. So at some point it's going to make more sense to do compute in space to just build giant solar fields in space and use that power and computers basically on spacecraft in space and then beam down the results. So just do your AI in space and then beam the results down to offload.

I don't know when that's going to happen. I think that's way out there. But that's part of it. And just there's certain things, drugs and chemicals and materials that can only be made in microgravity, that's going to happen. And then once that starts happening in low Earth orbit, that's when I think the moon is really going to get developed because there's water.

There's, you know, perhaps billions of tons of water in the ice, in the poles. And with water, you can make propellant. And the nice thing about that propellant, if you use hydrogen and oxygen, is it tends to burn more fuel rich, so it leaves excess oxygen when you make it, so you have oxygen to breathe for people. So it's really quite an amazing resource to have on the moon. As I hear you talk about this longer-term vision, what does it mean in terms of the longer-term vision for Impulse? Space tugs right now, but years down the road, what's involved? The space tug, like the Mira space tug that we're about to fly, I consider like our Falcon one. We're learning to be a spacecraft company, how to navigate, how to get around in space

and how to survive the radiation environment. But we also have another product coming along later that's going to be our prime mover that can go to the moon, that can go to geosecretous orbit, which is out there at 36,000 kilometers. So we can do these very high energy things and really go anywhere in the solar system with that. So that's where we're headed. And it's hard to say right now what the killer apps are going to be. This is kind of like the Internet in the 1990s. Nobody knew what it was going to be. So I think space is a lot of development to go on commercially in space.

In terms of the actual building up of the company, is it, I mean, are you self-funding? Have you reached out? Are you engaged with the investment community? Are VCs backing you? Yeah, we raised a seed round and funded it about a year ago, 30 million. And we're starting on our, we're into our series eight right now.

That's great. Fundraise, yeah. Have you found that there's been a real shift in the investment community? More excitement and more understanding and openness to investing in this sector? Well, there was a year ago. There still is, yeah, absolutely. Space is really big. But

now it's like a year ago, just about anybody could get funded. And they did. There's a lot of space companies out there that are going to fail. I feel like they just didn't have the stuff. Now, the investors are much more careful in picking out the ones that are more likely to be a winner. So it's definitely a lot harder to get funding now everywhere. But certainly, I think we've got a really experienced team and are seen as a frontrunner so we're able to get funding. Yeah, the other piece of this puzzle, I should say, is the talent pool. And it does seem like with all the success of SpaceX, and you could argue too, with Blue Origin being around for several decades, these are sort of the

two original space startups that are now minting other entrepreneurs that are going out and starting companies. And I wonder what you think that's done in terms of the available talent that's out there and the excitement of newer generations coming into this field? It's great because now engineers and scientists coming out of school want to go work in space. So we're just building up this whole economy. And in this area here, over in El Segundo, you can't throw a rock in El Segundo

without hitting a building, a company that was an ex-SpaceX person. There's just so much talent out there that started at SpaceX and other companies too, like Origin. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.