Main Engine Cut Off - T+324: Impulse Space (with Tom Mueller, Founder and CEO)
Episode Date: March 17, 2026Tom Mueller, Founder and CEO of Impulse Space, joins me to catch up on the company’s progress and plans—3 Mira missions flown, Helios soon to fly, $525M raised, new defense contracts, a lunar land...er concept, and a new Colorado facility. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Joel, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Warren, Steve, Ryan, Will and Lars from Agile, Natasha Tsakos, Russell, Joakim, Theo and Violet, The Astrogators at SEE, Matt, Lee, Donald, Heiko, Better Every Day Studios, Josh from Impulse, Miles O’Brien, Stealth Julian, David, Joonas, Kris, Frank, Jan, Fred, Pat, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters. Topics Impulse Space Careers - Impulse Space Tom Mueller (@lrocket) / X Inside Impulse’s New Colorado Facility Impulse Space Secures $300 Million Series C to Accelerate the Future of In-Space Mobility Starfish Space Completes Autonomous Rendezvous and Proximity Mission in LEO with Impulse Space To the Moon (and Beyond): How Impulse Can Deliver More Mass to the Lunar Surface Introducing the Upgraded Mira: Bringing In-Space Mobility to GEO and Beyond The Show Like the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack! Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to anthony@mainenginecutoff.com Follow @WeHaveMECO Follow @meco@spacey.space on Mastodon Listen to MECO Headlines Listen to Off-Nominal Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Artwork photo by NASA/John Kraus Work with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo. I've got an awesome show today. We've got Tom Mueller here from Impulse Space. Employee number one at SpaceX went on to Found Impulse Space a couple of years ago. A couple of years ago on Off NOMINAL. So if you want more of the origin story and some of the fun behind the scenes, I'll link that in the show notes. But I want to talk to him about what they've been up to since. Because a lot of times I'll have guests on the show.
You could go a couple of years and they don't have that many updates.
They're still working on their roadmap.
Not the case at Impulse.
They have an absolute ton of hardware.
They've flown three times already on the mirror platform.
They've working on Helios and some other vehicles.
They've got landers they talk up all the time.
So I want to dig into what they've been working on,
some of the strategy behind, what they pick and choose to work on,
the tech underneath all of that,
and how they see the industry right now
where there's a lot of upheaval in the Artemis program.
The launch market didn't play out,
don't think as they would have expected from where they sat in 2021, 22 when they were starting.
You know, Starship has had a lot of struggles. New Glens come online. The others have kind of delayed
and plinkoed through the schedule in ways. So things are different now than when they started.
I want to hear where he's at on that. So without further ado, let's give Tom a call.
All right, we're here with Tom Mueller of Impulse Space fame. A very busy time. You've got a lot of stuff
in space right now and a lot of stuff heading that way soon. So I'm excited to talk about it. It's
been almost three years since we talked. The company's almost, let me do math right,
almost four years old? Five years old. Five years old? Yeah. Yeah. We incorporated it on in June of
21. So it's been, it's been a flurry of activity. July, sorry, July of 21.
There it is, yeah. We're getting there. We're warming up. It's been a long time.
Yeah. A handful emissions under your belt. You also have been doing a lot of expanding recently. I saw
there's this big new announcement of Colorado facility.
There's been a ton of fundraising.
So I would love to catch, I think last time I talked to you,
it was like the week that Leo Express 1 launched.
So the delta between there and here,
I would love to just kind of hear that the high level things
that you find as like the important notes on what you've been up to for a couple of years here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, as you know, we're doing in space mobility.
So everything above launch to, you know,
accelerate the future beyond Earth.
And that first launch of Leo Express 1, three years ago,
was the start of that.
And, you know, I'm happy to say that we've launched three spacecraft now all successfully.
And we've got all three on orbit right now, still alive.
And it's going great now.
And, you know, a lot of interest from customers in these vehicles too now.
So it's, you know, from where we're at before we picked up.
a lot of new business. Yeah, it's going good. And a lot of new, new types, right? There's
upgraded Mira. Helios was announced a little bit after that. There's even some mention of
electric propulsion. So the roadmap, you know, is that what you expected the roadmap to be at
this point in the company history? Or, you know, how do you track against where you thought you started
out? Well, when I started out, I wanted to be the do-all in-space mobility. So I felt like
chemical. Of course, what I know, and I think what a lot of people now to get there fast,
but I think the future is going to involve a lot more electric propulsion. So even though we didn't
have a specific mission for it, we said this is a tool that we're going to need. I think,
as you're seeing right now, the power per kilogram of solar power in space is going up,
which helps EP a lot.
There's a lot of talk to the new administration
about nuclear electric propulsion,
which I've been pushing really hard,
so I think that's the next step
in advancing propulsion.
So I just want to make sure that we got our stake
on that future with starting out
with our EP test system and our new thruster.
In terms of the sort of the platform
that your vehicles are for payloads, right?
The mirror of vehicles fit perfectly on those transport emissions.
Intentionally so, I think.
Helios definitely carves out more of a niche for taking things up to geo.
Yeah.
So do you feel like you're heading?
Also, side note, the renderings make it look way more upper stagey than just a thing that's supposed to fit inside of a faring.
But I take it you're not working on a rocket.
I mean, well, it's a full upper stage, basically, right?
It's a third stage.
So it has everything that a third stage.
I mean, it looks like it kind of looks like if he took a, you know,
a Falcon 9 second stage and shrunk it down because it's very similar.
It's a common dome with a single engine, you know, helium press.
So it's...
Yeah.
Do you feel bad sticking in the faring?
It feels like it's unfair in there.
It wants to feel the atmosphere on the way out.
Yeah.
It takes up some of the faring space.
So we made it pretty compact, you know.
Specifically, the design was to pack as much energy in a smaller space as possible.
And I think we were pretty successful at doing that.
Do you feel like there's customer differences in how those platforms are targeted where, you know,
Mira feels like it's a fit perfect for those rideshare missions,
but Helios definitely is more of a solution for somebody who might be even buying a dedicated launch?
Or is it more common?
You know, Mira, Mira is, you know, we call it our stay there vehicle.
It can stand orbit up to five years.
It can host payloads.
It can release payloads.
It can do RPO, like the RPO demonstration we did with Leo 1 and Leo 2.
There's just all kinds of things it can do on orbit.
Helios is to get there.
So Helios allows you to get above Leo.
It's primarily designed.
The original design was to get to geo.
It could really improve your payload to the moon.
It can multiply the payload that you could take to Mars on a typical rocket,
maybe up to a factor of five.
So it's,
staging is super,
a super efficient way
to add performance.
You know, like, if you, I always make this
comparison,
we can, with a helios on a
Falcon 9, we can do almost
as much as a Falcon Heavy can do.
Falcon Heavy has
something like 700 tons
propellant in those two side boosters,
and we have about 13 tons of propellant
in our upper stage.
Who designed that?
thing. Come on.
Maybe they should be in a third stage.
It's just a very efficient way to get to higher Europe.
It's like I think the optimum solution like everybody does to get to Leo is two stages.
To go above that, I think you got two choices.
You could either go more stages or you put a very high performance propellant in the upper
stage, like some of the rocket choose hydrogen in the upper stage.
So, I mean, there's four-stage rockets out there, you know, the Russians have some crazy staging.
So it's just another way to really improve the, I think, the price performance and just the general performance of, you know, of getting to these high-energy orbits.
So I think it's an important market.
With that sort of positioning, right, and then you mentioned to the moon and there's been, you know, there was a talk about Marslander mission.
I'm actually curious if that's still in the cards or how that's percolating through the company roadmap,
but then a lunar lander variant as well.
I don't know if those are, are those the same vehicle that you have in mind that can do both,
or are they different things entirely?
I mean, you know, some of the same pieces we're developing, you know,
we have a bunch of different rocket engines that we've developed.
You know, we've got the safes, the little six-pounders that are on, that are on Mira.
We've got some bigger ones that we have on the landers,
And then, of course, we have the big prime mover on Helios, but probably the same propulsion systems,
some of the tankage science, a lot of the components would be the same.
But definitely a lander that lands on Mars will look a lot different than one that lands on the moon.
Sometimes it's confusing to people because you think that going to Mars, it might require more propulsion.
It actually requires much, much less because you scrub off 99% of the entry energy in the atmosphere.
So all you need is a little bit of propellant to land.
Whereas the moon, there's no atmosphere.
So you've got to somehow, in staging or in one stage, you know,
absorb that, you know, two and a half kilometers per second of gravity well.
You're dropping into it on the moon.
So much bigger propulsion job, actually, to land on the moon.
So from a strategic perspective, how do you, do you kind of equate these as your job
is just getting things from Leo to other places?
and these are much in the same, you know,
and you might stack some of these things together
where you maybe you've got a lander flying on a helios
or something like that to put you in position to do those missions?
My premise on starting this company is, you know,
sort of based off of Starship,
having worked on Starship for, you know,
the last five or six years I was at SpaceX
and kind of coming to a realization,
the real, like I call it the true space age is going to start
when you can take 100 tons,
every hour to orbit, you know, which hopefully they're going to get there.
And where's all that cargo going to go?
How's it going to get moved around?
And this opens up what you can do not only in Leo, but at other orbits at the moon at Mars.
I just wanted to be kind of the do-all in space.
Once you get all that mass up there, if we will land out and the moon, we're here to help.
And we want to take it to Mars, we're here to help.
You want to move two different orbits, we're here to help.
That's why I just want to have all the pieces to facilitate a reliable, affordable solution to advance our future in space.
The amount of different things that you're working on is obviously what we're seeing, you know, doing a ton of fundraising, ton of hiring, expansion facilities.
Those, you also have been fundraising through a time period where people have been nervous about it.
It's been hard to come by.
Everyone's now focused on the IPO that's going to happen over on the SpaceX side or over the data centers.
There's a lot that's attracting investment elsewhere.
Yeah.
Did you, was it a tough environment or did you feel like because of the knack that you've got
with everything that you're cooking up?
And the fact that you have a ton of hardware that you can point to and say,
look at everything we're doing, or not a lot of PowerPoints, is easier for you.
Yeah.
It's varied a bit.
You know, I think our early raises, there was a lot of excitement, you know, in space.
And we were able to get well-funded on our CNA round.
There was some other intermediate rounds where the market was maybe a little cooled off, but luckily we had all the successes of the mirror flights and signing some new contracts.
So we actually have done pretty good on all those.
Right now, space is hot.
I think the space X IPO and talk about orbital data center and stuff, like it's really, I think, taken off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what's going on in these new places?
You've got Colorado opening up.
do you have a master plan of like, all right, we're going to move all this kind of stuff out in that facility?
We're going to do this here.
What's the roadmap for that?
No, you know, there's a lot of talent out there.
We started with our GNC team out there in a small office.
And then there was more talent that we've collected.
So we actually put a bigger facility out there with some machining capability because we got some really excellent machining capability.
So we're doing some really precision stuff out there.
It's just a way
We're kind of space constrained here in L.A.
It's kind of a way to open up the talent pool
and have more room to expand.
How about L.A., though?
Are there other places you have your eyes on?
There was a time where I think there were a lot of space companies
that were popping up.
Then a bunch went away.
People kind of took up the old factories
and everything else of companies that had gone away
in the last couple of years.
But what's the future?
like for you in terms of
yeah we're looking at some some new facilities there's
to be some announcements about that coming up pretty soon yeah yeah I'm not to
come take a visit we're growing wait wait till about summer when we're starting to
get into our new new stuff all right cool some of the commissions that you have
coming up you've got a lot of the manifest and also we should probably mention you talk
about the starfish demo I'd love to hear about that a little bit too because I want to
know the sort of coordination between the impulse side and the Starfish side and figure out,
you know, where does one end and where does one begin? Like, what is the actual overlap there?
Is it their software, but your hardware? What is it? Mostly, some of our software, too,
because their software had to talk to our software. I need a software guy in here to explain it.
But the coordination is great because they knew a lot. We knew a bit, and we collaborated.
I think everybody learned a lot on that.
So it was actually a really great collaboration.
It really improved our tech in that area
and certainly helped prove out their tech in that area.
So it was a big success.
It really great.
It really got us pretty sharp on, you know,
you have to do a lot of burns pretty fast,
so it really got our cadence up to plan the burns, make the burns.
It's good for us.
Yeah, that's the thing I was curious about is if it was this just another customer and it's a good flight?
Or is it, wow, this is really beneficial to the operations that we have internally and it's good training in that direction.
So it does feel like that.
But is that, you know, when you're thinking about the way that impulse scales up in the future, I don't know what number you haven't had in your head of like how many things you would like to fly a year, how many missions.
Do you think much about how we're going to operate that many missions or is it like that's a problem that will solve?
That's a great problem to have and we'll solve it.
I mean, we've got, you know, we've got a lot of missions coming up over the next few years that we've got to grow, you know, our capability to, to operate, certainly more, more automation and our control center and things like that.
That's, yeah, it's, it's, it's in the plan to grow to be able to do that.
Yeah, it's, it's different too, though, because it's not, you know, I think it's with constellations, Starlink and the like, automation's pretty clear because of the operating.
environment that you're in is like keep things stable, supply a good network to the ground.
With stuff like you're working on, every mission is unique and that's the point.
And so you can automate some parts of it, but there's definitely going to be unique things
about each mission or moments where you want all the humans looking at it at the same time
because something really interesting is going on or something about dynamics happening.
So it's, I don't know, sometimes I get worried of like, well, how are they going to fly that many times
a year if they've only got X amount of people.
Are you going to have tons of people operating these things?
Or is there, do you think you'll get into more of a standardized rhythm the further you get
into the flight manifest?
Yeah.
You know, we're going to learn a lot of, I think, automation and, you know, just improvements
in the, you know, the procedure and the operation of the spacecraft just makes it more efficient.
But, you know, you're kind of pointed to it is, it is more difficult to fly a highly
maneuverable vehicle because you're changing orbits all the time you got to watch out for you know
other things because you know most things you know just stay in an in an orbit that they're locked in
like you know like a star links you know they climb to that orbit but once they're there they're lock
in and they pretty much hold hold that or where we can change orbits go to different places
so it takes a lot more coordination with other objects as based with with government entities so it's
definitely a more complex thing
And there's opportunities there.
You've got General Raymond on the board now.
I was actually, I went and visited his successor, General Saltsman at the Pentagon in December,
talking with him.
And obvious, you know, huge use case for Space Force side of things and defense missions.
A lot of the stuff they've been talking up over the years of maneuverability and the ability to operate around geo.
So there's, you know, is there anything we can talk about there that you're allowed to say,
or there are going to be men in suits coming into your office if I asked the wrong question.
Yeah, I can't say too much, you know, the first rule of flight club is you don't talk about flight club.
But, you know, these opportunities, there's, they are about space mobility.
They're about moving around in space in Leo and geo.
and that's what we do.
So, you know, we're ready to support the U.S. government when called upon.
But as you know, I can't go into more specific than that.
The government has made it clear that they don't want us to disclose what companies are doing or who's working on.
So we'll leave it at that.
All right.
Let's dig into stuff they've announced then.
Put it this way.
I think we're the right team at the right time in history with the right concept.
It's fitting pretty good.
You have a Space Force mission, some of the Victus series.
I never can keep the Victus name straight because there's been a lot of them to this point.
Yeah.
But there's one of them where there's a mirror on a Helios.
And I want to hear about this aspect of things from an impulse perspective,
because of actually integrating these vehicles together.
How did that go?
What are the opportunities there?
Not only for just mission, but for the future, too.
This is the great synergy of these two products,
is that, you know, like Victus Sago goes to GIL.
and what's the best way to go to, you know, geo is going to be on elyos.
It's going to allow us, you know, to fly often on a vehicle that flies, you know, every other day.
And we're, you know, as you know, we announced our caravan program, which is going quite well.
You know, there's a lot of interest in that.
And this is kind of like one of those things where, you know, it's basically a sense.
set up like a ride share similar similar to a transporter, you know, with, and we can carry now,
you know, these transporter type payloads to all the way to jail, parking in jail.
And so our government customer is happy to take that ride too.
It's funny in that, you know, an environment where,
someone like yourself that used to work on the launch side, you know, everybody's talking about
cheaper launch, launch that's more on demand, responsive launch, dedicated launch, a lot of
ride shares. But there's still a huge opportunity for the types of services that Impulse is
providing. And there's other companies that have had issues in that market, you know, Momentus had
a crazy roller coaster through all sorts of different drama over the years. And there's other
companies that are, you see every time a transporter goes up, right? There's the Orbit's got something
on there. And there's a lot of these companies that are offering these kind of services.
why is it sticky when the launch market is as dynamic as it is today and changing on a monthly basis, it feels like?
Well, I think we overestimated the amount.
People seem to be happy when they go on a transporter to stay in the orbit that they get dropped off in.
We thought that there would be a lot of interest in, you know, okay, like, the Rocket Lab could take you to any orbit you want for a certain price.
And we said, well, if you go in a transporter and buy a mirror, you actually save money, and we can take you to that orbit.
But it turns out there wasn't that many. It was already being serviced by some of the companies you mentioned.
And it was really the U.S. government that saw Mira as a vehicle that fit their needs quite well.
So we kind of have pivoted to more of that market, although we're still doing a lot of commercial things.
And certainly, I think, geo market with when like a caravan is going to be mostly commercial up front.
And it can involve, I mean, it could really involve mirrors because the new mirrors designed to operate in geo.
So now we can take host to payloads or drop-out payloads in geo.
So we found our niche.
You start out with a plan and the plan changes when you get gone,
and luckily it's changed in a good direction.
There's one aspect I want to dig into.
It wasn't on my list, but top of mind because I never know who actually asked this question to.
So, you know, National Security has their space launch program that is now broken up into two lanes.
You've got the big high-budget missions, and then you've got these other missions that are bid out on a task order basis.
They still, in this phase, though, have not really cracked the solution.
to having something like impulse take part in that program.
They are still looking at it as like,
we're going to put our satellite on a rocket.
That needs to take us all the way to where we're going.
They don't have a system in place for those payloads flying on impulse
outside of these very specific contracts that we're talking about.
Yeah.
Is that something you're trying to push back on and saying like,
well, here's the way that we should operate this?
Because it's a weird setup from their, you know, paperwork perspective.
As you know, those lanes are highly tested.
very political.
It goes all the way back.
You're opening of a DC office or what?
Yeah, it goes all the way back to the, you know,
SpaceX, ULA fight, you know, a decade ago.
And, you know, and then all the new players coming in.
And now here we are with an upper stage.
It doesn't fit the plan.
So we're working our way through it.
I can't say too much about what, you know,
what we're doing and what's going on.
Eventually, eventually my thing is we go fly Helios next year reliably.
They've got to make it fit.
because it is such an improvement over the current situation.
It can, you know, it really improves your ability to get to these high,
higher gerbets more cost-effectively and more often.
So it's going to get resolved.
I'm not sure exactly how it's going to get resolved.
Yeah.
Speaking of my spirits, when the, when the hardware shows up and it works really well
and it flies a lot, people figure out.
We just, we need to stay to go fly it, you know?
It's like, everybody's like, that sounds great.
When are you flying?
So that's the main thing where,
You know, head down getting this thing ready to go fly.
And hopefully you only have to sue the Air Force once in your life.
That's hopefully not a thing you have to go through again.
It is, I get it from the perspective of like, how do you structure this program to take, you know,
all the diligence basically that they need to do on those launchers to provide the assurance for the missions.
And then it's like, all right, well, how many, it's like Russian nesting dolls?
Like how many things are we stacked on top of that we have to make sure that we can trace all the, you know,
the sourcing for all these parts?
I get it, the system's not designed for it, but it's also, I don't know, the fact that they could miss out on really good opportunities definitely drives them crazy.
Well, this is why, you know, our whole plan for the beginning is to provide a commercial product that also is useful to the government.
And, you know, they call it dual use.
It doesn't always work in space.
It works great for launch vehicles in upper stages because of the thing called EE.
You know, these standardized payloads, these ride-share things, these standard adapters, it's a standard.
And whether it's on a third stage or a second stage, you know, the payloads fit.
So we go and fly a commercial and prove out our reliability with commercial all launches
and make sure that we have met all the requirements of the government, and then, you know, we're ready to fly them.
So it's a process.
Is that your process for the Lunar Lander as well?
Is that the idea?
Or are you going to try to, you know, lead out the way that the others have,
which is get a Clips contract.
Lunar Lander is likely to be, you know, a civil, you know, NASA, NASA project.
We're talking with NASA.
We've loved to, you know, to fly intermediate side payloads in between what Clips could do
and what HLS can do.
So there's this gap in the middle.
our mantra is we can fly 10 times the payload for you know twice the price or something it's just not
exactly that but it's something something I'm not in yeah yeah so we can you know depending if we
fly on a falc I think it was in my blog we fly on a single stick Falcon 9 we can put about a ton
on the surface if we if we go up to heavy we can go three tons maybe five depending on how
optimized the system becomes so it's uh and it's not it's not going to add a lot of costs you know
I think we have a, you know, that's our whole thing.
We want to do, we want to be efficient cost-wise, but also reliable.
Find that magic in between, you know, is what we're looking for.
So is that a full-blown team working on that right now, like structures and all that?
Because I'm sure a lot of the avionics and tanking and engines is what you're doing elsewhere,
but the lander-specific stuff, is that something spun up or more of a on the drawing board?
It's on the drawing board.
We've done a lot of preliminary work with proposals and things like that.
that. You've seen the renders of it that we put out. There's still a lot of engineering to do on that.
So we need a contract to lock that thing down. The good thing is that the avionics vault that we fly on Mira will work on that.
It's good for geo and beyond. So the engines are kind of the same that we're developing qualifying right now.
that if we need COPVs, we've made every type of size and pressure.
We're pretty good at making those now.
So we have the pieces.
So this is a huge head start.
It's not like, hey, you just start from scratch.
You need an engine.
You need a structure.
You need, you know, the structure is similar to what we're doing on Helios.
So it's, that's what we're, you know, that's what we're telling the government is,
because we already have a lot of these pieces and certainly the know-how and improving
flight heritage.
So it's, I think that it's pretty compelling, hopefully.
How do you feel about the current Artemis shakeup of sorts going on with this idea of changing things around?
And are you looking at it in terms of opportunities or just kind of sit down the sidelines and gone out?
Opportunities.
And I just think it's great.
You know, Jared's awesome.
I just love what he's doing.
He's getting real about this.
He's trying to, you know, he's going to shake it up.
He's pushing.
He's trying to greatly improve things.
I haven't been falling too closely all this stuff.
a lot going on. I've got my head
head down here working on my things, but
what I've seen looks really great.
I have been following it all, and I still feel like
I'm missing half the story. There's
an interview every other day and
some new announcement.
It's cool. I mean, there's
a ton going on, and certainly when you see
more openness
in the program to different kinds of
architectures, I think it lends its hand to something
like you're talking about, where we stacked a mirror
on a helios, and now we've got a lander on a
helios, and something we've
needed for a long time that, you know, SpaceX kind of started this whole thing.
Commercial companies can do it faster, better, cheaper.
And, you know, now there's a whole bunch of new players coming in, including us, that
want to, you know, springboard from there and continue.
So I think right now we're showing that we're, you know, we're a pretty reliable partner,
so we definitely want to be a player in this.
I think the last time we talked, I mean, it's been a,
It's been a weird couple of years for Starship generally.
And so anytime I talk to yourselves, K2 down the street from you,
people that have a lot of opportunity, you know,
when Starship is flying payloads,
I'm kind of stuck in a holding pattern with a lot of these questions.
Nerves of like, all right, then what, right?
When are we getting to the then what is a big question mark?
But in this time, we've also got New Glenn that started to fly.
There's, you know, people are growing their launch vehicles across the industry.
Neutrons coming online in a, I don't know, a year, year and a half, something like that.
So Stoke.
Stoke certainly is getting a lot closer.
So what are the things there that you're tracking that are most impactful for impulse?
Does it better because you designed it to fit on any rocket so you don't really care and you're like, just gets a pad?
I think it's interesting that really I started the company based on Starship flying often and it will.
You know, they've got, I think they've really, I mean, their whole plans depend on Starship.
So they got to go fix the each shield and get it tight.
and I have all confidence they're going to do that.
But will they fly commercial payloads in the next 10 years?
So, you know, like somebody said, it really opened up the opportunity for all these new start,
these new launch vehicles because they won't possibly be directly competing with Starship for a while.
It sounds like possibly.
We can fly, like I mentioned before, EELV, we can fly on any rocket.
So we're glad to continue to fly at Falcon 9 and relativity and any others.
You can fly on any rocket from a physical perspective, but how about from the business and cost perspective?
More difficult, yeah.
We're working that.
Yeah.
I just take it of like, you know, some of these farings are kind of weird.
Like Stokes got a weird design.
Yeah, well, I mean, certainly for Helios, it's big.
It's got to fly on a, yeah, I mean, it's designed.
to fly on a 17 ton to Leo
so it's got to be that
or bigger. We can certainly short
tank it if we're close
and still do a lot of Delta V
but yeah it's got to fly
on a medium or bigger lot to you.
So that means like Stoke is more
of a mirror vehicle then. Yeah
it's probably not going to fly on the
original Stoke version. It's probably not
going to fly even on Neutron. I think
I don't think neutron's quite there.
It's a little smaller than that. Yeah.
Yeah. Eight tons or something, 10 tons.
Yeah. It has a smaller ferrant.
I think, so I don't know if it'd fit.
But anyway, it will certainly fly on Falcon 9 and, you know,
and some of the bigger rockets.
New Glenn could fit a couple under that thing.
Yeah, yep.
Would that be something at the cards too,
that a dual manifest of the faring's big enough?
Like, on a Starship or New Glenn, what could you do in there?
Oh, man.
On Starship, we could fly three.
I think we could fit three.
How we get them out of there is up to Space Act to face.
To a pancake down to a pancake and then slide out the side.
I mean, they got to be that shape because, you know,
panaking tanks really makes them heavy.
So, yeah, they can't go through the pest dispenser.
Yeah, no, they cannot do that.
So that's, you know, that's really up in there.
You know, everybody, I think K2's, which is a plan, fly on Starship.
Others certainly us, too.
It's going to happen hopefully someday.
It's pushed out, but there's space is hot right now.
These guys all need to catch up.
It's like, you know, I want to see Newland flying off and I want to see ULA flying off.
And I want to see Neutron start to fly.
I want to see Stoke fly, you know.
Relativity, you know, they're getting close, you know.
So, yeah.
It's been, yeah, it's been a lot of the years of the same kind of storyline.
So I'm excited for stuff to change in that regard.
I know it's all.
We're going to fly this year.
Okay, we're going to fly next year.
Okay, we flew once.
It's pretty slow, but it'll pick up.
I mean.
Luckily, wherever you are, people.
tend to be flying.
Yeah.
I mean, if you go back, if you go back 15 years, what did we flew once in 2010, once in, I don't, it was the same thing.
You know, it took us a while.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Us, meaning SpaceX.
Yeah.
You can still say us.
Yeah, I can still say us.
All right, so, you know, the market, the civil side is pretty chaotic right now.
There's tons of opportunities there.
You also have a lot of these new technologies coming on.
You mentioned the electric propulsion.
there's the nuclear electric propulsion side of things.
The vehicles you have now, the mirrors and the helios, you know, those are built the way they are,
but are there, is the electric propulsion vehicle a new thing, or is it an electric version of those vehicles?
And then that, you know, factors back into what we're saying.
If Mira only fits on a stoke, but now is an electric propulsion mirror,
that is a different class of emissions than you would be flying on current Mira.
Yeah, we're looking at, you know, what opportunities there would be for electric propulsion.
The main one right now is just geo stationkeeping.
So it really helps the mirror to have just to have a small amount of propellant
and electric propulsion on board to do that north-south station keeping,
just a few tens of meters per second per year.
So you're not burning your chemical propellant.
Then if you need to make a big maneuver, you're preserving that propellant.
So that's probably the first use for it.
And then we're waiting to see what other uses could be.
Like we could, like one of the things I said is, you know, looked at is like if we, if we replaced all of the chemical prop on the tanks on Mira with Krypton and put, you know, more solar on how much Delta V can we get out of a stage?
We could have a pretty high-performance stage.
We could say go out to the Lagrange point back.
We can go out to an asteroid and back.
So take a long time.
And it's, you know, the other thing is it takes a long time to qualify that because now you got an engine that's going to be.
to burn for most of a year.
You've got to demonstrate your life.
It's a lot of propellant.
It's a lot of test time.
So, you know, we're just getting started, but who knows where the feature is going to take us.
I was going to ask about beyond the moon, right?
When you're talking about lunar missions, asteroids are pretty close.
You've got Astroforge and others that are doing some of these near-Earth things.
You've got a lot of interest imminently in Apophis.
There's talk of everybody flying these different kinds of missions.
Is that something that would be up your fancy?
if somebody came by and asked like, hey, can we do some Helios things beyond the moon?
This is what we want to do, yeah.
This is the stuff we're excited about, you know,
doing these cool science missions or exploration missions.
Yeah, this is what, this is why we're here.
This is why the team here is excited about doing cool stuff like that.
We've got a couple minutes.
So just give us a heads up of what we should be watching.
What's like near-term roadmap stuff that you're most excited about?
Helios obviously has come up a bunch of.
in terms of its first flight, but what else mission-wise is it that you're excited about?
A lot of updates on Helios as we get closer to flight.
Some big updates coming this year as we fly early next year.
That's going to be probably the big thing.
A lot of mirrors in the production right now,
so you can see a lot more of those flying here in the future.
Yeah, hopefully some big NASA announcements.
Who knows?
That would really be cool.
I feel like that's the one place we've missed.
We've done quite a bit of commercial work.
We've done a bunch of government work, but we haven't really had a big,
we've had some small NASA contracts.
But if you think back to the early days of SpaceX,
we were built on that, you know, Dragon was built on NASA money.
And, you know, it was a great anchor to build a technology that just really helped us in
space, you know, like, what a great investment that NASA paid.
like if you really look honestly like we didn't have SpaceX wherever we be so that I think was one of the best investments ever made so hopefully we can you know lightning could strike twice we'll be a great investment really open up that like the future in space there's a Mars sample return that's uh out for the picking right now so yeah we'd love to plan that put some nice paperwork together that might be something I don't know that that one's really interesting because a lot of the names that came up on this show you know are involved in what we might do there but um
It's, I think, probably rightfully, not really getting the attention right now.
Like, there's other things that they want to solve more imminently,
but it does feel like one that is going to become increasing the important.
Is that, I don't know.
I mean, size-wise, you probably need more than what you're planning for the relativity mission, right?
That's a smaller scale lander than you're going to need a much bigger thing to handle the MSR platform.
Yeah.
Yeah, if you would, to come back, you know, to have a map, you know, a harsh-ascent vehicle.
The return part is the hard part.
You do some pretty big landing mass.
Yeah.
We've looked at it.
We've looked at what architecture we could do it.
It's a new architecture.
Again, it's using the pieces that we have.
Like a new structure, but the engines and the avionics and a lot of the stuff we already have.
It's the EDL, the entry descent landing, the parachutes, the heat shield.
That's a lot of work.
Yeah.
We would look to NASA to help us there.
For sure.
Yeah.
They're like the only ones that can do it.
I mean, they've got a proven system.
we would just use, rather than go and reinvent that, you know,
there's a three shield cone, whatever it's called.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Awesome. Well, this has been great.
I'd love following along with what you all are working on.
I said this before we start recording, but there's always, you know,
our favorite shows are the places where you go to their factory
and you're tripping over hardware because there's just so much of it.
And you can get that sense that there's a lot kicking around the impulse facilities.
So it's good.
There's quite a buzz here.
You know, a lot of people.
people out on the floor build cool stuff.
My very dedicated team, it's happening.
This is a pretty exciting place.
Awesome.
Well, thanks so much.
I'll come visit, I'll come visit L.A. soon.
And then maybe we can get you back on after Helios flies and break it down a little bit.
Great talking, Anthony.
Thanks again to Tom for coming on the show.
It was awesome to hang out, talk with him, hear what they're working on.
Like I said, there are companies that do a lot and build a lot, and there's companies that talk a lot.
And I like the former.
I mean, the latter is really good for content, but the former is really good for space.
So that's what we like to see.
Thanks to everyone out there who supported the show.
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