Off-Nominal - 132 - Boneless Skineater

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Tom Mueller, founder, CEO, and CTO of Impulse Space and former Propulsion CTO at SpaceX. We’ll talk about what Impulse Space is up to, including their literally-just-launched first mission to space.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 132 - Boneless Skineater (with Tom Mueller) - YouTubeAccess Any Orbit | Impulse SpaceImpulse Space (@GoToImpulse) / XImpulse Space on X: “Any company’s first launch of their product is always an incredible feat. But for Impulse, ours is a little more special because of the journey it took to get here. We moved into a new 55,000 sq ft facility in Redondo Beach in March of 2023…”SpaceX Transporter 9 rideshare features new OTV from Tom Mueller's Impulse Space - NASASpaceFlight.comIMPULSE SPACE ANNOUNCES LEO EXPRESS-2 and LEO EXPRESS-3 MISSIONS | Impulse SpaceSpaceX founding employee successfully moves from rockets to in-space propulsion | Ars TechnicaProject HARP - WikipediaFollow TomTom Mueller (@lrocket) / XFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, everybody. Happy Thursday, Jake. Hello, happy Thursday. We are here for an excellent show. Tom Mueller is with us of Impulse Space Now. Big week. Stuff just into space, so I'm sure you've been busy. How's everything going out there?

Good. Yeah, this is probably the most important week for us this year. In fact, in history of my company. Yeah, this year. Very casually. Yeah. Yeah, we'll talk about this, but timeline-wise, it sounds like this was a big year from start to finish. It's everything happened this year pretty much.

Yeah, it did. Yeah, as you saw probably on the tweet from Impulse, you know, we just got moved into this building and really started the design of this spacecraft, you know, like the real design of it just, you know, earlier this year. And here it is flying and healthy and happy and live. Lonely? Lonely. Lonely. The destiny of every satellite. Yeah, I can't tell that's a good or bad thing, honestly.

It turns out he's really into satellite servicing, Jake. It's an announcement here. He would like all satellites to not be lonely. That's the mission. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. Good kid.

We saw you get a beverage out of the fridge right before we went live. What kind of fun thing did you bring? It's a little early in the day for it, so it's a light beer. It's actually my executive assistant is originally from Argentina, so it's an Argentine beer. I wouldn't even try to pronounce that. Jake might have us on this. Gilmese? Cool.

Nice. Yeah. Although our Argentinian accents are pretty. Yeah. They're pretty wild accents, so I might be pronouncing it wrong. Yeah. What you got, Jake? It's good.

I like it. Did you make anything? We're moving up the world, from Argentina now to the northern end of the Yucatan Peninsula. What you got down there? Yeah. Well, I'm having an orange day. So I got an orange shirt on it and I got an orange beer. My local brewery here in Mereda is clearing out their pumpkin ale.

Nice. I like that. Orange is my family color. Okay. Excellent. My dad had two orange logging trucks in earlier. his career and so it's kind of like orange orange kind of like the family color his call his his call name on the CB radio was sun kissed that's an excellent name honestly that's

that's up there actually and they're there's telling us in the chat here it's actually it's the one-year anniversary of artemus one sLS big orange rocket so oh yeah it is yes wow i totally forgot about that Rock and the F-Rush. I mean, I got my orange. Oh, man, you're branded across the board. It's just a mystery that the impulse site and all that is blue. So you're going to have to do an update. Yeah, rebrand.

I did not bring anything orange. I did bring, so I thought we were going to be broadcasting on the eve of the starship launch. So my first one was a Hail Mary from Westahick and Brewing Co. I brought a couple beers from places that I tend to cycle pass. So I got the Hail Mary that I was drinking in the pre-show, Jake, where we settled a lot of debates. And then the second one is called pow juice, which is also pretty good, hazy double IPA. This one's from the Concha Hocken Brewing Company. I think this one's 9%.

So back half of the show is going to have some good questions. What did we do? Pre-show, Jake. We did, maybe we can get Tom's take on this. I have a spicy space take that you might be the most qualified person that could ever comment on this. my feeling is that no one other than people like yourself who actually work on vehicles

cares about or should care about max queue and that the last time a rocket has fallen apart of max queue was like probably the 1960s how does that sit with you yeah I was never too worried about max queue I know the structures guys

sweated over it narrow guys but the rocket engine doesn't care Yeah, right. You're just sad to be throttled down because we like to run on 100% thrust. That's the most boring part of the flight for you. This is the part we have to take it easy. Our thing's doing too good for the rest of the rocket right now. When we upgraded the engine for Flight 3 of Falcon 1, that engine was designed to go on Falcon 9,

and we actually had to throttle it down for the Falcon 1 structure. It's actually running throttled, just not the smash structure. But I thought was really cool. All right. Well, that's the one time I heard about Max Q, Jake. If the Merle, was that the 1C, would have plowed the Falcon 1 right down through the atmosphere. Yeah. Yeah, the 1C version for Falcon 1 ran it.

Like, what was it? Like 90. It actually stayed at sea level thrust. We had the throttle as it got into vacuum thrust. Yeah. you were out doing yourself there so let's let's keep talking about some of the old days because I'd love to hear about this is probably more recent than that but impulse space you got you just mentioned you got something in space right now but we'd love to hear a little bit of the origin story

of when you started thinking about this kind of idea what were the early days you know concepting this out and why you've chosen and maybe I guess for people that don't know impulse space a little bit of the elevator pitch of why you've chosen what you're doing and what it is that you're doing. Yeah. Well, I just, it's kind of like the K2 story that with with Starship, there's going to be a lot of mass going to orbit very cheaply. And it's, it's like storable propellants, you know, hydrazine and, you know, the traditional hypergall propellants just really don't make sense anymore because there are hundreds of dollars a kilogram. And, you know, the, you know, the traditional hypergall propellants, And now you want to throw many tons of them.

It's just, you know, it's going to cost more to load the spacecraft than it does the flight, you know, with propellant. And I've always thought about what, you know, what bi-propellant, you know, reasonable performance propellants are out there. And it always kind of came back to, you know, I did a lot of work with hydrogen peroxide back in the day. And it's not a big fan of it. It's the only, I told somebody I don't. It's the only time I've ever seen an oxidizer tank just spontaneously explode down at our chest site. That was on the laser guys were using it. It wasn't the rocket thing.

It was the laser guys were using it on one of their chemical lasers. And it just like, it likely happened in the middle of the night. This stainless steel tank blew up. And we just had a lot of trouble with that stuff. And I'm like, so it's out. and it's like nitrous and ethane. And even though their performance is a little lower and even worse, their density is kind of low, you don't have to carry a pressurization system because they're self-pressurized.

So it's kind of a pretty neat, you know, moderate performance, pipe propelling. You know, we're getting with this little guy, we're getting 290 seconds of ISP, which is pretty dang good for a five-pounder. casually takes a rocket engine off the desk next to him yeah audio listeners will have to reference the video feed to realize that he booked up a rocket engine and held it in front of his face go to the Twitter feed you made a follow of some laws by showing me that he's a Canadian in Mexico so watch out oh I tire police just point it my way not his

way so soon as I as I left SpaceX in 2020 I started you know I got board. I started to mess around. I designed actually the Rajal engine, which is our, you know, our 180 pound, the Mars Lander engine. And I actually designed that thing and went and got it printed. I went to Morf 3D, a local company here in Nelson Gondo and went and got it printed and, you know, was going to mess around with it. And that's when, you know, my investor said, hey, you can incorporate to do something real. No, no, no, no, no. You skipped over that part way too quick. I printed a Mars Lander engine. I was going to mess around with it. Like, what did it? How do you mess around with a Mars lander engine?

I know you live close to the desert, I guess, out there in the West Coast. It's like getting back to my amateur rocket routes, but, you know, it's a big step up now that I've, you know, 18 years at SpaceX. And 3D printing is just cheating for rocket engines, right? You could make such a great engine so fast and easily. It's the perfect solution for, you know, for rocket engines, especially for the injectors or turbo pump parts,

just about anything that's small enough to print. And so this was the first one that I personally myself designed for 3D printing. You know, we had, you know, like the Super Draco engine and some other ones. Certainly a lot of Raptor was, but I didn't design those myself. I, you know, I helped with the design of it, but I wasn't like on the CAD designing myself. So this was the first one that I, and it's really cool because instead of designing it for like a part that you can be, shin, you just design the fluid passages to be in what you think would be the perfect shape to get good mixing and flow and low losses and all that, and then just put some, some walls around it to

give it structure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come up some pretty cool looking stuff. If you, if you could see the inside of that engine, which Iitar would not let you let you inside of that engine. He literally means if you could, Jake, if you could ever. Yeah. It's a, yeah, it's pretty trick inside that.

So you were just like, for fun, you were like, let me see if this, like what this whole world's about, like printing and making this rocket engine or, and then you were like, I don't know, I'm going to blow some stuff up. Like, what was the plan? Yeah. No, I was just, you know, going to probably got the desert run it like I did back in the amateur days and maybe start a company at some point. And then Scott Nolan, who's a, you know, one of the principals at founders fund, said, hey, Tom, what are you doing? And I told him about it, he said, are you going to like make a real company on this? I go, oh, probably someday. He said, why not now? You know?

Like, yeah, maybe I should do something. So here we are. So it started with the Marslander idea. That was sort of the kickstarting thing? No, no, no. Actually, the Mars lander came or later. It was just really like, what size engine do I want to make? Like a space engine, like 200-poundish would be.

good. Actually, just, you know, I said one-inch throat, just to draw something up, and that's kind of where it started. And it ended up being 180 pounds of thrusted vacuum. 170 pounds on Mars, because there's a little bit of atmosphere there, so you have to have a smaller air area ratio, but it's about 170 on Mars, 180 in vacuum. It just ended up. But it's going to be like a little satellite engine, which is what I cut my teeth on back in the early days at TRW was, what's just the, you know, satellite engines. So that was the start of it. And I always wanted to do an orbital transfer vehicle because, you know, the whole plan was then once starship starts flying, there's potentially over 100 tons going up every flight.

And it's probably not going to be just one big 100 ton payload, it'll be lots of, lots of things. And it's like they need to be moved around to where they really want to go, you know, like, you know, Like we always say, it's like the container ship coming into port. Everything on it needs to go somewhere else. It's almost like that. And so we're going to be the semi-trailer to move them off the container ship. And we're not the only one doing that. It's an addressable market.

So it's like something to start out with. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we just saw that. Where was that stat? I don't know. It was on Twitter or something. I don't know if it was SpaceX. themselves that had posted it or some fan

had made it, but it was like, here's the summary of Transporter and it was like 789 satellites they've already put in this space. It's like, you look at something like that and that really like highlights the whole business case. It's like this is why your company is, it makes sense,

right? Because it's like, look at how many satellites are suddenly going up. And those aren't like, you know, those are like necessarily Starlings, I don't think. Those were like customer payloads, right? So like that was, that's pretty wild. And nine launches, yeah. There's been nine launches. Yeah. There's been nine launches. and it's like up until recently like half of the active satellites in orbit you know like exclude starlink there's only i don't know

we're still around like the two to and a half thousand mark of non starlink satellites active in orbit yeah so it's like yeah so how do you when you were when you kind of settle on the idea of the orbital transfer vehicle where there certain um decisions about the architecture there or some of the the the technical specifics that you had decided, you know, we're going to take this path, whereas all the others in the industry have taken this path, anything specific like that, that you were kind of shading as your expertise? There's quite a bit of competition into space, but they're mostly, most people are keeping it pretty small and going after Kubsat.

So we just said, we're going to go, it was easy to design because it's just like, let's max out the capability of one of those lower transporter spots. So it's your volume constrained and mass constrained. And how much payload can we get there, get in there? and what kind of delta V can we, you know, maximum amount of delta V can we give it? So you try to maximize the ISP on the engine and venomize the weight of the structure of the spacecraft and use the volume as efficiently as you can. And so, you know, that's where Mira 1K Pro.

Try to pull up some picks so we can reference them here. It's interesting because like when we had the K2 guys on, I asked this question of like, you know, because they're designing these enormous satellites. that are kind of dependent on their being volume, like starship-sized volume, right? And right now that's basically starships. Like you're building a company around kind of like one launch vehicle. And for you, it's almost like the opposite end of the spectrum, but kind of the same idea. Like, you know, do you think about like, do I build this whole product line, the service offering

around Falcon 9 being a present thing, right? Because if you have these transporter missions and that's where all the satellites are going, And that's the only rocket that's really doing that in this volume, then you're building to Falcon 9 as a platform, right? Do you think about that as a company? And do you think about, like, how to protect yourself from the risk of, I don't know, like maybe SpaceX decides to just cancel Falcon 9 as soon as starships up and running and then it's gone, right?

Well, it's just because it's designed for, it's designed for an Esper ring, which are going to be around, I think, for a long time. Okay, okay. I'm assuming they're going to fly them also on, on Starship. And our next product, Helios, is designed to perform more for Starship, like bigger stuff,

much bigger stuff. So, yeah, we're future-proof in our company. Good, good. Yeah, no, it's just, it's, this is like a really fascinating time for me, like in the launch market, because we spent so many years, like,

worrying about cost of launch. Like, it's like that, you know, just getting off the ground was like such an important thing to figure out. and you and many others kind of solve that. You know, like we've hit a whole new inflection paradigm for that first stage getting to space. And now we're starting to explore like the next leg of the journey. And it's not only is it much cheaper to get to space.

It's so much more reliable. Think about it. Like the Falcon 9 has flown like 150 times without failure now. Yeah, it's just wild. Incredible. Incredible. And that's like 2,500 mission duty sites. of Merlin engines. It's pretty amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. I tweeted that I tweeted that, you know, I love to fly on Falcon Nike because you know you're going to get to orbit. It's like, you know, yeah. Yeah. Don't worry about like launch failure failures like you had to on past vehicles. Yeah. Yeah. Like as a platform, it's like, I mean, we'll write about this in the rocket history books for a very, very long time, I think, is where, you know, where Falcon 9 fits. in the history of orbit. But it's just the world that's coming out of that, I don't, I mean, everybody was hoping for all these great things,

but I don't know if we all kind of like really had it figured out what was going to happen. And so kind of like now seeing sort of like the stuff that's being built on top of that and where it's all kind of going. So like I don't think I was spending a lot of time thinking about OTVs in 2015. Like I just straight up like was not thinking of that was a huge problem to solve. Everything I was thinking about was like, if we don't get the rockets to work, nothing else matters. Like, so whatever. And now it's like, oh, we need all this in-space propulsion.

Like, okay, I didn't know that was like such an important thing, but it is. So it's, I don't know, it's kind of interesting to be a sort of like a point in history. Yeah. I mean, the amount of, the number of companies and the amount of, you know, new space designs have come, that have just come forth since SpaceX got gone is really pretty cool. Yeah. You mentioned the scale, I think, of the lander engine, which was, now I'm blanking on the name. What was the name of it?

Rigel. Rajel. Rajel, which is the blue star and my favorite constellation, the Orion constellation. And then you picked an obscure star for this other engine, which is it safe? The small blue star next to Rajel is safe. Right. Safe. Okay.

I mean, it's also a good sounding rocket engine name. Like, I have the safe engine. You know, it plays off well. Yeah. Can you talk about that one a little bit, too? Because people are in the chat, we're saying, you know, 180 pounds seems a bit much for OTV. But I don't think, I think the OTV engine is a bit smaller, right? Yeah.

The ride-jol is throttable and is great for landers. You know, like, four of those happen to be perfect for the Marslander or for the lunar lander. or for a lunar lander, or if we wanted to do something like ISS deorbit or something, like eight of those would do it. Hypothetically. Just to throw down that. In case anyone is,

yeah, yeah. Just about that. Yeah, or just deorbiting capsules. You want high thrust. You want to be able to go to a pretty highly elliptical orbit and then do a,

have enough thrust that you can do it in a single burn over a short arc to hit your, your lips on the ground, come in steep and eat your lips on the ground. So high thrust is important in certain applications. For most, if you just change in orbit, you don't need a lot of thrust. And then the little five-pound safe works just great for that. This is the qual engine. So this guy was tortured pretty good.

It has, I think, like, almost two hours of runtime on it and 6,000 starts on it. Wow. I always love looking at those, like the little engines that go on satellites. I'm like, man, there's so much. The briefcase engines? Yeah, I love that. I got lots of them there, like all over my desk. Send me one, you know?

Look at my backdrop here. I just got like cameras and stuff. Uh-oh, this one doesn't have a cap, Jake. This one doesn't have the red anti-Jake cap on it. Cover your hand over that. It's got, you know, ox valve, fuel valve, a sparking coil. You know, cooling channels all printed right into it. Really nice little injector on it.

We polish the inside of the nozzle to reduce heat transfer give it higher performance. All the standard stuff. And it also, you know, it has the, you see when it's brand new, it has a black, black high immissivity paint on the nozzle. And then after we burn it for a while, it turns this ashen color. But it still has high immisivity, so it runs cooler as it radiates. All right.

So. A little master's course here. Yeah, yeah. We're going to be way smarter at the end. This is the most we're ever going to grow up on it in a single podcast. 100%. And that's Rockets 101 there. Well, you're talking to two podcasters, so, you know, take it easy.

Yeah, we need Rockets Zero, Zero, one. We do software during the day, and then we podcast about space. So, like, you know. Can you talk a little bit about the mission that's ongoing? This is Leo Express 1. I don't know how much you can or can't say about what's going on with it. I can. You know, we're going to do an announcement next week.

We are having some. the com, like radio problems. So we can get data down. It's hard to get data up and high speed data. So there's a subconfig thing on the, it turns out that radios are worse than rocket science. They're like black magic. Yeah, it's magic.

The software configurable radios are, they're an analog device and they're a digital device, and you've got to figure out which one is the problem, doctor ship. I'm learning a lot. I think we're going to solve it, but we're not out of the wood yet. The great thing is we're getting data down, and we know that everything we built is working perfect.

Like the, like, I remember the thermal guy was pulling his hair out because we don't have any, you know, we haven't done any thermal testing, like just, just modeling and very little thermal testing. It's like, is it going to really run at this temperature? It's running exactly the temperature. It's running at 70 degrees out, like 69 degrees out. The battery's at 85. Everything's perfect. It's like, you know, the body rates are really low, which tells you like there's no propulsion leaks or anything. If you have a leak, this thing start moving.

So it's just sitting up there. That's why I said it was lonely at the beginning. It's like we're not able to talk to it very well. So it's kind of like, hey, guys, I'm up here. Are you going to tell me to do something? We're resolving it. We got a couple tests we're going to do here in the next couple days, and I think we're going to resolve it.

So people have high hopes that's going to get the radio things. We get fixed. So that's the scoop. You guys get the scoop on what's going on here. This is great. I do want to warn you, the other scoop that we have was Jim Bridenzine telling us that Tom Cruise is flying on an Axiom flight, which never happened, and we assume he sunk the

possibilities of that on our show. So, I do just want to generally worrying that we don't have a great track record of scoop. I don't know, it hasn't happened yet. Like, so. These things take a while. That's been a long time. That's been like, you know, I was like, early pandemic when he dropped that one, so.

That was DM2, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, there was a, I saw at least a couple of mentions of the payload on board was from trust. Was it, trust point? Trust point, yeah. Is that deploying or is that like a hosted payload kind of situation?

Yeah, we're going to deploy it. Okay, cool. Nice. Yeah. You're doing everything at once. I think it's their second KubeSat for a, it's sort of like a GPS type constellation of encryption. Hmm. Yeah.

That's cool. In the future to deploy their constellation. The mirror is set up to have, you know, multiple deployers in each side. So we can take like 32 or maybe 48, 3 U Kupatsats up at time and just deploy them. So instead of waiting for them to drift into place over months, we can deploy them in like a week or two, get them all laid out. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, so they're right there on the side, huh? Mm-hmm.

this thing's sweet looking like I'm I'm loving the design of this situation yeah something about the fixed solar array just makes it feel like real reliable and industrial in a great way you know well we're gonna we're gonna mess that up because the version two of it which is which is meant to go to geo is going to have steerable much larger deployable and steerable solar so that we can maintain like like one kilowatt up at geo and radiation-tolerant hardware. That's our orbit fab Camino design, the vert B2 of it.

So it's going to have a different-looking solar. Yeah, I mean, it'll be doing a cooler's thing, so, you know. Yeah, yeah. And then, I mean, you've talked up, like, at least inner solar system work as well. Obviously, the Mars stuff we should probably talk about at some point. Yeah. Do you've, are there tweaks like that you're talking about with chain-it-solar ray-config or radiation-hardening to get. to different orbits? Are there other differences that you're thinking about with these different

destinations, or do you feel like this kind of base model can take us from here to the asteroid belt or something like that? No. So Mira can't really do, you know, interplanetary. It's, you know, it's, it can do one kilometer per second-ish, one and a half with like a cube sat or two. And we could, we could definitely make a higher delta V version of it. But we're talking maybe two or three kilometers per second limit. To get out there, we have the get there design, which is Helios, and we have the stay there design, which is Mira. So get there is Helios, which is basically a third stage for like Falcon 9 or Starship.

I love when people start talking about third stages. So that's when everything gets fun. If you've got a third stage, some shit is going down, you know? Like, you're into something serious at that point. Yeah. I love it. Listen, I've heard some people tell me about Helios, and as much as they told me is that there's a name Helios.

Yeah. And we have little scoop. We have these flyers that are out in industry, so you might see these around. So this is what it looks like. Look at that. That looks like a third stage. That's a legit third stage. And that's like a three-ton satellite on top or two-ton satellite on top

and a bunch of mirrors or something like that around that Esperance. and a 20,000 pound thrust. It's aiming a completely realistic direction away from Earth as well. I always love that about those visualizations. Right. Rockets totally fly straight off of Earth. That's exactly how they go. That is designed to take five tons from Leo,

from like 200, like L'O, like 200 kilometers circular, to parked NGO. Damn. That's a lot. Right now, the only thing that really can do that is a heavy. Like a full-on, full-launch vehicle. Yeah, maximum launch vehicle right now. Yeah.

Damn. Yeah, well, a single stick, single-stick, Falcon 9 cannot take four tons to geo. It can take the GTO, but not GEO. And that's it. Yeah. And those are like, that's probably the higher end of any geo-satellite at the moment that we know about. Yeah, that Viosat that flew earlier this year.

was six tons and that was that was what they call a triple X that was all three cores expendable on a heavy so that's how hard it is to get to jail but it's pricing staging staging efficiency really counts you can have you can have two more booster cores which is kind of like a half a stage which you know they weigh a million they have a million pounds of propellant each or you can just you know have a smaller upper stage and do almost the same thing with you know 13 tons of but not like, you know, just much, much smaller. It's why, how that math works.

That, like, will never, I'll never be comfortable with that math. Listen, we already know you're a falcon-heavy skeptic over there, Jake, all right? Let's take it easy. Jake's a third stage stand and a falcon-heavy skeptic, so. I love me that, I love him that high-energy stuff. That's my first. It's just a Mars elitist, so. You know.

Yeah, yeah. I get it. Throw away those extra cores and give me some ion engines. Let's do this. Let's go. Let's go to Alpha Centauri. Let's do it. So do you can work on that.

Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a fourth stage at a minimum. Yeah. Do you feel like the stuff that you're attracted to in this era that you're in is like parts of the tech tree that SpaceX either was actively or. you know, didn't mean to, but are avoiding? Like, is that fair to say that you're taking on some things that you know are not on the path of where SpaceX is heading? Yeah, yeah. SpaceX is solving, you know, first Leo and really Mars colonization.

So, you know, the secondary transportation in space is not their focus right now. And you're just into it because you know that it's like a thing that has to exist, It's a really fun place to make a lot of different kinds of rocket engines. Well, like, SpaceX has solved low-cost and reliable access to lower-throbot. I want to help solve low-cost, reliable access to everywhere above lower-throbate. And Helios, you know, anything that can get to geo can get anywhere. Yeah.

It's actually easier to get to TLI, you know, towards the moon, to lunar injection that is to, to, to geo because of that plane change you have to do. So this thing is to go anywhere in the inner solar system or outer solar system. I mean, empty this stage. Like if you just have like a half tonne satellite on it, it could do like almost 10 kilometers per second. So that can get you out to the outer planets and, you know, reasonable number of years. So it's a very capable stage.

Wow. This is it, Jake. Yeah. Yeah. To the moons. On the moons. I want to talk about Mars, but before we get to it, thought, I just want to ask, because this, like, Leo satellite, like you said, you started really designing it.

I think you saw the announcement or whatever was January, and it's in space now. And I have to just ask, like, that seems pretty remarkable to me that 11 months later it's, like, flying. And I want to just kind of ask, like, what do you do differently, like, to make something happened that quickly. Like turn around in a single year to put something in space seems like kind of like, why aren't more articles being written about this? I'm not really sure. There's companies that have went out of business quicker, you know, like, you know, like, you know, it's a couple things. We have a very experienced crew. You know, I got a bunch of

of my guys that helped develop Merlin and Raptor here. And because of our, we have a great your reputation, which we could screw up if this thing fails. But we have a great reputation, so we're able to hire. We got some real spacecraft people in here. We're great on hardware and propulsion. We're a little weak on, you know, guidance, navigation and control and radios, clearly. So, and we're learning this, I consider this our Falcon 1, and I was nervous about this thing like we were on Falcon 1 because I felt like we have a great team and we had a really nice spacecraft. I think it's a world-class little spacecraft, but you just don't know what you've missed, kind of like this radio problem. Nobody saw that coming. It's like you can't test everything

on the ground. Same thing as a rocket, and all the things that you missed come out. So we were just sweating it. We did this pretty fast, and we wish we had more time to test, but, you know, or a startup, we need to get things moving. So it was pretty nerve-wracking. So I'm very, I'm super happy that, you know, like I talked about earlier on, how the spacecraft seems to be in perfect shape up there, other than we can't really talk to it too well. But if we resolve that. That's a piece of problem to solve for sure, yeah. Yeah, I think a week or two fooling around with radios we hear is pretty common on new spacecraft. So it's, you know, this is something that happens.

And I have high hopes we'll resolve it. And then it's like, wow, we kind of nailed it. The spacecraft seems to be doing it really well. But we still have to go up there and do some burns and stuff. So we're not out of the woods yet, even if we fix the radio. We've got to prove that everything works. I trust your rocket engines generally. I feel like you got that part down.

They run great out here in the vacuum chamber, but let's see how they do up there in orbit. Let alone Mars, you know. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, should we go to Mars in, which we're talking about this? You've been tantricly getting closer to Mars here. I know.

There's a teasing around the edges so we can say if this is delicious. He canceled this whole Mars podcast, Tom. Then we did three planetary science episodes in a row. And yet again, here we are halfway through. Finally, we're talking about rockets. I'm back in my life here. And we've got to go back to Mars. So go ahead, Jake.

Yeah. No, I mean, I just, I want to hear. So, okay, I'll admit something to you first. when you first learned about impulse and it was like, we're going to build this little Mars lander. I was like, okay, whatever, guys. Like, whatever you, here's another Mars story. Another 30 degrees cone, like, whatever, what's the thing? You and everybody else wants to put some stupid thing on Mars.

Okay. So, you know, I want to hear from you. Like, why? Why do this? Like, what is the reason that you want to make that kind of like some kind of centerpiece to your company? and what do you hope to really get up? Well, actually, it's kind of an interesting. It wasn't me, really.

It wasn't us. It was, you know, months after we incorporated, you know, back in 21, that fall, my friends at Relativity came over and said, hey, we've got this first launch of Tarran R coming up. It's going to be a demo flight. We would love to do something really cool on our demo flight. Like, go to Mars. Would you be willing to build a spacecraft? to go to Mars and I said, hell yeah.

And then we start talking about, well, what are we going to do? And they said, would you, do you think you could land something on Mars? I said, that sounds like a really good goal. Like, let's try to land something. And I immediately thought that if we're doing that, we're going to copy exactly what NASA has done on the heat shield, the shape, all that, you know, decades of analysis they've done, the parachute design.

This is every degree sphere going, yeah. Your phone, yeah. Uh-oh, Jake, you cameras out. Uh-oh. You can still hear me? Yeah. Tom's going to keep going. You can just be a black screen.

You've got RF problems. This is a great Leo Express 1 demonstration you're doing. He's back. He's back. Where was I? So you were going to drive over to JPL and grift all of their designs of this. Yeah, no, we talk with them. And steal the 70 degrees of your phone.

Yeah. All that stuff is public domain. which is great. The parachute, you know, the guys that made the parachutes are still around. They're willing to make another one. So, because parachutes, as you guys know, the parachutes are tricky. Oh, so hard, yeah. Everybody's having trouble with parents.

So don't mess with your, once it works, don't mess with your. I just love, you're so funny because, like, the humanity's cliche is it's not rocket science. And you're like, parachutes and radios, man. Oh, boy. Like, this is the arts of it's like, yes, the goat of rocket engines would say that, obviously. but everyone else in the world is like rocket science, that's where it's getting tricky. It's the devil you don't know, right? Let me tell you about the software I was debugging earlier.

You would go nice. I know. That's a black hole for me too. So, yeah, the really unique thing about the mission is the lander. So, you know, it has we're trying to make it super mass efficient with biopopoporant, high-performance landing engines, so that so we can maximize the payload. So we're talking about doing a mission that can actually put more cargo on, you know, more payload on Mars than the previous like Insight or Phoenix where there's a size of

vehicle that we're doing for, you know, maybe one-fifth the cost. Like we're talking like those missions are like $800 million. We should be able to do it for less than $200, you know. you can probably charge like four or five hundred though could yeah probably you know I wouldn't short yourself that yeah yeah

the idea is so lower the cost of like I remember this this is a great story early on when we were doing Falcon 1 very early probably within the first few years of company I remember we had some guys from orbital or somewhere come in and oh no somebody from NASA we're talking about

horrible and they said if you can throw the mass of a pegasus and it costs 30 million dollars why why aren't you charging 29 million dollars and Elon Antwer? We're not trying to be like the other guys. We're trying to get the cost down to the minimum. That's why it was $6 million for the Falcon one, not you know, not 30 million. And I'm kind of the same way. It's like I'll make a reasonable profit on this thing but not like but not not not charge the maximum I can get. That's kind of You don't want to do JBL minus a dollar? Yeah. Yeah.

That's just kind of the way I operate. I guess I learned it for me a lot. Yeah. So do you see, like, you know, is it more of like a thing to cut your teeth on and a cool sort of like, you know, horizon goal? Or do you actually think there's some sort of addressable market there for Mars in the, I don't know, what time scale you're looking at, but at all, really? Yeah, no, I think if we could fly one or two of these every, you know, every March opportunity, every 2.2 years, it's, that's, that's reasonable income. That's, you know, we could, if we're charging, you know, 150 million with a 50% margin, like 75 million every two years, that's nice income. I think it's a bargain for if, if we prove it, like we do the demo and it works, like, like, the, like, this.

this first one is just just land and send back video and pictures and say I'm alive, have radios that actually work. Yeah, get the radio's working. That's a good thing. You got these other Leo missions first, yeah? Yeah, they work it out. Yeah, you don't want to duplicate Beagle, too. You want to actually send stuff back, yeah?

You don't want props 50 years from now. Yeah, I mean, look at all these commercial landers that have failed landing on the moon. I'm not saying it's easy, so, you know, we've got to get lucky kind of. And if we do it, then I think NASA would be willing to say we've got a little, you know, we'd take 300 kilograms tomorrow. So NASA has 50 kilograms, some university has 10 kilograms. Like we just pack a bunch of different things in there. And I think we hopefully could get like a little business going. But we've got to do the demo because nobody believes you can land the first time.

You know, like I think famously the Russians have never been able to land anything, you know. NASA's gotten pretty good at it because they keep you know they they use what they've learned on the last ones which is what we're trying to do well leave some achievements for everyone else though Tom you know if you pulled that off it's like oh all right I guess we'll just go do something else with their life you know lands rockets on the earth land stuff on Mars that's cool you know if there's anything that I mean I talk about this a lot especially when I talk to students they asked me like what's the most important thing that you learned and it's be optimistic and you can like if there's anything that I really learned being a you know a founding member of

SpaceX is you can it's it's not as hard as you think it's you know you can do it and so don't be afraid to try hard things just go do it words of wisdom yeah cheers that's what we do So I'm not afraid to try and land on Mars. I would love to go to. I'm about the moon, really. I think the moon is economically more important. I think scientifically Mars is very important, and I want to support that. But really, I think that the moon is super cool.

And asteroids, too. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the atmosphere just gets in your way, right? So it's, yeah. It likes the pure, the pureness of space and rocks. Yeah. You can't even fly in it, like, hardly at all. So, like, you know, it's...

I mean, he said he had to throttle down his engines to get through it. So, you know, you can go full out on the moon. Absolutely. Do you... In that vein, though, right? We've got all these clips flights coming up in the next couple of... I mean, hell, we're like two months away from the first two that are going to go up. Right.

Are you... How do you kind of... I mean, you're in a funny spot with what you just said about, you know, you're planning for... If we can do one or two of these a Mars window, we've got a business going. And then we've got this, the clip side of the market here that is in a funny spot, you know, with weird dynamics of the way that these missions are bid on, kind of feeling like it's a race to the bottom on pricing. And it's putting, you know, there's been companies going out of business in the effort and no one's really flown yet. So it feels like that program is in a tough spot.

And then who knows what's going to happen with the first couple missions. So are you watching that market and trying to figure out if it's something that that important? Fulse would want to get involved in? Yeah, well, I come out of it differently. I wouldn't want to set up my business plan to be just a lunar lander, which some of them did, because that's difficult, because you've got to do everything for this one mission. What we have done is developed the building blocks.

And I always tell my guys this. I go, you know, we have the engines, we have the tanks, the lightweight composite-wrap tanks. We have the avionics, and we're going to come up with the rad-tolerant avionics and get better at software and radios get much better at radios. And then so we have, you go to the dressable market, which is lower Throbot, and then you go to the market that people really want to go to that's hard to get to, which is geo.

And then once you have that, like, you add to that to land on the moon. You know, you use the same building blocks. So you already have on another program, you have the pieces you put together to do, you know, keep adding missions and capability. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's kind of like, you know, what I was mentioning earlier about how, like, we can now go to the next leg of the transportation.

And it's very interesting to see, because it's not just the cost of, like, getting to Leo that's been, like, a game changer, but the volume of stuff we can send there, like the, you know, the cadence we can get means that having building blocks makes more economical sense, right? Because it's like, yeah, well, just reassemble these and we've got another thing.

And there's all, you know, always something going up, so we're always reassembling and blah, blah, blah, blah. So you can do like some pretty fancy stuff. Because like making, you know, reusable components to assemble whatever spacecraft you need didn't make sense if, if you were going to fly once a year and it was, you know, really expensive to do it. Like you make a bespoke special, you know, snowflake kind of spacecraft every time when you do that, right? So. Exactly. Yeah, it was interesting. So, yeah, it's again, I'm just like, I'm just so interested to see what sort of stuff

is about bubbling to the surface now that we have like this kind of like platform available to us, right? It's kind of cool. Yeah, I see this really now as, you know, launching off the shoulders of SpaceX. This is the true commercial exploration of space and exploitation of space. And, you know, the fine, you know, this said a lot that the resources of Earth are finite. You know, like, you know, Astroforge talks about that. We're going to run out of these metals. we're going to require so much compute power that it's going to strain our resources.

We need to move into space. Maybe not in the next five years or ten years, but eventually. So I'm getting ready for that future, like where things need to be built in space and the resources need to come from Earth, asteroids, and the moon. And I just want to have the pieces in place when that goes. I like how much you talk about asteroids. Nobody talks about asteroids enough, Jake. I'm an asteroid guy at this point.

I can tell. The more of these missions that go there, they're so interesting. Like, they're all weird, and they look strange, and nobody knows if they're solid or just rubble piles. Like, there's way more, there's way more intrigue there than I expected. Yeah. But there's water, there's metals, there's, you know,

there's very usable materials. I'm not sure if you're for all mankind viewer. though, but I mean... I am, I love it. They're getting into the asteroids now in season four here, so no spoilers. I haven't started that. I haven't started that one yet. This is the asteroid one, you know, so...

Yeah. That's pretty legit. That could be where it's out. I mean, I kind of like the moon, but somebody recently, you know, convinced me like, you know, you got that 2.4 kilometer per second gravity will of the moon that you've got to overcome. And I always joke about that's where spin launch makes sense. Yes.

you put spin launch you take away that you know that that vacuum chamber and put it on the moon and and now you just throw blocks of ice or tanks of water into leo from the moon at 2.4 this is the best show jake he's verified my max queue theory and he's just told everyone finally where spin launch is useful anywhere but earth yes right you know you hate the atmosphere tom but the only person who hates the atmosphere worse than you is spin launch crew. Oh, wow. Any other people out there you want to shout out as having bad ideas for Earth?

That would be a great segment. Tom Mueller shouts out all the space companies that won't make it. Did I say it's a great idea? I say it's a great idea for the moon. It's a great idea anywhere else. It's fair. Honestly, that's been like the theory of spin launch. It's like, this is a good idea for something that we're not connecting on.

I don't know if we're communicating at the same level. Is this like a military thing? Is this like for the moon? I feel like we're not talking about the same thing. There's something. What was the... Somebody's got it. You remember the Glomar Explorer?

The Howard Hughes thing that was like a cover story for actually trying to extract a submarine off the ocean floor, but it was like, no, I'm doing like Duxid mining. Like this is... The spin launch has been one that people have had the Glomar Explorer theory about. That this is like a cover for something else

that's going on. Hypersonic test for a good thing. Yeah. Like this is just... You're making up that this is the actual mission. So I always love a Glomar Explorer theory. That's great. Now I'm just thinking about Project Harp

and how we can get that back and running again. Oh, the Space Cannon? Yeah, the Space Cannon. Not the atmospheric creating weather one, right? Because I think that was also called Harp. Oh, was it old Harpy? Yeah, no, the big gun. In the Barbados or whatever.

There's like this old space cannon out there. Yeah. I feel like some stuff that, Tom, the next time you were talking, like that, you're going to get really bored. You're going to be like, I'm going to build a space cannon. That's going to be the next thing for you. If you put a space cannon on an asteroid and point it away from where you want to go, is it just propulsion?

Like, it might just work that way, right? I mean, look at dart, you know? People on opposite reaction. Yeah. Yeah. What if you extract the useless rock out of the asteroid and then fire it away from you and that way you are propulsing and you're also reducing the ratio

of bad to good in your asteroid by the time you get home it's just like a big ball of platinum you're set you just raised $40 million like oh shit if the founder's fund crew is listening Tom let us know

the greatest theory I've ever heard I've never heard you come up with that before that was awesome that's a great one yeah look a couple of Armadito pumpkin beers and you could be surprised at what can happen right It's honestly, it's such a good idea.

Jesus. We used to get, you know, we used to, especially at SpaceX, we used to get crazy letters and stuff. This one guy sent us a paper. He was like some of a Taiwan guy and something. So there was like this language barrier. But it's called, it was called something like boneless and skin eater. And it was a rocket that consumed itself. It was burning the metal on the rocket with oxygen.

And it would just, by the time it was finished burning out. He didn't explain exactly how you're going to, you know, powder up the structure and burn it. But anyway, it was like, that one went on the wall. That was a good one. Yeah. And the name, I was a skin eater. I'm not sure.

Found the title for this show. Did you send a letter back of like, of all the companies that have burnt metal to get vertical? Like, we are the company that has done that. Oh, my God. What was, there was, yeah, there was a bunch of them. We used to have, like, the wall of shame to us all these different ideas. Spin launch.

Yeah. I can. There was spin launch. There was a version of orbit one. There was, let's sell Pegasus to the commercial market. It's a couple of them that were on the wall that were actually happened. Yeah. Huh.

Oh, you're posting a link. Project Harp with 1H, Jake. I got it. Yeah, yeah. One H was this. Yeah, yeah. No, one A. One A.

One H. Yeah, the Wikipedia literally says not to be confused with harp, the high frequency active rural research. That's like the Alex Jones one. You got to watch out. You got to watch out. Don't get those wires crossed. Yeah, yeah.

Tom, so you've got Leo Express 1 happening. You've got like two more in the pipeline. I want to hear about like, we've talked a lot about the long distance future, but are there things we can follow along with more imminent? with impulse. Yeah, yeah, we have Leo Express 2 on Transporter 11 next year, which is in June, I believe, next year. So we've got payloads lined up for that.

I can't talk about them yet. They're not signed, but they're ready to sign. And then possibly Leo Express 3, depending on the demand. I think if we really nail it on this mission, get our radios fixed and do our burns, I think hopefully we'll fill up. that one too. That's awesome.

So another one by, I see now it's going to be two spacecraft in like 18 months and now it's an even better story. And how many people is the team at this point? Yeah. Just over 80. Okay. All right. And he didn't even go public via SPAC.

Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. The SPAC train's gone, Anthony. It's over. That's it. You're calling it 10. The SPAC train.

crashed. Left the station and got lost in the Alps somewhere. Yeah. It's been, I mean, yeah. Wait, so you said this is an ESP ring. Can this, I mean, what have you, what would that fit on small launch-wise? I would fit on electron, yeah? It's kind of the only one that matters to be real.

Yeah. It's kind of heavy for electrons, 250 kilograms, right? They're a little higher now. They really have juiced it lately. Okay, 300. Yeah, we're about 300. I think we're right at 300 with what's up there right now. Of course, it doesn't have very much payload on it.

It's like another kick station. We'd have to detank a little bit. You're always about that funnel down, detank. I mean, the whole idea of small launch is you don't need a OTV. You go right where you want. Or they'd use photon if they want to, you know, go a little. little further. Do something a little different.

We've got a French goodbye question in the chat, and I feel like I should bring it up. Here we are on the somewhat eve of a Starship launch. What is your opinion on hot staging? Is it going to go chaotically wrong? Is it going to be awesome? Yeah. It's funny because I was just hanging out with a bunch of my SpaceX buddies,

and some of them are working Starship. They're complaining about hot staging. You know, I used to push back on Elon, too, and now that I'm the CEO, I don't like getting pushback. It's like, that's the right thing to do. Hot staging is the right thing to do. And it's like, just suck it up and do it, guys. It's going to work.

Maybe it won't work this first time, but you'll get it working. I mean, you know, Titan did it. The Russians did it. If people try to figure out why you need to do it, but it's simple, if you decelerate and all the propellant comes forward and that hot allege mixes with the cold propellant and it collapses and you've got to repress the tanks. It's just tons of lost payload. And if you're hot stage, you don't go through all that.

So it's like it's the right thing to do. They need to do it. Like suck it up and make it happen. That's more math that I'm never comfortable with because like they were like some people of our Discord were doing like, you know, ideas on how big it would be. And it's like 20,000 pounds of hot stage ring you have to add in the middle there or whatever. that, you know, a chunk of steel and heat shield and stuff costs. And it's like, wow, that is really, really, that's cheaper than the, than all the plumbing for the allage motors and all that kind of stuff.

Like, that's, that's kind of wild to me that that works out, right? Yeah. It's crazy. And it just straight up looks cooler. I mean, come on. It does look cooler. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, there's, there's other ways to do it. Like Apollo used Oledge motors, but, you know, there's not a lot of, like a lot of motors laying around that are cheap and they're hard to develop. So it's just use the motor, use the motor, the motor, you have the second stage engine engines. All right, you're four hot staging. What's the one thing that you're annoyed at with Starship in its current configuration?

Raptor reliability. Okay, just right back to your old position, yeah. You can take the man out of SpaceX. I mean, come on, guys. The most reliable rocket engine by far in history is the Merlin, so why isn't Raptor there right there? it could be it's not I mean we know there's some

Raptor problems that they're working through but I don't know if all the engine's shutting off or actual Raptor problems or other things on the system getting broken I mean have you ever blown up a launch pad into your engines Tom I bet you never did that A lot of stuff

yeah yeah you've done a skin eater or whatever I've blown up test stands but not launch pads You never run a launch pad rich launch And I'm even I'm shedding the image that the first failure of Falcon 1 was me. It wasn't. It was avionics.

We sat on that island for an extra six months because of avionics problems in an untenable corrosion environment. It just wasn't solvable. And that's why it failed, not because propulsion screwed up with the aluminum nuts. I believe that's somewhere in this book. Look at the cover.

That thing's on the cover. That thing's on fire because of avionics. Lift off. Shout out, Eric, because that's a great book. I love it. A primary source right here for most of that book. Wow. Okay.

Well, this has been awesome. Yeah. This is so cool. I'm really excited for you guys. I think this is, it's really fun to see, like I said, three or four times now. It's just fun to see what kind of stuff is bubble. bubbling up and you know impulse is one of those things so I hope I hope you figure out the

radios and you move on to the next ones and then yeah yeah we'll talk we'll talk again when you're on Mars I'll sleep a lot better when the radios are yeah yeah well I think follow along on Twitter X or Instagram or something about that yeah got all the links on the site so yeah follow along somewhere Because it's going to be awesome. We'll let everybody know as soon as we get some good news. Awesome. Well, thanks for hanging out with us.

Jake, what are we doing on this show here? Next week's Thanksgiving. Well, next week is American Turkey Day, so we will not be having an episode. But the week after that, we've got a fun one. So in the pre-show, you've been Harping on me, Project Harpen on Me, to buy a telescope. and we thought, hey, what if we asked someone who knew things about telescopes what to do? And so we're going to have Andrew McCarthy come on and show us some of the cool photos he's taken and teach us about telescopes.

So it should be fun. Yeah, this guy has some crazy pictures. There's this one I will pull up real quick. Really amazing, yeah. Like this shot of the moon in the ISS is just the most sci-fi amazing picture I've seen in my life. So, yeah, that's really good. Cool. All right.

Tom, this has been like a highlight of our podcast for sure. Awesome to have you hang out for so long. Thanks a lot. Give some hot takes about Max Q, Spin Launch and Starship. I feel very fulfilled. So we appreciate you very much. Thanks a lot, guys. All right.

See you later, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.