Tom Mueller is driving his candy green Porsche Taycan Turbo S the way he builds rocket engines: with a terrifying amount of instantaneous thrust and little regard for the local speed limits of El Segundo. He is headed west on Marine Avenue, cutting through the smog-tinted sunlight of Los Angeles\u2019 South Bay aerospace corridor, talking about Earth\u2019s limitations. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf we continue to grow like we have, eventually you just use up all the metals, you use up all the energy,\u201d says Mueller, 65, who is especially concerned by the energy demand of AI data centers. \u201cBy about 2045, the total power that the world is generating right now would be needed just for compute. Exponential growth can crush resources on Earth.\u201d <\/p>\n
From behind his reflective wrap-around shades, Mueller spots a gap in the afternoon congestion. His electric sports car can rocket from zero to 60 in 2.3 seconds, and Mueller seems eager to demonstrate the point. \u201cThis is where we accelerate,\u201d he says, stomping on the pedal. The torque hits like a physical blow, pinning us against the leather seats as Mueller cackles. \u201cThe moon and the near-Earth asteroids,\u201d he continues moments later, now parked at a red light, \u201ccontain billions of tons of metal, silicon, water and ice, so we have to start using it. It seems a little farfetched to start using it now, because we just haven\u2019t built the space economy. We haven\u2019t got there yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is the bet behind Mueller\u2019s Impulse Space, the Redondo Beach-headquartered startup he founded in 2021, a few months after leaving SpaceX. Just as SpaceX dominates the global launch market, Impulse wants to own what comes next: \u201cin-space mobility,\u201d moving satellites, cargo and eventually people after rockets drop them off in orbit. Its spacecraft are not built to blast off from Earth, but to hitch rides aboard launch providers like SpaceX, then detach and ferry payloads between orbits\u2014and one day, Mueller hopes, to the moon, Mars and beyond.<\/p>\n
Impulse\u2019s selling point is not just that it can move things in space, but that it can move them quickly. Like Mueller\u2019s all-electric Porsche, most satellites are powered by electric propulsion systems, but unlike his car these spacecraft are slow: It takes between six to 12 months for most satellites to get from low orbit, a few hundred miles above Earth, to geostationary orbit, more than 22,000 miles up. Impulse says its spacecraft will reduce that journey to a day with its chemical engines, powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen\u2014the cosmic equivalent of swapping ships for airplanes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat distinguishes us from other spacecraft is we’re about half propellant by mass when we lift off, so we can move fast,\u201d says Mueller. \u201cMoving fast is what our customers want.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mueller\u2019s pitch is landing at a moment when space is attracting more capital than ever. Global spending on space is projected to grow from roughly $600 billion last year to $1.8 trillion by 2035, while venture investors poured a record $55.3 billion into space startups last year. Later this week, SpaceX is expected to raise $75 billion in a record-breaking IPO, targeting a $1.8 trillion valuation. Small by comparison, Impulse has raised over $1 billion, and was valued earlier this month at $4.3 billion. Mueller, between his stakes in SpaceX and Impulse, joined the Forbes billionaires list this spring and now has an estimated $1.7 billion fortune.<\/p>\n
But Impulse is not just racing competitors. It is racing the market itself, betting that satellites, lunar missions and military payloads will need fast transportation soon enough to justify the hundreds of millions of dollars Mueller is pouring into spacecraft built for a space economy still taking shape. <\/p>\n
\u201cNobody knows what these markets are going to look like,\u201d says space analyst Chris Quilty. \u201cThese are markets that don\u2019t exist yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raised in Saint Maries, Idaho, a timber town of 2,500 people an hour south of Coeur d\u2019 Alene, Mueller grew up riding dirt bikes with cousins and learning about the timber industry from his father, a logger. In high school he saved money from unpacking boxes at the local grocer to buy his first car, a 1977 Triumph Spitfire, whose engine he fiddled with. Encouraged by a high school math teacher, Mueller studied mechanical engineering at the University of Idaho. \u201cHe came from a meager background,\u201d recalls retired professor Terry Precht, an Idaho-native who compares Mueller\u2019s hometown to Appalachia. \u201cHe knew how to make it happen because he\u2019s a builder.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1985, Mueller moved to Los Angeles to join aerospace conglomerate TRW as a propulsion and power engineer. He cut his teeth in the rocket division during President Ronald Reagan\u2019s $30 billion push ($90 billion in today\u2019s dollars) to develop space-based weaponry. Flush with government cash, scientists and engineers like Mueller could experiment. \u201cI worked on all kinds of crazy things,\u201d he recalls, listing chemicals he used to power rockets that are now highly regulated. <\/p>\n
Even so Mueller became frustrated with the bureaucratic hoop jumping that came with working for a 100,000-person corporation. \u201cI was wanting to move faster. It seemed like everything was designed by committee and there were too many people on the committee,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI was an entrepreneur but didn’t know it.\u201d <\/p>\n
He found his release with the Reaction Research Society, a quirky group of professional engineers who spent weekends bolting home-built engines to trailers in the dry lake beds of the Mojave Desert. By 2002, Mueller was tinkering with a massive 13,000-pound-thrust engine in an El Segundo warehouse. It was there that Musk, fresh from a failed attempt to buy Russian ICBMs, was led by a consultant to see Mueller\u2019s work. \u201cCan you build something bigger?\u201d Musk asked Mueller, who promptly left TRW to become SpaceX\u2019s first employee.<\/p>\n
At SpaceX, Mueller became Musk\u2019s engine room. As the company\u2019s first employee, he led development of the Merlin engine that powers SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which accounted for 52 percent of all global launches and 84% of all satellite deployments in 2024, according<\/a> to the American Enterprise Institute. He also oversaw propulsion development for Dragon, the SpaceX capsule that carries cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. By the time he left in 2020, after SpaceX had largely solved the problem of getting payloads to orbit, Mueller was thinking about the question of how to move satellites around after the rockets let them go.<\/p>\n The answer is taking shape inside Impulse\u2019s 60,000-square-foot warehouse in Redondo Beach, where hundreds of engineers oversee 3D printers churning through metal alloys in glass chambers and test white-hot thrusters in sealed vacuums. Beyond the engines and chassis, Impulse produces its own radiation-hardened avionics, propellant tanks and X-band antennas. Half-completed hardware sits on shelves awaiting delivery to the next station in the engineering conveyor belt. Impulse, like SpaceX, wants to make everything in-house.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce you achieve vertical integration, you have better control over your cost, your schedule, and your quality,\u201d says Mueller from his office desk. Behind him sits a bookshelf with textbooks such as Space Mission Analysis and Design and Magnetic Actuators and Sensors. Mueller flips through a graph paper notebook stuffed with scribbled engine-part designs. \u201cI start with sketches, then I’ll typically go to CAD [computer-aided design] and then to build.\u201d As chief technology officer, Mueller leads design of Impulse\u2019s new propulsion systems. He manufactures prototypes of ignition parts at his offsite garage, which also houses a collection of sports cars and dirt bikes. Mueller\u2019s man cave is \u201cwhere a lot of ideas and prototypes have been born for Impulse,\u201d says Drew Damon, one of many Impulse engineers who previously worked at SpaceX.<\/p>\n Impulse\u2019s in-house push has produced two main vehicles: Mira for smaller jobs near Earth, and Helios for heavier hauls to higher orbits. Mira, a horse-sized craft that looks like a toaster with solar-panel wings, has already completed three missions. Impulse\u2019s larger vehicle Helios, which resembles a futuristic water tank, is designed to haul payloads of up to four tons from low-Earth orbit to geostationary orbit, a distance of over 20,000 miles, in less than 24 hours. Helios is slated to complete its first mission in 2027. <\/p>\n Impulse\u2019s first two Mira missions\u2014in late 2023 and early 2025\u2014went off without a hitch, performing a record-breaking 150-kilometer orbit raise, rendezvousing with another satellite in orbit, and depositing its clients\u2019 CubeSats (miniature satellites) onto its intended orbital planes. During the third Mira outing earlier this year, a technical problem caused the vehicle\u2019s star trackers to produce noisy measurements. This tricked the flight computer into over-correcting and in an attempt to stabilize itself, Mira floored the accelerator and ran out of fuel. Luckily it had already completed its satellite deployments. <\/p>\n Despite the hiccup, nobody\u2019s questioning Mueller’s engineering chops or the caliber of Impulse\u2019s team. The bigger question is whether the space economy grows fast enough to absorb the capacity that Impulse is building at great cost. <\/p>\n For now Uncle Sam is Impulse\u2019s biggest demand driver, as is common in the space industry The U.S. Space Force requested $71 billion for fiscal year 2027, a 77% jump over current levels as the Pentagon embraces a far more aggressive posture in space, including President Trump\u2019s proposed $175 billion Golden Dome missile-defense system. NASA meanwhile says it plans to establish a permanent basecamp on the moon by the end of the decade. Impulse is riding that wave. To date it has received nearly $400 million in contracts, the \u201coverwhelming majority\u201d of which comes from government spending, says Impulse president Eric Romo, who began his career as an MBA intern working at SpaceX before founding and selling multiple companies and working at Facebook. <\/p>\n On the commercial side, much depends on SpaceX\u2019s massive Starship rocket, which can carry up to six times as much cargo as the Falcon 9 but has faced technical setbacks. For startups like Impulse, the equation is simple: more launch capacity means more satellites in orbit, and more demand for moving them once they get there. Starship completed just five launches last year, the first three of which ended in failure. That\u2019s still a long way from Musk\u2019s vision of Starships launching every hour by 2029. \u201cWe are built to do fine with or without Starship,\u201d says Romo. <\/p>\n There\u2019s also the potential threat from SpaceX itself. The rocket maker has plenty of capital to build its own orbital service vehicles. Will SpaceX one day enter Impulse\u2019s lane? Mueller is unfazed. \u201cI\u2019m not worried, but I mean who knows?\u201d he chuckles. \u201cElon was all about Mars and nothing but Mars. Then, \u2018Okay, we’re going to do Starlink to help pay for Mars.\u2019 And then it became data servers. Things change.\u201d<\/p>\n A few miles from Impulse\u2019s factory, the question of what SpaceX might do next is no longer theoretical scenery. Mueller is navigating his Porsche past SpaceX\u2019s Hawthorne campus, where a retired Falcon 9 booster stands on the corner like a white-steel totem to the heavens. <\/p>\n “I don\u2019t feel the nostalgia,” says Mueller. The lifelong engineer is far too busy optimizing the present, which includes choreographing this afternoon drive down memory lane to feature only right turns. “In rush hour, some of these left turns take two lights,” he explains, scanning the intersection ahead. “Working at SpaceX, I learned you want to plan your route carefully.” <\/p>\n More from ForbesForbesWhy Pfizer And Eli Lilly Are Betting On This $1.3 Billion AI Drug Discovery StartupBy Amy Feldman<\/a>ForbesCaryn Seidman Becker Bought Clear Out Of Bankruptcy. Now She\u2019s A Billionaire.By Katharine Schwab<\/a>ForbesForbes\u2019 Ranking Of America\u2019s Richest Self-Made Women 2026By Grace Chung<\/a>ForbesHow These Bold Women Are Reimagining LeadershipBy Alicia Park<\/a>ForbesHow Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, Michael Saylor And Other Billionaires Are Rewriting Their LegaciesBy Martina Di Licosa<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tom Mueller is driving his candy green Porsche Taycan Turbo S the way he builds rocket engines: with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[2690,77925,212285,39154,27524,144169,33523,90,416,1958,176913,94948,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-626123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-aerospace","tag-aerospace-engineering","tag-astronautical-engineering","tag-elon-musk-spacex","tag-impulse-space","tag-newspace","tag-propulsion","tag-science","tag-space","tag-space-economy","tag-spacex-ipo","tag-tom-mueller","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}