Inside Impulse Space's Factory with Founder Tom Mueller (Full Tour)

About this episode

Tom Mueller discusses the innovations at Impulse Space and his journey from SpaceX to building space infrastructure.

Tom Mueller, Founder, CEO and CTO of Impulse Space, (aka Employee #1 at SpaceX) gives Sourcery a walkthrough of the company's Redondo Beach factory, from the avionics clean room to a live rocket engine firing in the vacuum chamber. As SpaceX's founding employee, Tom led development of the engines for Falcon and Dragon and started the origins of what became Starship. His proudest project, the Merlin engine, still flies Falcon 9. In this episode he explains why he left to build the next layer of space infrastructure: moving payloads and cargo around once they're in orbit. We tour Mira (the company's precision maneuvering spacecraft), Helios (the vehicle bringing same-day delivery to space), and the Deneb engine, and get into how Impulse designs and builds: extreme vertical integration, 3D-printed engines, in-house composite tanks, and a "build, test, iterate" loop. Tom also shares where he thinks the industry is heading, on nuclear electric propulsion, data centers in space, the return to the Moon, and what it was like to work with Elon Musk. Tom Mueller: https://x.com/lrocket Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠ https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄…

People in this episode

Host: Molly O'Shea

Guest: Tom Mueller

Topics covered

• space infrastructure
• rocket technology
• 3D printing
• propulsion systems
• Elon Musk
• space exploration

Keywords

• Impulse Space
• Tom Mueller
• rocket engines
• spacecraft
• Falcon 9
• 3D-printed engines
• nuclear electric propulsion

Sponsors

Brex, Turing

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Impulse Space, SpaceX

Products: Falcon 9, Dragon, Starship, Mira, Helios, Deneb engine

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