The project SpaceX's first employee raised $500M for

The project SpaceX's first employee raised $500M for

From This Week in Startups by Jason Calacanis

June 3, 2026 · 1h 2m

About this episode

The episode discusses advancements in the orbital economy and the rise of purpose-built robots in the construction industry.

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent - NorthwestRegistereAagent.com/TWIST Every - Every.io Sentry - Sentry.io/TWIST Today’s show: Want to get to space? Several launch companies can help you. SpaceX, Rocket Lab, the Russians, the list goes on. But what about once you make it upstairs, then what? Impulse Space CEO and CTO Tom Mueller is building the next stage of our orbital economy. With its Mira and Helios spacecraft, we’ll soon be able to take mass from lower orbits to higher orbits, or even to the Moon, with ease. Meanwhile, venture capitalists are enamored with the idea of humanoid robots — robots share our shape, our work environment, and even our tools. But startups like Dusty Robotics are taking a different tack; instead of building human-shaped robots, Dusty has built a small, wheeled 'bot that can mark out building sites quickly and accurately. And it’s doing more revenue than all humanoid robotics companies combined, I reckon. Dusty’s CEO, Dr. Tessa Lau, joins Alex to go deep on purpose-built robots in today’s build-crazy market. Timestamps: 0:00 Blue Origin, and why fixing things in orbit is hard 2:19 What Mira is and what it does 4:35…

People in this episode

Host: Jason Calacanis

Guests: Tom Mueller, Dr. Tessa Lau

Topics covered

  • space economy
  • orbital transportation
  • humanoid robots
  • venture capital
  • robotics

Keywords

  • SpaceX
  • orbital economy
  • robotics
  • venture capital
  • Dusty Robotics

Sponsors

Northwest Registered Agent, Every, Sentry

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Dusty Robotics

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