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

0:00I was a founding employee at SpaceX. I led the development of the propulsion systems for Falcon and Dragon and also started the origins of what became Starship. My proudest development was the Merlin engine, which is currently flying on Falcon 9, the most reliable rocket engine ever developed, and also the highest thrust weight of any rocket engine ever developed. I worked on Starship for the last six years at SpaceX. So when I left, I had the plan of launch mostly being solved or being solved. Like the next big opportunity is to move all that payload, all that cargo around in space. So I started Impulse Space to do in-space transportation as opposed to from Earth to space transportation, which was SpaceX.

0:34We feel like the next step is in-space transportation, including to the moon and landers on the moon.

0:49Tom Mueller, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you. Great to be here. Okay, so before we start, I believe we're in a very special part of the office. What are we standing on right now? Oh, you mean right here? Yeah. This used to be my parking spot. This was your parking spot? But now we moved to new offices. Now I lost my parking spot. No. Okay, so I want to know, and we'll get into impulse in a second, but could you name every car model that you own? Oh, I have about five 911s from various models. RSR, three GT3 RSs, two R race cars, and a 64, like a first year. How many was that? That's like more than five.

1:37Two Ferraris, a F40 and a 458. A Lotus, 66 Lotus Elan. Three 9-6-2s, one in pieces being put back together. Porsche 9-6-2 race cars. Two Tundra trucks. No, two Raptor trucks. Used to have a Tundra. One's in Idaho. And a whole bunch of dirt bikes. I probably missed a car too. Oh, the one I used to park here, my Taycan, which is probably gonna get lemon-laught right now because it's broke for the third time. Love that car except for the braking part. Well, I think you're properly warmed up. So we're in Impulse right now. You have another facility here in LA, but right now I'd love for you to walk us through and tour Impulse for us.

2:31Sure. Okay. Okay. So this is the avionics clean assembly area. So this is where basically all the avionics and go on our spacecraft, get assembled and tested. You can see there's a vault right there that's getting ready to go into maybe thermal back or electrical test, something going on with it. So this is set up for high production rate for Mira and the other spacecraft. Let's go talk about Mira. Okay. So you also in your garage make your own rockets? I do. I have been doing that for a long time. Yeah. In fact, that's how I met Elon was through the amateur rocket stuff that I was doing.

3:11Tom Mueller:Yeah. But I like to make prototypes for, you know, just to get some pre-production data on things that we're doing here. So I've done a few things in my garage. Yeah. One of the things that I learned from our interview with Eric and research ahead of time was how fast Impulse has for iteration and testing and development. Yeah. It's really core to the business and vertical integration. Being extremely vertically integrated. Having the machine shop right here with the assembly areas and just really rapid prototyping, test area out back so we can build, assemble, test, and iterate. And so as we walk through, what are we going to see today?

3:53Could you just give us a little run through? Yeah, the assembly area out here where we'll see spacecraft like these being assembled. And then our next product, which is Helios, which is right over there in that area being assembled. Then we'll go back to the machine shop where the actual parts are made and then in the back is The propulsion assembly area where the propulsion products are put together and then tested back there in the test area We're gonna see a rocket engine test today back there and yeah should be pretty cool. Amazing. All right. Well starting here This is the mirror. So this is a This is our mirror prototype.

4:30So this is one we can have out here that you can actually touch so So Mira is a highly propulsive orbital transfer vehicle. So it's got these thrusters, actually, these thrusters, two on each corner. So it's got eight of these thrusters. They're about six pounds of thrust each. So total of almost 50 pounds of thrust, which for a small spacecraft like this is a lot. That's good enough to move around in space very fast. Inside the chassis, we've got three propellant tanks, two oxidizer tanks, and a fuel tank in the middle that feeds these thrusters. It's got the solar panels which unfurl and they're steerable so you can point the spacecraft wherever you want and still have the power positive pointing at the sun with the solar.

5:11The avionics that we just talked about being assembled in there are all in this box down here we call it the vault. We keep them all in one box. And it's got, these are reaction wheels which are basically flywheels with a motor that you can actually very precisely steer the spacecraft with. and then there's a bunch of antennas and stuff that go on this which you can see on the flight vehicle in there so they've got red hats on a red red removed before flight covers on but those are antennas so we can talk to the spacecraft it's got the multi-layer insulation or MLI that that gold foil that thermally protects it keeps it it's kind of makes it like a thermos bottle it's really when that when that gets into vacuum of space it acts like a thermos bottle really thermally isolates the spacecraft.

5:59Here's some flight solar panels right here that are assembled and ready to integrate onto the spacecraft. So we've got I think three spacecraft being built up in there right now in various states of assembly. We can see the one back there if we walk this way. And then we can talk about Helios. Yeah here's another one that's... Oh wow. Got a team working on it. Yeah, wow. This I believe is the next one to go up here. It's going up later this fall. So you have three in orbit? We have three on orbit right now. We did a rendezvous last year between two of them. Got within 1200 meters of each other, which is really damn close in space.

6:41Yeah, got some cool pictures. We know right where it's at. They're all alive. We have GPS so we know where they're at, what their state is.

6:52So, Mira is our space maneuvering vehicle that can stay up there for five years, but then we have a vehicle to get you there and that's this. This is Helios. So Helios is basically a tank of propellant. That tank right there holds 12 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane. And then we have a very high performance engine that goes on the bottom of it that you'll see back there that provides 15 ,000 pounds of thrust. This can take a large satellite, like a four-ton satellite, from low earth orbit at a couple hundred miles up to geosynchronous orbit at 22 ,000 miles. So basically it's escaping most of the gravity well of Earth.

7:39Very high energy

7:40Tom Mueller:transfer. It can take, you know, five tons of payload to the moon on a Falcon 9. It can improve your payload to Mars by up to a factor of five. Yeah, just it basically adds a third stage to a two-stage rocket. For those who don't know your origin story for Impulse and why you've decided to go after this after SpaceX. Can you share more on that? Sure, yeah. I was a founding employee at SpaceX. I led the development of the propulsion systems for Falcon and Dragon, and also started the origins of what became Starship. Probably my proudest development was the Merlin engine, which is currently flying on Falcon 9, the most reliable rocket engine ever developed, and also the highest thrust weight of any rocket engine ever developed.

8:35But I worked on Starship for the last six years, that SpaceX. So when I left, I had the plan of, you know, launch mostly being solved or is being solved. It's like the next big opportunity is to move all that, all that payload, all that cargo around in space. So I started Impulse Space to do in-space transportation as opposed to from Earth to space transportation, which was SpaceX. So we feel like the next step is in-space transportation. including to the moon and landers on the moon, which we're also bidding on. Going to the moon? Going to the moon. I'm all about the moon. And so one of your engines is over here.

9:15Yeah, let's go look at it. So these are domes that go on these are tanks. They're not alien spacecrafts. They're not alien spacecrafts. No, they look like flying saucers, don't they? Yeah, so three of those are in that tank to make up the liquid oxygen and the methane tank. Yeah, so this is the Deneb engine. Deneb is the name of a star. Rigel, another engine that we're developing, you'll see back here, is the name of a star. We named all and the little the little engines that you see on Mira are safe. Those are really cute. S-A-I-P-H which is also a star in Orion. So we name our engines after stars.

9:54So this is Deneb, which is a blue supergiant star and this is our super giant engine. This engine makes about 15 ,000 pounds of thrust. It's pump fed so it's got the turbo pump there on the back and it's ox rich stage combustion. So all of the liquid oxygen off the pump comes out of this line. There's a valve missing here but through the main ox valve into the pre burner where it gets burned with a little bit of the fuel, liquid methane. So we burn all the oxygen with a little bit of fuel which makes hot oxygen at about 4 ,000 psi, which goes into that housing, drives the turbine, which provides 1 ,500 horsepower to run the turbo pumps.

10:36Then the hot oxygen off of the turbine comes across this transfer tube

10:41Tom Mueller:and into the main injector. The fuel, other than the little bit that goes into the pre-burner, goes through this main valve into a bunch of cooling channels inside the combustion chamber to cool the combustion chamber and then goes in as hot gas into the injector and gets burned with the oxygen. So that's how the cycle works, Oxrich stage combustion. This engine will probably be the highest performing hydrocarbon engine ever flown because it has a very high area ratio. The way you get ISP is you have very high mixing efficiency, which this is designed to be a very very good mixing gas gas main injection very fine injector and then it has a huge skirt when you see the engine back there it's got a big carbon skirt on it so this is this is only half the engine by height it'll have a it'll have a carbon skirt that'll glow white hot that gives it area ratio that that nozzle converts pressure into velocity which is pure performance so the more expansion nozzle you can have the more performance you get what is the development process like been with this.

11:45I know you have land in Mojave too, so do you have to do something special when you're testing it there? A lot special. Difficult engines. Oxbridge stage combustion is a very difficult development. So right now we're finishing up the turbopump development and just starting to get into engine testing. So we're just getting there. Yeah. Exciting. How long have you guys had the land in Mojave? A couple years now. Yeah. We started with Rigel there, a little 200 pound thruster, and then moved to onto this in the last year. What's your favorite part? What's my favorite part of this thing? The main injector.

12:27I'm pretty proud of the main injector. It's a very fine mixing. I think we're going to find out it's going to be a real high class engine. We've got the design team, the test team, the manufacturing team. We've got the valve team. It's a bunch of pieces that come together. There's even an avionics box. There's an engine controller, so there's even an avionics contribution to this. But this is the heart of the stage, and this engine will probably become our prime mover. This engine, very high-performance, high-thrust engine. Imagine if we built a bigger version of this with multiple engines or say in the farther future, say a human lander would have several of these engines to land on the moon.

13:16You need something like this to do these, you know, big payloads to, you know, to space. So this is going to be our prime mover. Cool. So should we see how it's built? Yeah. It's all, it's in fact, while we're here, it's mostly 3D printed and you'll see. 3D printed? Yeah. Really? It's 3D printed right here. Wow. Yeah, so I'll show you the 3D printed part. It's actually easier to show you the parts that aren't 3D printed. Okay. This part right here is hydroformed. This part right here is machined. Everything else is 3D printed. So this part, this part, this part, all these parts, and this part, and this part are all 3D printed right back here.

13:58This is the igniter that lights it, 3D printed. When did you get into 3D printing? Is this just the core? Started the company within the first year we bought it. Really? Yeah. When did you? The little thrusters on there are completely 3D printed. You'll see them back here. I heard you make little party cups out of those ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They make little shot glasses. That's amazing. I'd love to get into more of the knowledge that you've built along the way. So you prefer 3D printing. What are some other aspects that are for? Let's talk about 3D printing a little bit. For rocket engines, it's almost like a cheat code.

14:37It's so easy to make a high-performance rocket engine or 3D printing because the rocket injectors and the cooling passages are pretty small and complex. So to make a rocket engine by machining and assembling and welding and brazing is really difficult. With 3D printing, you just basically draw the fluid passages you want and then put a wall around it and just print it. It's whatever you draw, you know, within reason you can make. So it just makes making rocket engines really easy. But we still have to do a lot of machining. But before we get to the machine shop, I want to talk about this. These are composite overwrapped pressure vessels, our COPVs.

15:21So these are the lightest way to make a propellant tank or a gas tank, a high-pressure tank. Because we wrap the carbon, which you can see happening on that machine back there. Yeah. The carbon fiber is extremely strong. So we have an aluminum liner that seals the propellant in, and then a carbon overwrap that holds the pressure. So a properly designed COPD will be about half the mass of a state-of-the-art all-metallic tank, like a titanium spacecraft sphere. The carbon is so much stronger, it'll actually be about half the weight. So we brought this in-house early on too, along with 3D printing, just because a major portion of the spacecraft mass is the tanks for the propellant.

16:03And we want to be able to control the, you know, the quality and the quantity and the cost. So here they are. We're making, these are, these are tanks for the Mira spacecraft. The bigger one there is a tank for VAST space station. We provided the whole propulsion system for VAST, including the thrusters. And then the one that's getting wrapped there, it will be a very high pressure, like a 5 ,000 psi helium tank for the Helios vehicle to pressurize the tanks. So everything from 1 ,000 psi for the spacecraft up to 5 ,000 psi for the helium tank.

16:40Tom Mueller:Wow. These things are really hard to get typically from industry. Like if you wanted to buy one of these, it might take, you know, after you order it, it might take a year or two to get them and be hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece. How do you find the talent to build them? We learned. Mostly it was guys that hadn't done it before. So we bought the winder and learned. And then we've since hired people that run the winders before and stuff. And so people have carbon experience. But we mostly learned. We had a consultant come in and show us how to design properly. And a lot of cut and try.

17:19You saw the one that we burst back there? Yeah. Yeah. So you make one, you blow it up, find out how you did, and then design from there. Where does software come into the development piece for you? I know, like, I would even love to learn about the long tail of that. I mean, clearly you've seen a couple eras of space. Well, in 2026, you can't have modern hardware without software. So the spacecraft has, you know, has autonomous software on it. We use AI for coding and for design. We use pretty powerful generative software for 3D printing. So, you know, everything, you know, like the machines here all are running on software to do the machining.

18:12So a lot of software. Big IT department. Okay, so what are we going to see through here? I know there's one machine we're not allowed to see, but... Yeah. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30 ,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S. Nearly 40 % of startups fail because they run out of cash. Brex is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, Brex is designed to help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all-in-one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account.

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19:36Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Let's see what we got on here. There's a turbo pump part for the Deneb engine. So this is what's called a mill turn. So that table can spin fast and you can actually run it like a lathe where you can just single point turn the bore, which I believe he's doing now. Yeah, he's putting a boring bar on it to turn the bore. That way you can turn all the all the different bores in there, the different diameters at the same time and have a very precise and concentric machine.

20:23Yeah, see that's the boring bar there. So it doesn't spin, it just holds stationary and the part turns and that's a lathe basically. Then on the same setup, it's a milling machine. So they'll replace that boring bar with a milling cutter and then it's a five axis milling machine so they can go and they can cut the ports and the bolt holes and the ceiling surface and everything. So in one setup you can machine, you know, like three quarters of that part. Then you flip it over and hit the backside and it's done. So really you've got two of these machines and another one similar back there. so a lot of these machines because they're very very handy for making parts like this.

20:58I think we're going to go see a copper liner back there. Yeah.

21:05Yeah, the inside of the dead of engine, the combustion part is made of copper, just like the bottom of your cooking pans is, because the heat transfer inside the combustion, inside the combustion chamber is so intense that only copper can get the heat out without melting. So we start with big forgings of copper like this right here. Wow. And then they go on this lathe right here to turn them down, to thin them out, to make them very thin. And then they... can't see that machine. Then they go on that machine over there and they get slotted. Which Lee is going to make, stop them from filming. Yeah, we can see that.

21:47So we start with these forgings that weigh about 700 pounds and the final slotted product weighs about 25 pounds. That's some pretty strong employees. Yeah, and there's all the chips that we end up generating. Oh, those are pretty. And then we have a big milling machine here to make big parts like that. The Mira chassis, all that aluminum on the Mira is made right here on this machine. So this is our big mill. This is huge. It's huge. How did you get this in here? You can machine a motorcycle on this thing. Oh my god. Yeah, it's huge.

22:27Did we see the 3D printers yet? Or are we gonna... We're right there. Okay. Yep. So see this part right here? This is the payload deck for Mira. So we call it the pegboard. It's got all these bolt holes so you can bolt anything to it. That's done on that mill right there. How did you get to this design? Was this original or did you have to go through the... And this is like our sort of like for a development mirror, like our demo flights where you can mount anything. Like you have a whole bunch of hosted payloads. If we have a specific mission where they just have one payload in the middle, we actually redesigned this to get rid of some mass.

23:05Okay. So it can be custom fit to whatever your payload is. And this is the one size fits all. You can put anything on it. Try payload deck. Okay. Let's talk about 3D printing. So this is a 3D printing lab. So we've got three 3D metal printers in there. Wow. This machine right here prints Inconel, which is a nickel alloy, a pretty common nickel alloy. And it prints the little safe thrusters. You can see them there. In fact, over here is an even better one. Right here are the safes as they print on a plate. And then we cut them off and machine them and add the igniters and the valves and everything.

23:45They're all 3D printed, the injector, the combustion chamber, everything's all printed in one piece. And then these two black printers here, these are Vellos, and these are printing a special alloy that's like ink canel but it's burn resistant in the hot oxygen in that cycle that we have on the denivated. So all the turbo pump parts, the main injector, and anything that sees the hot oxygen is printed with this alloy called Novaloy, which has the strength of high strength of in canal but is very burn resistant so proprietary alloy I would say casting could be faster but you can't cast really tiny fine passages like the injector on Deneb has hundreds of elements that are really small and you can't cast that and casting does not have the strength that a 3D printed part has the casting has big grains and yeah it's just It'd be really hard to make these parts of the casting.

24:44The castings are fast. No. Like, Raptors cast, because they're big parts. They don't have a lot of fine... They print some of the fine stuff, but the big parts, they cast. What was it like to see the iterations of Raptor over time to get... Oh, we lived through it. ...to the last, the latest version, which just looks a lot... It was amazing. That one chart is so great. It was amazing. And I always said it took three versions of Merlin. to get it to be really tight. And it took three versions also of Raptor. I always say it takes really three iterations to get to a really, really tight product.

25:22And Raptor's there, yeah. And Merlin's there, yeah. All right, so we're entering the back area. I heard this is the secret area. Yeah. This is shipping and receiving, so boxes everywhere. And now we're in the assembly and test area. So in these clean rooms here, they assemble things like valves. You can see the valves for dinner right here. That's a ball valve right there. You can see the ball. Oh, yeah. There's a pre-valve, some actuators. So these all get assembled in this room. Here's the thrust chamber assembly. So that copper piece that you saw back there is inside there is the inside of this.