Impulse Space founders Tom Mueller and Eric Romo on making space beyond LEO affordable and the lunar economy

Summary

Tom Mueller, CEO and founder of Impulse Space, and Eric Romo, the company's president, argue that space beyond low Earth orbit is the next commercial frontier, and that the infrastructure to reach it affordably does not yet exist at scale.

Mueller spent nearly two decades at SpaceX leading propulsion on Falcon 9, Dragon, and early Starship before leaving in 2020 and founding Impulse in 2021. His thesis is that SpaceX made LEO accessible, and Impulse intends to do the same for everything beyond it: geostationary orbit, the moon, Mars, and the outer planets.

Helios and Mera

Impulse is developing two vehicles. Helios acts as a third stage for Falcon 9 and other mid-sized rockets, moving large payloads to high-energy orbits including GEO and medium Earth orbit. SpaceX could technically accomplish this with Falcon Heavy but has stated a preference not to on operational and cost grounds. Helios comes online next year.

Mera is a small, highly maneuverable vehicle built primarily for the Space Force. Impulse announced government contracts and a go-to-market partnership with Andúril last year. Unlike Starlink satellites, which maintain fixed constellation positions, Mera is designed for rapid repositioning. The Defense Department has grown increasingly interested in this capability as space-on-space rhetoric has intensified over the past six months.

The lunar economy

Mueller's longer ambition centers on the moon. Helium-3 currently trades at roughly $20 million per kilogram on Earth. While extracting it requires processing millions of tons of regolith, the cost of transporting it back from the lunar surface is a small fraction of that value. More structurally, bringing mass from the moon to LEO is approximately 23 times more energy-efficient than launching from Earth's surface because the lunar gravity well is so much shallower. If large-scale manufacturing or megastructures move to orbit, the moon becomes the logical feedstock source.

Mueller also sees the moon as a stepping stone to Mars. It is closer, payload losses are recoverable, and it serves as a testbed for living off-planet before confronting the much harder transfer-window constraints of a Mars mission.

Starship as foundation

The entire Impulse thesis depends in part on Starship completing development and becoming commercially viable. Mueller founded the company on the premise that Starship and next-generation reusable rockets will deliver massive cargo volumes to LEO that need somewhere to go. Starship reaching commercial operation is Mueller's single biggest near-term catalyst for the industry.

NASA's structural confusion

Romo's sharpest observation concerns NASA. SLS has made no commercial sense for at least a decade, yet Congress continues funding it to preserve jobs in Alabama. NASA needs to decide whether it functions as a jobs program or a mission-driven agency. Mueller's preferred answer is that NASA should focus on big science questions such as searching for extraterrestrial life and funding observatories like the Vera Rubin telescope. He also believes NASA should develop next-generation propulsion technologies that commercial companies will not fund yet. Nuclear electric propulsion fits that category. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has also been publicly backing it as the right next frontier for public R&D investment rather than building rockets that compete with vehicles already in commercial operation.

Space defense timing

Romo identifies a dynamic worth watching. The Space Force has increased its public rhetoric around counterspace and space defense capabilities over the past six months. Investment has not yet caught up, but Romo observes that dollars typically follow rhetoric with a lag. For Impulse, the question is whether the Mera product line captures that shift.