This week an in-space propulsion company, Impulse Space, announced that it had raised a significant amount of money, $300 million. This follows a fundraising round just last year in which the Southern California-based company raised $150 million.<\/p>\n
This is one of the largest capital raises in space in a while, especially for a non-launch company. To understand why Impulse was able to raise so much additional money so quickly, Ars caught up with founder Tom Mueller and the company\u2019s chief executive, Eric Romo. They explained that demand for Impulse\u2019s efficient in-space vehicles is high, and since early missions have worked well, the company wants to seize the moment to scale up its operations.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had been operating relatively conservatively, in how many people we were allowing ourselves to hire and capital expenditures,\u201d Romo said. \u201cThis will allow us to release a little bit of that conservatism and lean into some stuff like electric propulsion and potentially other vehicles that are going to allow us to grow long-term.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company presently has about 250 employees, and they are crammed into the company\u2019s 60,000-square-foot facility in Redondo Beach. Impulse would like to reach 300 employees by the end of the year and find a larger headquarters for its expanding vision.<\/p>\n
Although Impulse Space is only about 4 years old, it has already had some sparkling successes and is nearing completion of a new vehicle called Helios that could meaningfully improve the ability of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy to ship large payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations in the Solar System.<\/p>\n
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The company\u2019s initial product was the Mira spacecraft, powered by nitrous oxide and ethane thrusters. It can move payloads up to 300 kg around in space, and for a 100 kg payload, it offers 900 m\/s of Delta-V. With Mira, Impulse sought to tackle the problem of mobility once a spacecraft reached orbit.<\/p>\n
Mira proved a success almost immediately, with the first vehicle launching in 2023 and operating for a year in space, demonstrating ample mobility before finally depleting its propellant tanks. A second mission, LEO Express-2, launched in January with several hosted payloads and, so far, has met all of its objectives. The mission remains ongoing.<\/p>\n
Initially, it was believed that this vehicle would be useful for providing \u201clast mile\u201d services for spacecraft launched as a part of rideshare missions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reality is the market for that is not very good,\u201d Romo said. \u201cIf you\u2019re gonna size that market, it\u2019s basically the market Rocket Lab serves today, which is 25 to 30 flights a year, which is fine. You can do that, but not economically very well. Your gross margins won\u2019t be good. Your working capital kind of sucks. So that\u2019s not at all the market that we\u2019re after with Mira.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since Mira has had ample success during its first two flights, other customers have taken notice.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a high-thrust, high-maneuverability spacecraft that can operate anywhere up to GEO,\u201d Romo said. \u201cAnd so when you\u2019re thinking about space defense and space control, they need rapid response. So we\u2019ll move from one part of GEO to another very rapidly. And we can host payloads, like what Anduril makes, such as electronic warfare payloads, and then potentially doing proximity ops missions. So Mira wasn\u2019t necessarily designed out of the gate for that, but what we found out after we flew it successfully was, the Space Force said, \u2018Hey, we know what that thing\u2019s for.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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After Mira, Impulse Space has been working on the larger Helios vehicle, which is designed to ride as a kick-stage on various large rockets. Helios packs a real punch, with an engine capable of producing 15,000 pounds of thrust and the ability to move a multi-ton payload from low-Earth orbit to geostationary space in less than a day.<\/p>\n
Mueller also said he believes that Helios has significant implications for interplanetary science missions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just really increases your payload capacity,\u201d he said. \u201cWe looked at a case where a rocket can throw less than 2 tons to Mars. But with Helios, it was like 11 tons. So it\u2019s just a huge advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company is currently targeting a launch of Helios in the third quarter of next year and recently secured three Falcon 9 launches to launch its first three Helios spacecraft.<\/p>\n
It is natural for Mueller to work with SpaceX, of course. He was a founding employee and led the company\u2019s propulsion department for more than a decade. Once he saw that launch was becoming a solved problem, Mueller moved on to what he saw as the next frontier, taking advantage of that launch capacity and improving the ability of spacecraft to move around in low-Earth orbit and beyond.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to open up the capabilities of LEO and above and greatly reduce the cost of getting anywhere else past LEO,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are lots of things that we\u2019ve dreamt about for decades, like a base on the Moon or mining asteroids or putting humans on Mars. We want to see lots of things happen, and hopefully we can reduce the cost and help make it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week an in-space propulsion company, Impulse Space, announced that it had raised a significant amount of money, $300 million. This follows a fundraising round just last year in which the Southern California-based company raised $150 million. This is one of the largest capital raises in space in a while, especially for a non-launch company. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[458,9577,21,5234],"class_list":["post-44206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-impulse-space","tag-in-space-propulsion","tag-space","tag-tom-mueller"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}