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

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𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Tom Mueller, Founder, CEO & CTO of Impulse Space

(00:49) Inside Impulse Space

(02:32) Avionics Bay floor

(02:59) Building rockets at home

(03:50) Mira and Helios

(08:00) Why he left SpaceX

(09:33) The Deneb Engine walkthrough

(11:42) Testing in Mojave

(12:23) Favorite part of the Engine

(13:30) How it's 3D Printed

(14:21) Why 3D Printing changes everything

(16:54) Finding Talent for COPVs

(17:28) No Modern hardware without software

(19:52) The Mill Turn explained

(22:42) Payload Deck Design

(25:28) Entering the Secret Area

(30:48) Thrust, Flow Rate, and 100 Sensors

(32:13) Collision avoidance in Orbit

(32:57) The Electric Propulsion Chamber

(34:28) Nuclear Electric is the future

(38:49) Data Centers in Space

(40:28) SpaceX and Starlink's Growth

(41:10) Working with Elon