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

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 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 YouTube: https://youtu.be/WIORHdlPWAI 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery • Merge https://merge.dev—The leading provider of customer-facing integrations and agentic tools for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies. Visit https://merge.dev Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:49Molly O'Shea?

  Tom Mueller, welcome to Sorcery.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Thank you, great to be here.

• 0:52Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so before we start, I believe we're in a very special part of the office. What are we standing on right now?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Oh, you mean right here?

• 1:02Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  This used to be my parking spot.

• 1:05Molly O'Shea?

  This was your parking spot?

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, but now we moved to new offices, now I lost my parking spot.

• 1:09Molly O'Shea?

  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?

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Oh, I have about five 911s from various models, RSR, two, three GT3 RSs, two R race cars, and 64, like a first year. How many was that? It's like more than five.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Two Ferraris, a F40 and a 458. A Lotus, 66 Lotus Elan.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Three 962s, one in pieces being put back together, a Porsche 962 race cars.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Two Tundra trucks, no, our two Raptor trucks. Used to have a Tundra. Um, one's in Idaho.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  And a whole bunch of dirt bikes. I probably missed a car or two. Oh, my, the one that I used to park here, my Taycan, which is probably going to get lemon-laued right now because it's broke for the third time. Love that car, except for the braking part.

• 2:19Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I think you're probably warmed up. So, um, 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.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Sure, okay.

• 2:32Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  So this is the avionics clean assembly area. So this is where basically all the avionics that go on our spacecraft, uh, 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.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  So this is set up for high production rate for Mira and the other spacecraft. Let's go talk about Mira.

• 2:58Molly O'Shea?

  Okay. So you also in your garage make your own rockets?

• 3:03Speaker 00

  I do. I have been doing that for a long time. Yeah. In fact, that's how I met Elon was, uh, through the amateur rocket stuff that I was doing. Yeah. But I like to make prototypes for, um, you know, just to get some pre-production data on things that we're, that we're doing here. So I've done, done a few things in my garage. Yeah.

• 3:20Molly O'Shea?

  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.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:31Molly O'Shea?

  It's really core to the business and vertical integration.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. Being extremely vertically integrated, uh, having, you know, the machine shop right here, uh, you know, with the assembly areas, uh, and just really rapid, rapid front typing, test area out back so we can build, assemble, test and, and iterate.

• 3:50Molly O'Shea?

  And so as we walk through, what is, what are we going to see today? Could you just give us a little run through?

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, the assembly area out here where we'll see spacecraft like these being assembled. Um, and then the, 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, um, in the back is, uh, the propulsion assembly area where the propulsion products are put together and then tested back there in the test area. We're going to see a rocket engine test today back there and, uh, yeah, should be pretty cool.

• 4:22Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  All right, well, starting here, um, this is, uh, the Mira. So thi- this is a, this is our, our Mira prototype. So this is one we can have out here that you can actually touch. So, Mira is a highly propulsive orbital transfer vehicle. So it's got these, these thrusters, actually, these, 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 a, that's good enough to move around in space very fast. Um, the, inside the chassis, we've got three propellant tanks, two oxidizer tanks and a fuel tank in the middle that feeds these thrusters.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  It's got the solar panels which, uh, un- 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, with the solar. The 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, um, steer the spacecraft with. And then there's, um, a bunch of antennas and stuff that, that go on this, which you can see on the flight vehicle in there. So, they've got red hats on, red, red, removed before flight covers on, but those are antennas. So we can talk to the spacecraft.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  It's got, um, the multi-layer insulation or MLI, that, that gold foil that, uh, thermally protects it, keeps it, it's kind of makes it, um, like a thermos bottle. It's really, when that, when that gets into vacuum of space, it acts like a thermos bottle and really thermally isolates the spacecraft. Here's some flight, uh, solar panels right here that, that are assembled and ready to integrate onto the spacecraft. So we've got, I think, um, 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.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  And then we can talk about Helios. Yeah, here's another one that's, uh,

• 6:21Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Got a team working on it.

• 6:25Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, wow.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  This, I believe, is the next one to go up here. It's going up later this fall.

• 6:32Molly O'Shea?

  So you have three in orbit?

• 6:33Speaker 00

  We have three on orbit right now. We did a rendezvous last year between two of them, got within 1,200 meters of each other, which is really damn close in space. Yeah, got some cool pictures. Yeah, we know where it's at.

• 6:44Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  They're all alive. We have GPS, so we know where they're at, what their state is. Yeah, yeah. So 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.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  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. That's, so basically escaping most of the gravity well of Earth. Very high-energy transfer. It can take, you know, five tons of payload to the moon on a Falcon 9.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:00Molly O'Shea?

  For those who don't know your origin story for Impulse and why you decided to go after this after SpaceX, could you share more on that?

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah. I was a founding employee at SpaceX. I developed, I led the development of the propulsion systems for Falcon and Dragon, and also started the origins of what became Starship. My probably my proudest development was the Merlin engine, which is which is currently flying on Falcon 9, the most reliable rocket engine ever developed, and also the highest thrust to weight of any rocket engine ever developed. But 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.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  So I started in pole space to do in-space transportation as opposed to from Earth to space transportation, which was SpaceX. We feel like the next step is in-space transportation, including to to the moon and landers on the moon, which we're also bidding on.

• 9:09Molly O'Shea?

  Going to the moon?

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Going to the moon. I'm all about the moon.

• 9:12Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. And so one of your engines is over here.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's go look at it. So these are domes that go on, these are.

• 9:20Molly O'Shea?

  They're not alien spacecrafts?

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Huh?

• 9:23Molly O'Shea?

  They're not alien spacecrafts?

• 9:24Speaker 00

  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 that 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.

• 9:45Molly O'Shea?

  Those are really cute.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  S A I P H, which is also a star in Orion. So we name we name our engines after stars. So this is Deneb, which is a which is a blue super giant star. And this is our our our super giant engine. This engine makes about 15,000 pounds of thrust. It's it's pump fed, so it's got the turbo pump there on the back. And it is it's aux-rich staged combustion. So all of the liquid oxygen off the pump comes out of this line, there's a valve missing here, but through the through the main aux valve into the preburner, where it gets burned with a little bit of the fuel, liquid methane. So we burn all the oxygen, a little bit of fuel, which makes makes hot oxygen at about

• 10:26Speaker 00

  4,000 PSI, which which goes into that housing, drives the turbine, which provides 1,500 horsepower to run the turbo pumps. Then the hot oxygen off of the turbine comes across this transfer tube and into the into the main injector. The fuel, other than the little bit that goes into the preburner, 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, oxygenated stage combustion.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  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, 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 only half the engine by height.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  It'll have a carbon skirt that'll glow white hot that gives it area ratio. That nozzle converts pressure into velocity, which is pure performance. So the more expansion nozzle you can have, the more performance you get.

• 11:42Molly O'Shea?

  What is the development process like been with this? I know you have Land and Mojave too. So do you have to do something special when you're testing it there?

• 11:49Speaker 00

  A lot special, difficult engines. Oxygenated stage combustion is a difficult, very difficult development. So we're, right now, we're finishing up the turbo pump development and just starting to get into engine testing. So we're just getting there. Yeah.

• 12:08Molly O'Shea?

  Exciting. How long have you guys had the Land and Mojave?

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Couple of years now. Yeah, we started with Rigel there, our little 200 pound thruster, and then moved to, onto this in the last year.

• 12:22Molly O'Shea?

  What's your favorite part?

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Hmm, what's my favorite part of this thing? Ah, the main injector, I'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, it's going to be a real high-class engine. We've got, you know, the design team, the test team, the manufacturing team. We've got the valve team, it's a bunch, you know, a bunch of pieces that come together. There's even an avionics box, there's the engine controller. So there's even avionics contribution to this. Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  This is the heart of the of the of the stage and this 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 our in the farther future, say a human lander would have several of these engines to land on the moon. You need something like this to do these, you know, big payloads to, you know, to space. So this is going to be our our prime mover.

• 13:25Molly O'Shea?

  Cool. So should we see how it's built?

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  It's all it's in fact, while we're here, it's it's mostly 3D printed and you'll see.

• 13:34Molly O'Shea?

  3D printed?

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:35Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 13:36Speaker 00

  It's 3D printed right here.

• 13:37Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I'll show you the 3D printed part. It's actually easier to show you the parts that aren't 3D printed.

• 13:42Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  This part right here is is hydroformed. This part right here is machined.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  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. This is the igniter that that lights it, 3D printed.

• 14:01Molly O'Shea?

  When did you get into 3D printing? Has this just been four?

• 14:03Speaker 00

  Soon as we started the company, within the first year, we bought it.

• 14:06Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 14:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:07Molly O'Shea?

  When did you?

• 14:08Speaker 00

  The the little thrusters on on there are completely 3D printed. You'll see them back here.

• 14:12Molly O'Shea?

  I heard you make little party cups out of those ones.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They make little shot glasses.

• 14:19Molly O'Shea?

  That's amazing.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:21Molly O'Shea?

  I'd love to get into more of the knowledge that you've built along the way. So you prefer 3D printing. What what are some other aspects that are core?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Let's talk about 3D printing a little bit. For rocket engines, it's it's it's almost like a cheat code. It's so easy to make a high performance rocket engine with 3D printing because the the rocket injectors and the cooling passages are pretty small and complex. So to make a to make a rocket engine by machining and assembling and welding and brazing is just 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 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

• 15:12Speaker 00

  we get to the machine shop, I want to talk about this. This, these are composite overwrapped pressure vessels, our COPVs.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  So these are the lightest way to make a propellant tank or a high or a gas tank, a high pressure tank. Because we wrap the carbon, which you can see happening on that machine back there.

• 15:31Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  The carbon fiber is extremely strong, so we have an aluminum liner that seals the propellant in and then a carbon overwrap that 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. And we wanted 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 Miras spacecraft. The bigger one there is a tank for VAST Space Station.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  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, for the Helios vehicle, to pressurize the tanks. So, everything from 1,000 PSI for the spacecraft up to 5,000 PSI for, for the helium tank.

• 16:40Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  These things are really hard to get from, typically from industry. Like, if you wanted to buy one of these, it might take, you know, after your order, it might take a year or two to get them and be hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece.

• 16:54Molly O'Shea?

  How do you find the talent to build them?

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Um, we learned, like, we mostly, 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 have 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. You saw the one that we burst back there?

• 17:21Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you make one, you blow it up, find out how you did, and then design from there.

• 17:28Molly O'Shea?

  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.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Well, in 2026, you can't, you can't have modern hardware without software. So the spacecraft has, you know, has autonomous software on it.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  We use, you know, 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, you know, to do the machining. So a lot of software.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Big, big IT department.

• 18:17Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so what are we going to see through here? I know there's one machine we're not allowed to see, but.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:21Molly O'Shea?

  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 US. 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, shipping away out it with fees, Brex's design to help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all-in-one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one. With same-day and even same-hour liquidity, access your funds anytime.

• 19:07Molly O'Shea?

  Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, Service Titan, PIMS, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid, trust and use Brex. Start today at brex.com/sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real-world judgment. That's why companies like Nvidia, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing 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/sorcery.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Let's see what we've got on here. There's a turbo, 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 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. Yeah, see, that's the boring bar there. The way 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.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  And then 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 surfaces 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.

• 20:59Molly O'Shea?

  I think we're gonna go see a copper liner back there.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, the the 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.

• 21:28Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Which Lee is gonna make stop them from from filming.

• 21:46Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  So we we start with these forgings that weigh about 700 pounds. And the final slotted product weighs about 25 pounds.

• 21:55Molly O'Shea?

  That's some pretty strong employees.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there's all the chips that we end up generating.

• 22:02Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. Those are pretty.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  And then we have a big milling machine here.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  To make big parts like that. The the mirror chassis, all that aluminum on the mirror is made right here on this machine. So this is our big our big mill.

• 22:17Molly O'Shea?

  This is huge.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  It's huge.

• 22:19Molly O'Shea?

  How did you get this in here?

• 22:20Speaker 00

  You can machine a motorcycle on this thing.

• 22:22Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's huge.

• 22:27Molly O'Shea?

  Did we see the 3D printers yet? Are we gonna?

• 22:30Speaker 00

  We're right there.

• 22:30Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:42Molly O'Shea?

  How did you get to this design? Was this original? Or did you have to go through a hub?

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, the original design. This is like our, sort of like for a development Mira, like our demo flights where you can mount anything. If 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.

• 23:05Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  So it can be custom fit to whatever your payload is. This is the one size fits all. You can put anything on it. 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.

• 23:24Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  This machine right here prints Incanel, 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. They'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 Velos. And these are printing a special alloy that's like Incanel, but it's burn resistant in the hot oxygen in that cycle that we have on the Denobitan. So all the turbo pump parts, the main injector,

• 24:07Speaker 00

  and anything that sees the hot oxygen is printed with this alloy called Novolloy, which has a high strength of Incanel, 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, 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 with a casting. But 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,

• 24:52Speaker 00

  but the big parts, they cast.

• 24:56Molly O'Shea?

  What was it like to see the iterations of Raptor over time to get

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Oh, we lived through it.

• 25:01Molly O'Shea?

  To the last, the latest version, which just looks so

• 25:04Speaker 00

  It was amazing.

• 25:05Molly O'Shea?

  That one chart is so great.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  It was amazing. And I always said it took, it took three versions of Merlin

• 25:11Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  to get it to be really tight. And it took three versions also of Raptor. I always say it takes really three, three iterations to get to a really, really tight product. And Raptor's there. Yeah. And Merlin's there. Yeah.

• 25:28Molly O'Shea?

  Alright, so we're entering the back area. I heard this is the secret area.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  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 Deneb right here. That's a ball valve right there. You can see the balls.

• 25:51Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  There's a pre-valve, some actuators. So these, you know, all get assembled in this room. Here's the thrust chamber assembly. So that, that copper piece that you saw back there is inside there is, is the inside of this. And then the outside is, is this in-canal jacket that gets braised to it. So the, the copper, basically the hype, the, the high parts, except for the channels of the copper are stuck, you know, braised to the, to the, to the outer shell. And then that, that forms grooves, you know, channels that the fuel flows through to cool it. So that fuel will come into this combustion chamber at, you know, minus 250 degrees F is liquid, liquid methane, and it'll go into the main injector at plus 500 degree gas.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Could have picked up so much heat from the combustion. And here's the whole Deneb engine. So like I said, you've got this big carbon ceramic skirt. This is not carbon ceramic. This is, or carbon ceramic. This is actually carbon epoxy, just a mock-up. But the final part, well, it'll look like, like the brakes on my car, you know, that's that carbon ceramic material that can run red hot. Actually, white hot. This thing will run at over 3,000 degrees F. So it'll be probably the hottest skirt, you know, nozzle ever flown on our, on our This thing will break a few records. Probably the highest performance and the hottest nozzle that's ever been flown in space.

• 27:19Molly O'Shea?

  Have you thought about putting one of these on your car?

• 27:22Speaker 00

  That'd be awesome. Yeah, that would be awesome. Fifteen thousand pounds of thrust on a two thousand pound car. Yeah, that would get up and move out. Alright, let's um, let's see a, let's see a rocket firing. Are you guys ready to do a firing?

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, ready when you're ready.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Alright, let's come in and I'll show you what we've got.

• 27:44Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  This is one of the

• 27:50Speaker 00

  one of the safes, the six pound thrusters that we use on Mira. And it's in a vacuum chamber and it's sitting right now at um at about six tor, atmosphere of seven sixty tor, so we're six, seven sixtieths of atmosphere, so it's got a pretty good vacuum in there. And when they give us the count, you won't hear anything because it's in vacuum, but you're gonna see a flash in that gap between the nozzle and that pipe, and then it's gonna start glowing.

• 28:16Molly O'Shea?

  Oh wow.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Give us a count when you're going.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Off firing, five, four, three, two, one.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  I didn't even see the flash that time.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  How crazy that you can sit how crazy that you can sit this close to a running rocket engine.

• 28:38Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  So the way it's designed, the part that's glowing um red hot is uncooled nozzle, just like that carbon skirt will be. That's called radiation cooler, it just radiates the heat out to space. The, the forward part is cooled by the propellant. You see that pipe on the top that comes down through the nozzle? That provides um the oxygen, nitrous oxide, and it flows through little channels to cool it. So that part runs, it's still red hot, you know, barely glowing, but it's um, it's much cooler. And it's carrying the, it's carrying the combustion chamber pressure too, so it has more stress on it, so it's running at a lower temperature where it can actually take the stress. The skirt is so hot, it doesn't have very much strength, but there's, there's no pressure load on that skirt. There's no stress on it other than thermal.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  So it actually worked out pretty, pretty good, the 3D printing and the cooling scheme uh made this a pretty efficient little tiny thruster.

• 29:36Molly O'Shea?

  What was it like when you tested the first one?

• 29:39Speaker 00

  It worked.

• 29:40Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Well, the first, the absolute first one didn't, but we just, and it was a machined one. It wasn't even printed. The one that I machined on our lathe here. And after a couple of tries, we tried a few things and we got to light and we were super excited. And that wasn't in, we didn't have a vacuum chamber then. It was out. It was sitting out in the shaft. It was loud. We were in hearing protection goggles. Then we got this vacuum chamber and we did all the development qualification. And this is a flight acceptance test of them. So hundreds of these have now already been through tests on this, on this stand. So we're measuring on that, you see it's mounted on that pedestal right there. There's a wire, the black wire come up the back. That's a load cell. So that's measuring the thrust. And then in the propellant feed, we're measuring the flow rate.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  So the thrust divided by the flow rate is the ISP. So we're measuring the ISP, which is the performance metric of the engine. This, this engine has about a 290 second ISP. Whereas the Deneb engine will have almost, almost 400 second ISP, about 285 or 3, I'm sorry, 385 second ISP.

• 30:47Molly O'Shea?

  How are you like, how are you measuring all the data off of this? I'm assuming this just fuses off data.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. Yeah, you can see the thermocouple, the yellow things are thermocouples. The, there's little pressure transit. We're measuring three pressures, a bunch of temperatures, the flow rates, the thrust. And then all the, you know, these are, these are test stand temperatures. We're measuring temperatures on test stands. So there's probably a hundred channels of data that's being recorded. And then they look at the data after every run. To make sure it's running in family.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  He's a little long run, three minutes.

• 31:25Molly O'Shea?

  It's getting really far.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  So vast there now. Now it shut off and now it's going to do some pulses.

• 31:33Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  So as you can see, this engine can do anything from running steady state to pulsing. And on the mirror spacecraft, the way we steer it is all eight engines light. And then to steer, we offpulse. So if we pulse one at like, say 80% duty cycle, it'll have about 80% thrust and that'll allow it to steer. So they'll be pulsing, some will be pulsing, some will be running steady state to steer the spacecraft. That's kind of how we do it. So instead of using continuous throttle, adjusting continuous throttle like Deneb can do, this is called pulse width modulation to set an equivalent for us.

• 32:13Molly O'Shea?

  Have you had to maneuver across any asteroids?

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Not asteroids, but we've had to do collision avoidance on the first spacecraft.

• 32:22Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  Like in the first, I think within the first three or four months, we had to do a collision avoidance.

• 32:28Molly O'Shea?

  How did you get warnings of that? What was it?

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Air Force tracks everything and you get warnings. There's actually some commercial company, I think LEO Labs tracks things and they just tell you, hey, you've got a, you know, you've got a potential.

• 32:42Molly O'Shea?

  And that's exciting for you because it's your job.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  It was kind of, it kind of caught us by surprise because, okay, we got to do this maneuver. And we haven't done very much yet, but we were able to do it and get out of the way. Yeah, pretty cool.

• 32:56Molly O'Shea?

  And so what is this huge, ginormous machine?

• 32:59Speaker 00

  This is electric propulsion. So if you look in there, that's an electric propulsion thruster right there. That's a hall thruster, just like Starlink has. It runs on Krypton. And this chamber pulls down, this one will pull down to about one tor. This will pull down to 10 to the minus six, so about one millionth of a tor. So the vacuum in this chamber is literally one million times lower vacuum than in here. Because the electric propulsion needs, the plasma only works in a hard vacuum. So this one really, that's why it's got so much piping and machinery to pull that back, to pull in very.

• 33:37Molly O'Shea?

  What are you going to use electric propulsion for?

• 33:41Speaker 00

  For probably for north-south station keeping, when you're in geosynchronous orbit, the orbit gets perturbed and you want to take out that, those perturbations. So it's called, it's called north-south station keeping. So if we want to preserve, we want to preserve the, the chemical propellant for when the customer wants to make a fast move. So by using just a small tank of krypton and a couple of these, you can do north, you can do the north-south station keeping for five years and not use any of your chemical prop.

• 34:13Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  So it's, most, most big geoside lights are all electric propulsion. But they're, but they're not, they're not orbital transfer vehicles. We're an orbital transfer vehicle, so we need chemical propulsion to move fast.

• 34:28Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think about nuclear? Do you think that's going to enter anytime soon?

• 34:31Speaker 00

  I'm a huge proponent of nuclear. I've, I've been talking with NASA folks or anybody that would listen about how the next, the next step, the future in propulsion is nuclear electric, I think.

• 34:44Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:46Molly O'Shea?

  What, what do you think the timeline for that will be?

• 34:48Speaker 00

  Well, they're doing that SR1, the Space Reactor 1, mission to Mars. So it's starting now. Yeah. I think, um, nuclear electric, NEP propulsion is going to be important for going out to the outer planets. If you're, if you're staying near Earth or even between Earth and Mars, probably solar electric is, is, is, is going to outperform it on, on cost and performance just because solar is now getting very light in space, especially if Elon starts doing these data servers, servers in space that are going to really optimize the solar panel panels to be really light.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  So I think solar electric is still going to be a major form of propulsion for, you know, for the, like, cis lunar.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  But if you want to go to the outer planets where you get far away from the sun, the example I always give is the New Horizons mission where they flew past Pluto and got those awesome photos of Pluto. Well, that spacecraft was going so fast when it went by Pluto that it only got a few hours of pictures before it was gone, right? It went past.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  With a with a big nuclear electric stage, you could actually get to Pluto faster because you got high performance and you could slow down to inner orbit around Pluto. And even if you may be able to propel it to that time, but now you still have potentially megawatts of power, depending on how big your nuclear reactor was, to do science. So you've got all this power that you can do crazy science things with like, I don't know, ground penetrating radar or whatever. And you can keep it warm because you've got the nuclear heat. So you keep it warm for decades. So you can do science or you could run a very powerful radio for decades. Like we know Voyager is they're shutting off on the experiments because it's so far out and the power is starting to fade.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  With a vision reactor, you could do the same thing. You could run for decades and still have a lot of power to run experiments. So I think it just opens up, I think it's pretty far in the future. I mean, you know, and maybe, maybe a few decades away before we're really doing big nuclear stages. Hopefully centered in that, depending on how much funding it gets, but that's the next step.

• 37:03Molly O'Shea?

  Today's episode is sponsored by V C X by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at get v c x dot com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings A I into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like A I powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow, or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25% year over year. Public's A I then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single U S stock, evaluates them and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis. What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each.

• 37:48Molly O'Shea?

  Stock is included and before you invest, you can even back test your idea against the S and P 500. So you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond generated assets, public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com/sorcery. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. Enterprise AI runs on Merge, the AI infra platform for integrations, agent tooling, and model orchestration. So your team's ship product, not plumbing. Mistral, Dropbox, and Drata already trust Merge in production. Start building at merge.dev.

• 38:33Molly O'Shea?

  Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone, anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deal.com/sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash sorcery.

• 38:49Molly O'Shea?

  What are your thoughts on data centers in space?

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Data centers in space are a no-brainer.

• 38:54Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah?

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it's gonna take a while before it's cost, straight up cost competitive with terrestrial. But the real cost is how soon you can get the power. And from what I've read, it can take, you know, up to seven years right now to, to get power for, you know, for a new data, for a new data center. If you can build like Elon plans to do and get there faster, I think that's gonna be the right answer. So. I've, I've actually been saying this for a long time that compute will need to move to space at some point. That's my hot take.

• 39:29Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Is compute needs to move to space. It's, it makes the most sense of anything to move to space, to build mega structure, because.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  All you need is an input is power and all you have as an output is data. So you move it to space, you have all the power you would ever need. And you transmit that, that, that data back down on a, on a laser beam, terawatt laser beam. So it's just, it's solved. It's just so simple. Compute, power for compute is growing at greater than 15% per year. Some people say that it'll be equal to all of the earth-based power right now in about 20 or 30 years. It's just, it's gonna, it's just, it's crushing our resource use on earth.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  So I think it's just important to move it up. I'm glad that it's getting moved earlier. Not, not wait until it's crushing, you know, crushing us on, on total power use.

• 40:28Molly O'Shea?

  Are you surprised at how big SpaceX has gotten and especially the Starlink business?

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's been amazing to, you know, to be part of that company and, and see, see the, the growth and the, yeah, just incredible. Like when we first designed Starlink, we all had spreadsheets and we're looking at the return on investment and going, we need to make and fly as many as we can. We all saw it. It was really funny to, to see, you know, all the naysayers online saying, there's no way they're gonna be, they're gonna crush. And we're looking at it going the other way, going make them as fast as you can and launch them. This is gonna, you know, this is gonna hockey stick this, the stock, which it exactly did.

• 41:10Molly O'Shea?

  Were there any secrets to working with Elon and handling his Elon-ness?

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Tons.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, Elon's great to work with. Generally, he, um, he just energizes you. He's got this infectious enthusiasm and gets you just hyped up to go do crazy stuff. And, and we do. And, um, you know, he's.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  It's all about urgency and getting it done. And he gets, he really gets the best out of everybody. And that's why that company is so incredible. He's also really good at finding and recruiting talent. Like, the key, the key to success is having a great team. And we spend a lot of time to making sure we get a good talent. This, this, you know, we're basically, we're kind of the same plan. Vertically integrated, hire the best and move fast. And that's what we learned at SpaceX.

• 42:07Molly O'Shea?

  If you didn't have your role as CEO, which job of all these jobs would you want?

• 42:17Speaker 00

  Uh, CTO.

• 42:18Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 42:19Speaker 00

  I am CTO, actually. I'm a better fit as CTO. I like, I like designing the rocket engines and the avionics and the radios and the, uh, the telescopes and yeah.

• 42:30Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  I'm very technical.

• 42:32Molly O'Shea?

  Well, cool. As we wrap up, any last remarks? Anything you're super excited about?

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Uh, I'm super excited about the moon. You know, NASA is, uh, you know, Jared Isaacman said, "We're going to build a base on the moon and we're going to stay there." And that's, that's right on, man. That's, that's, that's exactly what I want to do. I think the moon is more important than Mars in the near term. And I think the same thing I was talking about earlier, using the resources of space to offload the crush of resource on earth. Like, people are predicting we're running out of copper here in the next few years. Um, we're just, data centers require so much copper. We need to start getting copper from the moon, uh, from the asteroids. There's a almost infinite supply in our solar system of, of material, enough to supply us for thousands of years. We just gotta get ready to go get it.

• 43:20Molly O'Shea?

  Well, are you interested in photonic chips if copper is becoming?

• 43:24Speaker 00

  I think we're gonna have to, uh, yeah, flip to something else. And I think it's gonna drive that technology. Yeah.

• 43:31Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 43:31Molly O'Shea?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Thank you. Great talking.

• 43:34Molly O'Shea?

  Cool.

• 43:35Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.