Episode
Inside Impulse Space's Factory with Founder Tom Mueller (Full Tour)
- Podcast
- Sourcery
- Published
- Jun 4, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2639
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Summary
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 OโShea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: โ https://x.com/sourceryy ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ YouTube: https://youtu.be/WIORHdlPWAI ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ โข Brex โThe modern finance platform, combining the worldโs smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery โข Turing โTuring delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performanceโand enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery โข VCX โVCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com โข Deel โDeel isโฆ