the first SpaceX employee

The race to explode all the resources that the Moon offers You’re going to need new spaceships. If Starship manages to become a fully reusable rocket capable of landing and taking off from lunar soil, we will have a winning horse. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is finding competition where he least expects it.

From Jeff Bezos to Tom Mueller. Starship delays are causing talk. If rumors emerged last week that NASA could turn to the Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar module of Blue Origin to take astronauts to the Moon in the event that SpaceX did not arrive in time to beat China, this week a very particular company has joined the race for the moon.

In this case, Impulse Space wants to solve the challenges facing the commercial race to the Moon with an unmanned spacecraft capable of delivering up to three tons of cargo. And who is behind Impulse? None other than Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s first employee and the genius who designed the Falcon 9 rocket engines.

Agility and pragmatism against Starship. Impulse Space, founded by Tom Mueller not as a new rocket launcher but to solve the challenges of orbital mobility once in space, has set its sights on the Moon. The company revealed its plans to develop a lunar landing module which would enter service in 2028. Mueller places his idea in a “critical gap” in the market: a medium-sized cargo ship.

Impulse’s proposal is quite pragmatic. Instead of developing a completely new system from scratch, it will combine the Helios booster, already in development by the company itself for upper rocket stages, with a lander of its own manufacture. Helios would act as a cruise stage, transporting the craft to lunar orbit in a week. One of the keys to its design is that it does not require a complex series of refueling in orbit, like Starship and other systems based on cryogenic fuel.

The Impulse module’s engine will use a combination of nitrous oxide and ethane bipropellant, which has already been successfully tested on its Mira orbital vehicle. This choice, according to the company, is safer and less toxic than traditional hypergolic propellants, and in turn avoids the evaporation problems of cryogenic fuels.

A competitor who knows the house inside. What makes this ad fascinating is the pedigree of its founder. Tom Mueller was a fundamental player at SpaceX: he led the development of the Falcon 9 engines and now applies that experience to his own company. Including the speed that characterizes SpaceX. Impulse Space boasts of having carried its Mira spacecraft from the design table to operating in orbit in less than 15 months.

But Impulse’s lander won’t just compete with Starship. It is located in a very interesting competitive niche. While Firefly’s Blue Ghost aims for lighter loads and future systems contracted by NASA, such as Starship itself or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 focus on enormous loads (30 and 100 tons), the Impulse proposal competes directly with the Blue Moon Mark 1, which also has a capacity of three tons, and which NASA could use to transport astronauts in a mission with several moon landings.

But the big advantage of the Impulse design is that it is compatible with a wide range of launch rockets (Falcon 9, Vulcan, Ariane 6, etc.). Its system does not depend on a single supplier, which gives it considerable strategic flexibility.

He who laughs last… At SpaceX they don’t consider anything lost (and no one should consider SpaceX a loser in any case, looking at its history). In fact, Musk’s company has just put dates and figures on its lunar ambitions. According to an update on their websiteSpaceX plans to begin its cargo missions to the surface of the Moon in 2028, the same year as Impulse, but with a price that breaks all schemes: 100 million dollars per metric ton, or what is the same, 100,000 dollars per kilogram.

To put this in perspective, Astrobotic, another competitor in the sector, sells its flights to the Moon at a price of 1.2 million dollars per kilogram. The difference is abysmal and demonstrates SpaceX’s aggressive pricing strategy, which is only possible with the total reuse of its Starship system. We are, therefore, faced with two opposing philosophies. A bet on the safe side and a bet on breaking the market. Led by two people who worked together for years.

Image | Impulse Space

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