Elon Musk may get much of the attention, but the story of SpaceX hinges on a collection of key early figures.

One of them is Tom Mueller, or SpaceX employee number one.

It was in 2002 when I got introduced to Elon through the Rocket Club actually.

That's how I met Elon.

And he wanted to do a launch vehicle company, so I was the first one to sign.

Mueller ran propulsion at SpaceX, spearheading development of the Merlin rocket engine

that powers the Falcon 9, and the Draco engines that power the dragon spacecraft.

He was critical to cracking the code on reusability.

The model spacex has pioneered and uses

to dramatically drive launch costs lower. mule from SpaceX in late 2020 to start his own company, Impulse Space,

which is developing a space tug to capture some of the future business his former employer's new mega rocket is poised to unleash.

Well, think of Starship is like a cargo ship, you know, coming into Port.

The Port being just the specific orbit it goes into, the lower Earth orbit and both there's thousands of

orbits even in the lower Earth orbit you could go anywhere there so it just goes to one

place and lets a hundred tons of payload out and most of those guys are going to if there's a whole bunch of them like a right share mission

most of them are going to want to go somewhere else and that's where we come in we have a very

highly propulsive we have a lot of impulse on boreal

on propellant so that we can move them to other orbit. On this episode the

famed engineer details his new venture, reflects on his time at SpaceX, and outlines impulse's own deep space ambitions.

I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. manifest space.

Talk to me about impulse space and a startup and what you're doing. Yeah, well after I left SpaceX in 2020, I decided where the business is really at is in space.

You know, I mean, the whole point of SpaceX is to move payloads into space.

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