Tom Mueller is driving his candy green Porsche Taycan Turbo S the way he builds rocket engines: with a terrifying amount of instantaneous thrust and little regard for the local speed limits of El Segundo. He is headed west on Marine Avenue, cutting through the smog-tinted sunlight of Los Angeles’ South Bay aerospace corridor, talking about Earth’s limitations.

“If we continue to grow like we have, eventually you just use up all the metals, you use up all the energy,” says Mueller, 65, who is especially concerned by the energy demand of AI data centers. “By about 2045, the total power that the world is generating right now would be needed just for compute. Exponential growth can crush resources on Earth.”

From behind his reflective wrap-around shades, Mueller spots a gap in the afternoon congestion. His electric sports car can rocket from zero to 60 in 2.3 seconds, and Mueller seems eager to demonstrate the point. “This is where we accelerate,” he says, stomping on the pedal. The torque hits like a physical blow, pinning us against the leather seats as Mueller cackles. “The moon and the near-Earth asteroids,” he continues moments later, now parked at a red light, “contain billions of tons of metal, silicon, water and ice, so we have to start using it. It seems a little farfetched to start using it now, because we just haven’t built the space economy. We haven’t got there yet.”

That is the bet behind Mueller’s Impulse Space, the Redondo Beach-headquartered startup he founded in 2021, a few months after leaving SpaceX. Just as SpaceX dominates the global launch market, Impulse wants to own what comes next: “in-space mobility,” moving satellites, cargo and eventually people after rockets drop them off in orbit. Its spacecraft are not built to blast off from Earth, but to hitch rides aboard launch providers like SpaceX, then detach and ferry payloads between orbits—and one day, Mueller hopes, to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Impulse’s selling point is not just that it can move things in space, but that it can move them quickly. Like Mueller’s all-electric Porsche, most satellites are powered by electric propulsion systems, but unlike his car these spacecraft are slow: It takes between six to 12 months for most satellites to get from low orbit, a few hundred miles above Earth, to geostationary orbit, more than 22,000 miles up. Impulse says its spacecraft will reduce that journey to a day with its chemical engines, powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen—the cosmic equivalent of swapping ships for airplanes.

“What distinguishes us from other spacecraft is we're about half propellant by mass when we lift off, so we can move fast,” says Mueller. “Moving fast is what our customers want.”

Mueller’s pitch is landing at a moment when space is attracting more capital than ever. Global spending on space is projected to grow from roughly $600 billion last........

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