Tom Mueller was the first person hired at SpaceX, where he built the engines that made the Falcon fly. Then he left, in 2020, to start a company on a contrarian read of his own life's work: that the rocket is now the easy part, and the money is in everything that happens after it lets go. A SpaceX rideshare drops your satellite into a generic orbit for cheap, and Impulse builds the tug that carries it the rest of the way, fast. Its Mira vehicle has been flying since 2023, which is rare for a startup this young, and the bigger Helios kick stage is due in 2027. The market values the company at 4.26 billion dollars, ahead of what the hardware has yet proven, and a growing share of the work is quietly military, from Space Force missions to a slot on the Golden Dome interceptor programme. Nobody else in this drawer builds the delivery layer, and the whole company is a bet that the layer is where the industry goes next.