Rocket engine startup Impulse raises $500 million to employ people, not artificial intelligence

Impulse Space, a startup founded by SpaceX engine expert Tom Mueller to build highly maneuverable spacecraft, announced a $500 million Series D this week that it will use to hire up to 200 new employees.

The round, led by 137 Ventures and BANNER VC, with participation from Founders Fund, Lux Capital and Linse Capital, reflects investor interest in space and defense technology as the US government spends money on national security issues and SpaceX prepares for an initial public offering.

Motivation focuses on navigating space. The company has developed a highly maneuverable platform called Mira that is targeted at buyers for the US Space Force. It is also building Helios, a vehicle designed to quickly carry satellites into high orbits after dropping them into near-Earth space.

President and COO Eric Romo told TechCrunch that the new capital will help the company build and test more spacecraft and emphasized the company’s hiring plans at a time when demand for space talent is high.

While the company’s software teams are embracing AI coding tools, Romo said that when it comes to solving real-world engineering problems, deep learning models aren’t quite ready for primetime use. As SpaceX’s 13th employee in 2003, Romo’s job was to create a computer simulation of the company’s engine design to evaluate its performance.

“I considered it a success if I got 20 percent right, because the simulations weren’t that good,” Romo said. “They’ve improved, but they’re not much better, so there’s really no alternative to designing the thing, analyzing it, building it, and then putting it on the test bench.”

Romo suspects that AI tools for hardware design may be slower to arrive due to the difficulty of finding the right training data, compared to the amount of text and code available online to train MBA students. “If you want, for example, to find the best turbo pump seal pack designs in the world, you won’t find them online,” he points out.

Impulse began by focusing on propulsion and evolved into building spacecraft, requiring the company to add more expertise in the form of engineers building vehicle structures and flight computers. One reason the company recently opened an office in Colorado is that aerospace talent has more options today — instead of just going to Los Angeles, engineers can find work in Seattle, Denver, or Texas.

The company’s next step is another launch of its Mira spacecraft, which made its third flight late last year. That flight was not without incident, as a problem with its navigation system meant it consumed too much of its propellant early on. Romo said the company is preparing for a new Mira mission that is expected to be launched before the end of the year.