Impulse Space's proposed mission architecture combines the Helios kick stage and an Impulse-made lunar lander to deliver more mass on the Moon.
By Tom Mueller, Founder & CEO
Growing up in the Space Race era, everyone was excited for our future beyond Earth, and the pace of scientific innovation was thrilling. Humanity went from launching the first-ever artificial satellite to putting men on the Moon in the span of just twelve years. Popular culture mirrored this scientific and technological momentum, as shows like Star Trek made a world of jetpacks, teleportation, and space travel seem inevitable.
Yet all these decades later, we haven’t fully delivered on that promise. Star Trek is still a blockbuster media franchise, but its technologies remain firmly fixed in some distant tomorrow. The United States is still the leader in space, but preserving that leadership requires continued innovation, growth, and exploration of the cosmos.
I founded Impulse Space to help accelerate our future beyond Earth. I’ve spent much of my career working to solve access to space; now, Impulse is solving mobility in space. We help scientific, commercial, and government missions get where they need to go after launch—quickly, reliably, and affordably.
So far, Impulse’s mission has unfolded in the orbits closest to Earth. But our work to improve in-space mobility doesn’t end at Geostationary Orbit (GEO). That’s why we’re unveiling some of our initial plans for the next stages of our roadmap, starting with the Moon.
The Helios kick stage and Impulse-made Lunar Lander launch on a standard medium- or heavy-lift rocket. After deploying from the launch vehicle, Helios executes an initial burn toward the Moon. The Lunar Lander then deploys from Helios in lunar orbit.
Our Lunar Vision
Today, there’s a critical gap in lunar cargo delivery capabilities for payloads in a midsized (0.5-13 tons) range. These sorts of deliveries could include things like a lunar terrain vehicle, rovers, communication relay systems, power generators, and habitation modules. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program is limited to small-scale deliveries, and the Human Landing System (HLS) vehicles (targeting large payloads required for human flight) are still in development. Therefore, in addition to these services, we need landers capable of near-term, multi-ton cargo deliveries in order to rapidly build out a sustainable lunar presence.
Fortunately, this is precisely the type of challenge that Impulse excels at. Traveling to and landing on the Moon requires highly-integrated spacecraft with reliable performance across all systems—from avionics to propulsion to communications—and we’ve already proven that we’re up to the task.
Our proposed architecture combines our existing Helios kick stage and a new lunar lander, to be developed by our team in-house. Helios would launch on a standard medium- or heavy-lift rocket. Our lunar lander would ride as a payload on Helios. Once Helios and the lander are deployed in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Helios serves as a cruise stage, transporting the lander to low lunar orbit within one week. The lunar lander then separates from Helios and descends to the surface of the Moon. By taking advantage of Helios’s high delta-v capabilities, this mission architecture doesn’t require in-space refueling.
This solution can bridge the existing cargo delivery gap by offering direct transportation of the necessary mass to kickstart infrastructure, resource utilization, and economic activities on the Moon. We’ve already begun engine development for our lunar lander solution, and we stand ready to execute as dictated by industry demand and interest.
With this Helios and Impulse-made lander combination, we estimate delivering up to 6 tons of payload mass to the Moon (across two missions) per year starting in 2028 at a cost-effective price point. Each Helios + lander combo would take approximately 3 tons of cargo to the Moon.
After deploying in lunar orbit, the Impulse-made Lunar Lander completes a braking burn.
Impulse’s Edge
There are several advantages to this approach.
- First, it uses existing and flight-proven launch vehicles, significantly derisking the mission profile and greatly expediting time-to-launch.
- Second, our Helios kick stage is already well into development, with the first flight slated for late next year. By 2028, it will already be flying multiple missions per year.
- Third, we’ll be able to leverage components and subsystems with proven flight heritage to further reduce mission risk—one of the advantages of our vertically-integrated approach, where we design and build the majority of our hardware and software in-house, from structures to star trackers.
- And fourth, our teams have already begun work on the engine for a lunar lander—and, as we showed when we took our Mira spacecraft from clean sheet design to in-space operations in less than 15 months, we know how to develop reliable spacecraft rapidly.
For the lander engine, we’ve already proven we have the expertise to meet the necessary propulsion requirements. Lunar landings necessitate throttleable, restartable engines with high specific impulse (Isp) for controlled descent in vacuum conditions (where there’s no atmosphere to support braking). With Mira’s Saiph thrusters, we’ve already demonstrated the capability to operate highly efficient, rapidly restartable engines in space. The engine we’re actively developing for the lunar lander uses a nitrous and ethane bipropellant—the same combination used successfully in space on Mira—alleviating any risk of boil-off during extended missions.
We’re confident in our ability to deliver this solution because of our strong track record of rapid success.
Following the braking burn, the Impulse-made Lunar Lander descends toward the lunar surface.
Why the Moon?
A thriving space economy requires three things: sustaining in-space presence, utilizing in-space resources, and greatly decreasing the economic costs of in-space mobility.
Improving access to the Moon advances all three of these goals. The Moon can serve as the site of a sustained human presence in space—which, in turn, could function as a staging ground for future missions deeper into the Solar System. The Moon also boasts natural resources, like the valuable isotope Helium-3. Because the Moon has a significantly weaker gravitational field than Earth, getting in situ materials from the lunar surface to LEO is much more efficient than launching them from Earth. But, taking full advantages of these types of opportunities requires reliable, near-term cargo transportation capabilities.
NASA and this Administration have made it clear: returning a human presence to the Moon is imperative to maintaining and expanding American leadership in space. Achieving this vision will not only secure our position in the new space economy, but also support the greatest goal of using space “for the benefit of all mankind.”
To echo President John F. Kennedy, going to the Moon is hard. But we know that we have some of the brightest minds in aerospace engineering here at Impulse, who push the boundaries of innovation forward every day. We’re confident in our ability to solve technology’s toughest challenges and excited to continue accelerating our future beyond Earth.
About Impulse Space
Impulse Space, the in-space mobility leader, is accelerating our future beyond Earth beginning with its fleet of cost-effective, high-performance space vehicles: Helios and Mira. The Helios kick stage unlocks high-energy orbits with its powerful Deneb engine, rapidly transporting payloads from LEO to MEO, GEO, heliocentric, lunar, and other planetary orbits. The flight-proven Mira enables precise maneuverability and rapid responsiveness for hosting, deployment, and rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) across any orbit. Founded by Tom Mueller and led by a team of industry pioneers, Impulse Space is transforming in-space mobility by reliably and rapidly getting customers where they want to go. And they're just getting started. For more information, visit www.impulsespace.com
