Transcript

You know, SpaceX employee number one wasn't Elon Musk. It was a rocket engine designer, Tom Mueller. And today, I got Tom to stop what he was doing for a few minutes and talk to me for an episode of It's Not Rocket Science. You could say that if there was one employee responsible for the success of SpaceX, it was Tom. We didn't sit down to specifically discuss the SpaceX IPO, but I couldn't help getting his hot take before we got into the interview.

Tom Mueller: I'm just gonna stay long. I actually was was on a Fortune reporter this morning, and she was, you know, she was kinda like, isn't it overvalued? Yada yada. I go, I you know, I this this is priced on on this you know, the crazy things that are gonna happen in space, not on their current revenue. And I said, I'm long SpaceX.

Jeff Ward: We have liftoff. So, Tom, how did you end up meeting Elon and becoming the engine guy at SpaceX?

Tom Mueller: Yeah. So I started my career at TRW, is now Northrop Grumman, which happens to be just straight across the street here from my current company. And I was not only was I, you know, a professional rocket engine develop developer at TRW Liquid Rockets, I was the head of the of the rocket engine department over there. But I was also doing amateur rockets, liquid rockets in a rocket club out in the desert. And Elon had just come back from Russia after three trips to Russia to try and buy some low cost launch vehicles from them and failed to convince them.

So he just had decided he's gonna start his own launch vehicle company. And he knew some people in the club, including Chris Thompson, who's been on your podcast, employee number two SpaceX, who was working with Elon at the time. And Elon said, Hey, I need an engine guy. Do you know anybody? And Thompson said, Yeah, you need to meet Tom Mueller.

So that's how I got introduced to Elon. And then as they say, the rest is history.

Jeff Ward: And just by a quirk of when you signed your contract, you ended up being employee number one.

Tom Mueller: Yeah. We were meeting for several months. We'd have meetings like every week or two here locally in LA, down to Hilton, down by LAX. And at one of those meetings, it must've been probably in April. I met him in January.

I say April because I started on May 2002. So, I'd say maybe a month before that or few weeks before, he said to me and Chris Thompson, he said, "Hey, if you guys are in, I wanna start this company." And so I went home and talked to my wife and decided I needed to do it. So I contacted his assistant and she sent me the paperwork and I signed. And then Thompson called me and said, "You're gonna do it?"

I said, "I already did. I signed." He goes, "I'm going to too." So he signed and he became employee number two in payroll. And then I'm just guessing this, but I guess then Elon, she probably said, Elon, you need to sign too.

So he became employee number three apparently.

Jeff Ward: I like that because by the time I got there, everybody was pretty well embedded. It was a well functioning team. And there was no sense of a, like, oh, I was here first kind of hierarchy. But we always knew that it's like the engines were the thing. The whole rest of the rocket was there to serve the engines.

Tom Mueller: Yeah. I think, you know, we've talked about this before. If you have engines, you pretty much have a rocket because you can always scrap together structure and and avionics and and go fly something. But it's pretty hard to get an engine. Like, there's very few people that can go develop an engine.

Luckily, I seem to have that talent.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. It seems like it. I wanted to ask you, like, when you had that opportunity with Elon, what did you make of it? Because there were other people who said, oh, I'm gonna build a rocket and we both know that they got certain distance and then they all pulled out, especially around that kind of time, like late nineties, early two thousands. A few people tried to build a launch vehicle.

Tom Mueller: Yep. I was there was a there was a startup called RDC, which was a bunch of McDonald Douglas guys. Smart guys couldn't get funding, Trying to use TRW engine. Was talking to them at time. They wanted me to come join them. But they fell by the wayside kind of during the .com crash. Then right about that time also was Beale Aerospace who had lots of funding, I think they had kind of terrible ideas. They wanted me to come out and interview with them. I refused to go interview because I just thought that their design sucked. And then luckily for us, they failed and we ended up getting their test site. Andy Beale had spent tens of millions of dollars on a test site, including that big tripod and the block houses and all that. So we took advantage of that failure and were able to start our rocket test site right there in Beale's test site.

Jeff Ward: Was there something about the SpaceX opportunity that made you think that it would be different or was it more, "Hey, look, let's give this a shot?"

Tom Mueller: After those two companies that failed for two different reasons, I felt like Elon was super smart. He was talking to great talent. He had me there and many other people from industry that were very smart. He was obviously super smart, motivated and he had quite a bit of capital. He had almost 200,000,000, I believe, from the PayPal IPO. It was about to go IPO, I think, month after I met him. And so we had, I think, good design. He listened to me. In the first few meetings we had, we designed Falcon one. And so I think we had great ideas, we had great people and we had funding. We had all the things that we needed and I just said, I'm gonna kick myself if I don't do this. Even though I had a really great career at TRW. And then you find out how much they like you when you say I'm leaving. All of a sudden they're making counters. They're giving me promotions. So Elon had to keep up on it to keep me. So it actually worked out okay for me.

Jeff Ward: And originally when you joined TRW, was that something that you had had your eye on to get into space since you were a kid or was it

Tom Mueller: Yeah. So I've been telling this story a bit lately, but I was really interested in science and very mechanically inclined. My dad being a logger, me working on his logging truck, working in the woods, riding motorcycles, all that. I'm working on motorcycles and bicycles and stuff. So very mechanically inclined, decided I was gonna be an aircraft mechanic. Took a math class as a freshman in high school, was really good at math. My math teacher said, Tom, you're really great at math. You're gonna be an engineer, right? I said, No, I'm gonna be an aircraft mechanic. And he said, You wanna be the guy that fixes a plane or the guy that designs the plane? So he convinced me to become an engineer, completely changed my life, set me on this path. So I went to University of Idaho, which is only an hour away, hour and a half away from my hometown and took mechanical engineering, which was a perfect fit for me. And it was really it was then I was super interested in rocket engines and rockets and flying model rockets. But when I was in high school, I had a book on the space shuttle and it had a big schematic of the main engine. And if you know that engine, which is which is current current the current version is flying on on SLS, the the Right. The RS 25. Very complicated engine. Super complicated schematic, is fascinating to me. But once I started taking the hardcore engineering classes like fluid dynamics and thermodynamics and stuff at University of Idaho, that's when I could understand that schematic better and how to design a rocket engine. That's when I decided I wanna be a liquid rocket engineer. So I knew in college what my career path was gonna be. So luckily I had married my wife while I was in college and she was from California. So I moved down here in 'eighty five. As soon as I graduated, we stayed at her mother's house for the summer while I got a job to work on rockets.

Jeff Ward: So it's down to that one math test.

Tom Mueller: Yeah.

Jeff Ward: It's good that somebody found your talent early.

Tom Mueller: It was good that I decided to take trigonometry. When I was like taking shop classes and welding classes and auto mechanics.

Jeff Ward: Well, think that combination is such a golden combination to have the practical skills and know your way around a machine shop and then also to be able to back it up with mathematics.

Tom Mueller: Yeah. In the early days of SpaceX, joked that I was the VP of machining because we basically built a machine shop down at the test site so we could modify and make injector parts and engine parts. And I basically had a machine shop in my garage almost since I moved to California And I still do to this day. I actually make prototype parts for Impulse now. But I have very good mechanical intuition I think because of my upbringing and constantly reinforcing my mechanical aptitudes.

Jeff Ward: Yeah, I think the things you're interested in too, they reinforce that and they allow you to exercise that whether it's motorcycles or race cars or rocket engines.

Tom Mueller: Yep, absolutely.

Jeff Ward: And when you met Elon, did you guys really ever envision the future that you ended up creating?

Tom Mueller: He was a big dreamer. He always said, you know, like, space has become such a huge thing. We're gonna be, you know, one of the biggest companies ever. And he said our name he said that he was really particular about branding and picking the right name. So finally ended up at SpaceX.

And he said someday this name will be bigger than Boeing. Like, because the spacecraft you fly on will say SpaceX on them and will be bigger than Boeing. And we were just like, yeah. Okay. Sure. Here we are today. It's coming to fruition. I think he he was right. Exactly. Never been against Elon.

Jeff Ward: When I first met him, I was in the satellite business. I'd seen a number of guys come and go trying to build rockets. And I like he said, I'm gonna build a rocket. And I sort of bet him. I bet him a dinner and he collected that dinner when I interviewed for SpaceX.

Tom Mueller: So

Jeff Ward: When you left SpaceX only a few years ago, like five years ago, it? Is it

Tom Mueller: Yeah. Five

Jeff Ward: years. Yeah. Something like that. So you saw it through every incarnation from, like, three guys to, you know, above above thousands. Yep.

And out of that experience, there must be a, you know, million good stories. Did anything pop into your mind as like, "here's my SpaceX moment that really sticks in my head?"

Tom Mueller: Oh, there's so many stories. A lot of them were at the test site. There's so many. They've been told they're in the books. The one I really remember was when we had the first version of Merlin, Merlin 1A, had an ablative chamber. It wasn't metallic, it wasn't cooled by the fuel. It was made of this fiberglass type material that would char away, kinda like the heat shield on Dragon. And they were expendable. So, we had to have several of these chambers just to do like development or qualification. And we were just getting into qualification. We had a whole bunch of flight chambers. I think there was like three or four of them that were shipped, that just arrived. And we had to hydro proof them, proof check them with pressure and they all cracked. And Elon was there and they were all cracking. And it was a disaster because we couldn't run the engine without them and they took months to get. So it's a giant disaster. Elon, they loaded up some of the cracked ones onto his jet and took one of my engineers when they went back to Hawthorne to the factory or actually to El Segundo because we were in our first building then. And I stayed down there. I think we put the turbo pump on the stand. They just started running turbo pumps if you didn't have any thrust chambers. And they tried to fix those chambers by infusing epoxy through the cracks and trying to glue it back together, which I said "there's no way that's gonna work." It didn't, of course. But Elon's there in his fancy clothes with his Italian boots with epoxy all over everything. I wasn't there, but I got the stories. But he got right in there hands on and trying to help make this come to fruition. It's just so typical Elon. Like, we're gonna do this come hell or high water or we're gonna try. And they were there all night trying to do

Jeff Ward: And then eventually you just had to wait months for the replacements?

We had to wait till the next ones and we fixed that problem, but ultimately ablative was not the way to go. The next version of the engine was regen and then it was all uphill from there.

I showed up at about the five year mark in early two thousand and seven, and even then typical of SpaceX, were iterating the engine as we went. It wasn't like you guys built the engine in the first couple years and then stuck with it. There was a lot of iteration going on on the the engine alongside building up the rest of the vehicle.

Tom Mueller: On the whole rocket. I remember the Air Force and NASA, we had contracted with all of them back at the time for Falcon nine and they were horrified. "Oh, you finally got it qualified. Now you don't change anything." Like Delta two and Atlas and all these things. Once you got it working, they didn't want any changes. It works. And we're like, No. There's a lot of things we wanna fix and make better. So we're really, I think, the first rocket company to just do continuous improvement. And if you look at where we started with one point zero compared to where we're at now with what would be the Block V version, I think it throws twice the payload, and it's only slightly longer. It's just like such an improvement over the the original product that we've made over the years.

Jeff Ward: And I and the complexity of the of the engine, looking at the engine now, the on on the booster, on heavy. It's like such a simplified streamlined piece of equipment.

Tom Mueller: Yeah, like the Raptor three compared to Raptor one and two, but even Merlin, we got rid of flanges, we got rid of welds, got rid of the main valves by going to phase shut off. So we simplified Merlin also and made it a much more streamlined and much more reliable and lighter engine.

Jeff Ward: It's always the best part is no part. Yep. Would you were still around during the development of, Starship. Yeah?

Tom Mueller: I had started Starship. I mean, Elon so I basically when when it became about production and not development on Merlin, that's when I stepped down as VP of propulsion. I told Elon, like, now it's like make 400 engines a year. I said, "I'm not the guy to make 400 engines a year. You need a new VP of propulsion to do that." And I'll go work on Raptor. And so that's when I became propulsion CTO, went from 200 direct reports to zero from all rocket engine development and testing and schedule pressure to none. Just go do fun things. So the last six or seven years I was there were actually awesome, were fun. First thing one of the first things he asked me to do, he said, "Size the lowest cost per ton vehicle that can take a 100 tons of cargo or people to Mars." So I basically started what became Starship and sized it. And we had an engine design for that assuming it was gonna be hydrogen, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen because that's the highest ISP. So we had the original Raptor engine that we had designed for was a hydrogen engine. And then I did the study got us to Mars with this big vehicle that I sized. Found out then he said, "Okay, what's it take to get it back?" And I said, "Actually, we can't take as much back as we can take there because it's actually harder to get from the surface Mars back to Earth than it is to get from fully fueled in Earth orbit already mostly out of the gravity well of Earth to Mars." So we could only bring back about 20 we could take a 100 tons there but only bring back about 25 tons. And so he said, what's it gonna take to get it back? And that's when I found out that it's really hard to make hydrogen and oxygen on Mars and liquefy it. But I also found out about the Sabatier reaction where using the Mars atmosphere with CO2, you do a reaction in a catalyst bed and you actually make methane. So for every pound of hydrogen you have, you can make eight pounds of methane for almost for free. You get water out and you actually get heat out. So it's actually exothermic. So I looked at that and it reduced the power required on Mars by a factor two, which kind of reduced your cost of return by a factor two. And I found out that on earth it was about half the cost of propellant here because high liquid hydrogen is very expensive on earth too. Methane is the cheapest hydrocarbon that we have. That's why everything's gas powered right now. So I convinced him, well, I said, We need to switch over to methane. And he goes, "Oh, that's a big change. I want somebody to check your numbers." So we had some guy check the numbers to come back and say, "Yep, we agree it's half." It cuts the cost to half a propellant. So that's that's why it became a methane engine.

Jeff Ward: And that's how you put you guys on that track of a new whole new technology.

Tom Mueller: Yeah.

Jeff Ward: It's interesting the last last test launch is one of those cases where you'd think that the previous vehicle was close to functioning and look good and you'd leave it alone but instead virtually everything changed prior to the last launch.

Tom Mueller: That's so Elon, like, more, bigger engines. You know? But though, I think the best thing that came out of that really was the heat shield that looked way better. Like, that that was the thing that was worrying me. It's like, they'll get the engines eventually. The the the you know, they caught in the tower, I think they can catch the, you know, the the ship in the in the tower. It's just is the heat shield gonna be hold up and be reusable? It looked much better whether it's completely good enough to fly again, I don't know. Hopefully, is. But but I think that's if they if they solve that, then they'll at least have you know, they'll have the first part of it, which is getting very low cost, fully reasonable to LEO, to to low Earth orbit. Right. Then now you need to refuel to go above that. So that's the next step is refueling. But they need to get to this step where the, you know, where they can refly everything. As far as the flip being wrong and, you know, the engine's not lighting, I think that was all software and and settings and stuff. Think that they're gonna fix that.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. I do believe that those things those things are observable near misses or observable incidents that you can repair more easily and fix more easily.

Tom Mueller: Yeah.

Jeff Ward: When you were at SpaceX, you know, you interacted with Elon on like a daily basis. Yep. And do you got a quintessential Elon moment aside from him in his his Gucci shoes or is it just, you know, long arc of Elon moments?

Tom Mueller: There's so many, but I remember one that particularly comes to mind. It's like when we when we were, starting the development of the new engine, I believe it was the the Merlin 1C, is the second version of the engine after the 1A. We put together a, you know, he wanted a day by day schedule that would take to get through the development all the way to qualification and ready to fly. And so we put it together based on what we learned on the other one, but knowing that we already had got the turbo pump working, we were ahead of where we started on the original one. So we had a shorter schedule. Anyway, I took that to Elon and he said, "That's way too long. You need to cut that in half." And I said, "There's no way we can cut that in half." And he said, "Do you wanna stay as the VP of propulsion?" He said, "You need to figure out a way to cut that in half." All right. He was not happy with me saying, "Nope, this is what it is." So we went and looked at what we could do. "Green lights to Malibu," as we said. And I think we would've had a much shorter schedule, we had this, you probably remember this problem, had we kept blowing off the pintle tip, which is I think in the books too. That was a really hard to solve problem. Some of the people in my department left because they thought it was unsolvable. We figured it out. I actually came up with some really cool metallics solutions that got us there and we finally solved that. But it definitely added months to the schedule. And so we ended up about at the schedule that I had presented that really made Elon mad in the end. But if we didn't have these big development problems, it certainly would have gone sooner.

Jeff Ward: That's the way those schedule things work. I remember when we were working on getting the Dragon software through the NASA approval process we had a burn down chart we had a pretty good idea of how long it was going to take and when we presented that we were told no there's no way it could take that long you got to make that shorter. You make it shorter and then it comes out longer and you live with the consequences.

Tom Mueller: Right.

Jeff Ward: I suppose part of the consequences for me is that I was no longer there by the time that launch happened, but this is life.

Tom Mueller: One of the things you learn is that when Elon asks for something, you don't say that it can't be done. You just say, "we're gonna do whatever we can to do it." And that satisfies them most of the time. Even if you have reserves about it, it's like, All right, well, we're gonna go and try to do this. And that's like the Marc Junkosa method of operation, like excited about, Yeah, yeah, we can cut time out. We're gonna go do this. And I learned from him, that's the attitude you gotta have around Elon. If you just like are a naysayer and just say, no, there's no way we're gonna be able to meet that schedule. He that does not play well with him at all.

Jeff Ward: I think that's an interesting insight because of course, some people are very committed to saying, "look. If I give you a schedule, I'm gonna hold to it." Whereas other people are like, "if that's the schedule you want, I'm gonna do my best to hit it." And those are kinda two different approaches. So I like that as an insight in how to manage those kind of situations because it's a constant. You see this I'm sure in your current business it's a constant pressure between look we need to have a good estimate but we also need to have a fast schedule. And those two things are in conflict sometimes.

Tom Mueller: Well, let me give you a good example of early on interaction with Elon, like when there was five people in the company. So we're gonna develop this 60,000 pound thrust rocket engine called Merlin. It wasn't even called Merlin yet. And he said, "Where are we gonna test it at?" So, I went and put together a TRW type schedule and laid out the program and brought it to him. Here's how much it's gonna cost. Here's how long it's gonna take. And boy, did he not like that. And he said, don't ever do that again. Like, every item on this list, we're gonna do as fast as can be done and for the lowest cost possible. He said, so Basically he was telling me, Don't add everything up and make an estimate. Like just optimize every step along the way. We never did that again where we bring like the full cost of the program all at once. Like, just look at the next incremental chunk and focus on that.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. The next incremental chunk and how fast can you do that? Yeah. And that is probably part of an explanation of how you ended up having a collaboration with him that was, what, twenty years long?

Tom Mueller: Yep. Yeah. Nine nineteen years. Yeah.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. How did you end up moving on?

Tom Mueller: I went part time because my dad had Alzheimer's, got very sick. So I was supporting the family and I stayed part time. And I was working this relates back to the earlier story with Starship on how to bring it back from Mars. And then he said, All right. I want you to work on how are we gonna make propellant on Mars to bring it back? And the answer is nuclear power. So we worked on a nuclear reactor to make propellant. So I worked with some guys from the nuclear industry and we came up with a concept for about a one megawatt electric nuclear reactor, about three and a half megawatt thermal. It had it all sized out and I went to Elon to hire some actual nuclear people and people to build this thing. And this is probably, I don't know, 2018 or thereabouts. And we were already spending a lot of money on Starship and Starlink and he said clearly the schedules were not what they were a few years ahead before that when I started working on the reactor and it was like, no, we're not gonna fund this right now. So I kinda ran out of work. I was supporting Raptor development and stuff but wasn't I was just kinda calling in, kinda getting bored. Then COVID hit and it was really disconnected. And I'm like, you know, what am I doing? I need to go do something new. And having worked on Starship for all the time, I was really a big fan of that, big proponent of Starship and the ability to take a 100 tons of cargo to orbit every time it flies and it's gonna be flying often. So my idea was, man, what we need now really is the ability to move things around in orbit. Like we've solved getting to orbit and greatly reduce the cost. Now we need the solution to get from LEO to GEO, from LEO to the moon, to Mars. And so that's how the idea for Impulse came about.

Jeff Ward: So it was a logical next step that was something that you could take and have it as your own independent organization and not do it inside SpaceX.

Tom Mueller: And I had experience with, you know, at TRW, most of the stuff we did was satellite propulsion to support their, you know, TRW at the time was a satellite company. It still is, it's Northrop Grumman now, it's mostly satellites here. And they let us work on booster stuff and we did some of that but most of my career there was doing engines like this one behind me and little space based thrusters. So I had a lot of experience. In fact, the Draco engine for Dragon was based on some of the work I'd done at TRW. And so that's why that engine, really, it was like the least changed of any of my designs. Was as I drew it up, it was how it's still flying because I just knew how to make an engine like that.

Jeff Ward: You mentioned the Draco thruster and the Dragons. I wanted to ask you a question about Dragon. How did it feel when the first humans were launched on Falcon nine? You know, how was that day for you?

Tom Mueller: Yeah. Like amazing. Like just, astounding. There was a lot of those, The first time we flew Falcon Nine and the second flight was we brought a capsule back from orbit and then not too many flights after that, we actually docked with a space station for cargo. And then, you know, years later we flew people for the first time. So there's all these huge steps that were just like amazing.

Jeff Ward: Do you get nerves on those? You know, I had nerves from the human launch.

Tom Mueller: Absolutely. It's like a whole different level of nervousness when you got people on board. Even though I have so much confidence in the rocket and the escape system, you know, with the Super Dracos, it's like very unlikely you're gonna lose crew but man, it's still you've got lives it really ups ups the level.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. It makes the makes the stress that much harder. I happened to see a graphic the other day of how the capsule would have been extracted by Super Draco in the event of a large explosion like the one that happened in Florida last week on the Blue Origin and it's like those Super Dracos zip that capsule out of there. Before the explosion is as big as the rocket, the capsule is gone.

Tom Mueller: Yeah, it's yeah. It's like within a hundredth of a second, they're they're commanded and lit and they were you know, they're high pressure and you just blow a, you know, a valve open and and and they just dump in light and it's just boom. And, know, you've got 17,000 pounds of thrust each times eight. So you got a lot of oomph to get the hell out of there.

Jeff Ward: Must pull some Gs.

Tom Mueller: I think it pulls like five or six Gs.

Jeff Ward: Right.

Tom Mueller: Yeah. So you just smash in the seat, just get the hell out.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. Which is preferable to all of the other other options.

Tom Mueller: You're up to almost mach speed and just, you know I mean, it only flies I mean, they only burn for like five seconds, but at the end of that, you're you're going as fast as a jet.

Jeff Ward: And how was it starting your own company with your experiences from SpaceX? Did you find a smooth pretty smooth process where you took those lessons and got cranking? Or what was the trajectory?

Tom Mueller: Certainly my experience from SpaceX and my reputation made it easy to raise money. Every round we've been oversubscribed and had lots of investor interest. Getting the funding was good and also bringing talent. Was able to bring some of the people that I worked with for years at SpaceX and able to hire pretty good. But I had a lot to learn. It's like I was just focused on the engine and propulsion systems for all the time, not doing business development, not doing investor relations, not running the business at SpaceX. So even though I'm very seasoned engineer at developing rocket hardware, I wasn't the expert at how to build a startup and all that. But I got lots of help. And the other thing is we're a spacecraft company, not a propulsion company, so I had to learn a lot more about avionics. I had to learn about reaction wheels and solar and guidance and control and radios. Radios are really tough. Find that these software controlled radios are really complicated. So it's just a lot more to learn which have been great. Actually, it's been very interesting and really fulfilling.

Jeff Ward: It's kind of the reverse of my trajectory into SpaceX. I came into SpaceX knowing satellites for my whole career and I had to learn what it was like to not be a satellite, to just be the brains on the pointy end of a rocket. Yep. But there's a lot. Sounds like you really enjoyed starting up Impulse and getting it all going.

Tom Mueller: It's been more successful than any of us could have hoped. We started out as a with Mira being a space tug basically and really becoming something that Space Force is very interested in. And then I came up with the idea for Helios, I still think was a brilliant idea to add a third stage in the fairing of Falcon nine and basically make Falcon nine have almost the capability of Falcon Heavy for tens of millions of dollars less. And we're seeing a lot of interest in that product line. So that was kind of a stroke of brilliance to come up with that too.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. I feel that you guys are well positioned to take advantage of the changes that are coming from Starship and Super Heavy. Yeah. Because you were there and you believe in it, and I think a lot of people haven't really understood what kind of a significant change in space faring that's gonna make when the thing is up and operational.

Tom Mueller: Yeah. That's why I often say and I've been saying it quite a bit in this week and all the podcasts and interviews I've been in is I think the true space age is starting now. Like what we had in the past was just kinda dipping our toe on it. Now it's become real. By that I mean, the space economy will be a major portion of the economy at some point.

I always talk about I grew up, I'm old enough to have been there during the original Star Trek series. And are we gonna be like a Star Trek civilization at some point? I think we are. And you gotta imagine that in the Star Trek world, the space economy is a major portion of the economy. Whereas right now, the space economy is like a single digit percent of the world economy. So almost by definition, space is gonna grow faster than anything else.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. Believe that. And I think that the Starship change is gonna be part of that change.

Tom Mueller: That's where it starts, when you have a fully reusable vehicle that can fly off almost like airliner type.

Jeff Ward: And so much volume, so much of volume available.

Tom Mueller: People say it's too big and I go, No, because you're thinking about the current payloads. People are gonna design payloads to fly a 100 tons of orbit at a time and it's just like the Internet in 1995. You know, nobody knew what you're gonna do with it. All the killer apps

Jeff Ward: Yeah. Came. If you'd said we're gonna be streaming all our TV and replacing cable, it's like people would have laughed at you. Yeah. But I think that the Starship is if you take a look at something like James Webb Space Telescope, how much time and money went into making it fold up, you won't have to do that to launch it in Starship.

Tom Mueller: Right. Or you make one that folds up, and it'll be really ginormous.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. I spoke to somebody a couple years ago who was like, yeah. We need to launch some football field sized solar reflectors to, like, reflect part of the sun. And I was like, okay. That's interesting. And then he was like, yeah. They gotta be the size of a football field, there has to be, like, several million of them. And at first, you're like, this is never gonna happen. And then you look at the capabilities, and the capabilities are coming.

Tom Mueller: And you look at SpaceX's plan, and that's basically maybe not the single one the size of a football field, but certainly deploying that much per month probably.

Jeff Ward: Yeah.

Tom Mueller: Maybe per flight, a football field's worth of because they're those are really big. Those Those data servers are talking about.

Jeff Ward: You know, congratulations on the raise that you guys just did. I didn't realize it was coming up. It was just yesterday in this timeline. So congratulations on getting some more funding there.

Tom Mueller: Thank you. Yeah. We're well funded now.

Jeff Ward: Yeah. What are you doing outside of building rockets? What's keeping you happy?

Tom Mueller: I race. I was just racing up at, Sonoma last weekend. I have a Corvette race car that's, it's at this this race car actually, raced at Le Mans, back in 2014. It got second at Le Mans. It won the twenty four hours at Daytona and the twelve hours at Sebring. It's a really fun race car. I've got several other other race cars, I do a lot of that. I ride dirt bikes. I you know, all kinds of crazy stuff.

Jeff Ward: When I actually managed to go to the Falcon Nine launch, I went to the one that carried the dragon that docked with station first docking. Yeah. And I had an opportunity to go out there and watch that launch after I had left SpaceX. And hearing the Falcon Nine first stage go up, it's like, oh, now I get it. I get it why Tom does this. He's like, he's the motorcycles, it's the race cars and the sound of that rocket.

Tom Mueller: Yeah. It's incredible to really to watch, to see a rocket launch. I don't think people realize that just the amount of energy you could feel.

Jeff Ward: Yep. Yeah. But it sounds like you're keeping yourself busy with noisy things and with your company and I appreciate you like taking the opportunity to hang out just for a little while and talk about things. But I try to finish up with some quick questions for people you know. One of the things is did you from SpaceX or from your business do you have one business lesson that you or one technical lesson that you say this is the the magic lesson I learned out of this?

Tom Mueller: I think the thing that we really adapted that that we learned at SpaceX is to is to become vertically integrated, which kind of ties back to my ability to raise money. It's very expensive to become vertically integrated, means you're building a machine shop, the printers, tooling to build everything yourself. But once you achieve that, you have so much power. You have complete control or much better control over cost, schedule and quality. And it's a superpower. So that's probably the main thing that I learned from SpaceX. And also the RE mindset, the extreme ownership, the responsible engineer, you have extreme ownership over your thing and the hand seams, how you hand it off to test or to manufacturing or to launch, you own that and make sure that it doesn't get fumbled.

Jeff Ward: I keep hearing that from people that I talk to, and you know both of those things are things I believed in and have worked on my whole career. And I think that the companies that miss that, that decide well we don't need that extreme ownership or we don't need that vertical integration, they're not going to be the ones that set the pace.

Tom Mueller: Yeah absolutely.

Jeff Ward: And what would you recommend to somebody who's like very excited by space like you were as a kid wants to get into this ecosystem? It's really hard now even getting internships. What do you think is the thing that people can do when they're in early in their college career or just starting to figure out how are they gonna get into this industry?

Tom Mueller: Again, it's a thing we always look for like to have done something extraordinary like have led a personal self project, built something really cool, something robotic or something on your own rocket. In my case, they developed a liquid rocket or something. And I think also, the thing that I think that made me quite appealing to Elon, not only my technical expertise but basically optimism, having a really good attitude. Like he, when I first met him, he asked me "How big is this engine?" Oh, it's a small amateur rocket engine. "Have you ever worked on anything bigger?" And I said, Yes. Six fifty ks, 650,000 pound thrust engine for Delta IV. And then he asked me, Could you build that engine? And I think I'm the only person in the world that would say yes. I think if I had the right funding and could hire the people, I could build that engine. Like, I know nobody at Rocketdyne would say that. And that was this pure optimism. I think I won the interview. Basically, I think the first time they met me was, it was an interview with Elon. And I think that's right there probably when he locked in.

Jeff Ward: So that optimism to say, look, with the right resources, I can do this.

Tom Mueller: Yeah, that's what he wants, can do. That's how do you achieve the things that everybody thinks impossible. Almost everything we did, which is kinda like the backhanded compliment you get along the way, is there's no way you guys can do that. So many times I heard that, you can't fly a rocket, you can't fly a multi engine rocket, you can't fly people, you can't go dock with this base station. People came and looked at Starlink. This is incredible tech. There's no freaking way you're gonna be able to do it. All these backhanded compliments basically is what they became because we did it.

Jeff Ward: And I suppose that's the other thing is to look at what people are saying is impossible and try and figure out how you can get it done.

Tom Mueller: Yeah. It takes optimism to ignore those people and just go do it.

Jeff Ward: It does. And do you think overall, you're still very deeply involved in space faring, and I think you've described how you see the substantial part of the world economy is gonna be in space faring. But do you think we can make the world a better place?

Tom Mueller: Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, if you look at, like, the the the population is probably gonna roll over around 10,000,000,000, you know, mid what they predict by mid century. But the GDP per person continues to go up. So, you want that to continue, you have to use the resources of space because at some point, start hitting the limits of resources on our finite planet. Basically, the planet is finite, so if you're going far into the future with continued economical growth, you're gonna hit the limits. There are no limits in space, right? Even within our solar system, it would just take centuries to deplete what we have here. So getting into space is the only way, really, I think, to continue economic growth that we're enjoying using the resources of space.

Jeff Ward: And that explains why you're still sort of gunning for more and more space exploitation.

Tom Mueller: And That's why I'm so much about the moon. I think that the resources of the moon are gonna be super important to building megastructures in in space, you know, to capture the power in space, to build in space, to build, you know, gas stations in space so that you can get further out. Just all these things we that that, you know, have been science fiction will become reality.

Jeff Ward: I'm looking forward to that. I think actually you've given me some hope and also some things to some excitement to look forward. And I've had that from speaking to a number of guys who are still very deeply involved in the industry who haven't gone on to other industries. I'm also trying to talk to people who are doing different things, but at the same time it's good to talk to people who are smart, optimistic people who are still driving for space. Do you mind me asking you, like, do you have a philanthropic footprint as well, or is your contribution, economic contribution, and space?

Tom Mueller: I mostly focus on building up my economic thing. I'm pretty proud of what, what SpaceX did. But I've been helping students get, especially in Idaho, the last most of the last ten years, I've been involved in a gifting program that I keep upping where we give $5,000 to students that just can't quite have the money to get into college to help them get in. So I've been doing that. I've also even here at Loyola Marymount, I'm giving some money to help build a new engineering building, possibly with my name on a lab.

Jeff Ward: Yeah, it's awesome to hear that because I feel that we've got a lot of colleagues and friends who are in these transitional spaces in their careers, and they're going to have to look at that, like where's my contribution to the world, how much of it is economic and how much of it is philanthropic. I like that you're working close to where you came from, Idaho, and also here there in California. It makes sense.

Tom Mueller: I want to make sure that my money's going somewhere where I know it's doing good. Think just randomly dumping it to charities can be dangerous. I think we're seeing a lot of fraud and a lot of abuse. So you have to really study that and I just don't have time to go study it and make sure that money's going to a good cause. I tend to target things where I think it's more defined and targeted.

Jeff Ward: That makes complete sense to me and I think that it's something that comes naturally to us too. We know the people, we know the problem and we know that we can help try to solve it.

Tom Mueller: Yeah.

Jeff Ward: I really wanna thank you for taking time today. I know that out of all the people I've talked to, you're one of the busiest ones and I'm glad that you took a carve out for me today.

Tom Mueller: Nothing I'd rather talk about than rockets and race cars, so all good.

Jeff Ward: Cool. Thanks a lot, Tom.

Tom Mueller: You bet, Jeff.

Jeff Ward: Tom's message about optimism during this discussion was really an eye opener for me. I do think of myself as an optimistic person, but I think when I do schedules, I try to make them realistic. I try to estimate when something's gonna actually be done in the real world. And Tom really gave me an idea that that isn't always the lens that we wanna look at things through. Somebody's gotta know what's really gonna happen, but sometimes you have to be optimistic about the thing that's right in front of you and say, I'll finish this as fast as I can and keep moving until we get to the end.

This episode of It's Not Rocket Science was produced by Devin Schwartz and you can find us at itsnotrocketscience.space.