The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Romo: Space debris remediation startups are largely a scam today
“It's a scam, I think, largely. So look the orbital remediation could be a problem one day. It is not currently a problem, and I think there are there are studies you can point to on this around, like, what's the probability of collision, and what challenge cou…”
Mueller predicts Deneb will be the highest-performing hydrocarbon engine ever
“This engine will probably be the highest performing hydrocarbon engine ever flown because it's, it has a very high area ratio.”
Romo: Mira's true market fit is a Space Force fighter jet, not a space tug
“The practical reality is that the product market fit for MIRA, for a high thrust, high Delta V space vehicle, Is it's closer to a fighter jet than a tugboat. This is a thing that the, what Space Force wants to do with this is move really fast at some foreign a…”
Romo: Commercial LEO space tug market is dead on arrival
“So when you stack those things together, you know, dubious economics, small market, and bad working capital dynamics, it just didn't really pencil. So here we are, we just launched this first Mira, and we thought that had this commercial market, we kind of rea…”
Romo: Moving fast in hardware requires insourcing component development
“If you want to move quickly, you absolutely must insource a lot of the development. You must build your own components. You must take as much internally as you can”
Mueller says launch is solved; in-space transport is the next frontier
“Launch mostly being solved or is being solved. It's like the next big opportunity is to move all that payload, all that cargo around in space. So I started impulse space to do in space transportation as opposed to from earth to space transportation, which was …”
Romo: Helios Reaches GEO in Eight Hours Cheaper Than Falcon Heavy
“Helios gets them to their same, same place they want to go the same day to launch eight hours later. And it's cheaper than a Falcon Heavy, more expensive than Falcon Nine, obviously, because they need to play for, pay for that and the Helios”
Mueller calls 3D printing a "cheat code" for rocket engines
“For rocket engines, it's almost like a cheat code. It's so easy to make a high performance rocket engine with three D printing. Because the rocket injectors and the cooling passages are pretty small and complex. So to make a rocket engine by machining and asse…”
Mueller predicts large-scale nuclear rocket stages are decades away
“I think it's pretty far in the future. I mean, you know, and maybe, maybe a few decades away before we're really doing big nuclear stages.”
Romo: Single-Point Engineering Accountability Outperforms Diffused Systems Approaches
“So you know, who is the person that's ultimately accountable for the success of this part, or this vehicle, or this process, and we want people to be that single point of accountability. Whereas other companies takes more of a, this systems approach where it's…”
Romo: Deep tech costs are driven far more by talent than capex
“I think there's this perception, you know, outside of hard tech, deep tech, whatever you want to call the segment we're in, that they're incredibly capital intensive, and you can't imagine how much they're spending on capex, but that's not really the case. I m…”
Morton: Revel increased Impulse Space's engine test throughput 5x to 10x
“So impulse, the first big deployment was actually their rocket engine test site, which was like their kind of big burning need at the time. And they previous software, it was kind of one of the legacy solutions. They were testing about once every other day and…”
Impulse Space provided the complete propulsion system for Vast's space station
“We provided the whole propulsion system for VAST, including the thrusters.”
Impulse Space's Helios vehicle can boost Mars payload capacity 5x
“This can take a large satellite, like a four ton satellite from low earth orbit at a couple hundred miles up to geosynchronous orbit at 22,000 miles. That's so basically escaping most of the gravity well over very high energy transfer. It can take, you know, f…”
Impulse Space machines 700-pound copper forgings down to 25-pound liners
“We start with these forging that weigh about 700 pounds and the final slotted product weighs about 25 pounds.”
Romo: Impulse Space is scaling Mira production to one vehicle per month
“We've got our Mira product line, which is now scaling to where we have to build one of those per month at this point.”
Romo: 137 Ventures and Banner VC led Impulse Space's funding round
“In particular we had, the firms that led the round are One through Seven Ventures and Banner VC.”
Romo: Impulse Space built its first Mira spacecraft in 14 months
“When I got here, the company had been working on the Mira vehicle for a little while, and it had, Mira went from not existing to being built and ready to fly in about 14 months, so really, really fast, which is testament to Tom and the talent the team had.”
Romo: Impulse's Helios stage is roughly the size of Falcon 1's second stage
“We've got our Helios program which is the build effectively at the third stage for medium launch vehicles. That's building a rocket stage. You know, it's like, it's roughly the same size as like the second stage of Falcon one, for example, like as a size of th…”