Amazon made same-day delivery the benchmark on Earth. Impulse Space is pitching a similar concept for satellites bound for geostationary orbit about 22,000 miles above Earth, compressing what is typically a months-long transit into a matter of hours.
In the span of a week, the in-space propulsion startup announced a trio of deals aiming to unlock geostationary orbit (GEO) for commercial and defense users. That includes a demonstration mission with defense contractor Anduril planned for 2026; a transportation deal with GEO communications startup Astranis in 2027; and a multi-launch agreement to carry Infinite Orbits’ servicing satellites to GEO starting the same year.
Tom Mueller founded Impulse in 2021 after nearly two decades leading propulsion at SpaceX, where he led development of the Merlin and Raptor engines. He left SpaceX in 2020 and started Impulse to build out in-space transport services focused on last-mile delivery in low Earth orbit (LEO) — which is typically 100 to 1,200 miles above Earth — and ultra-fast satellite transport to GEO.
The common denominator across these missions is Helios, Impulse’s methane-oxygen kick stage. A kick stage is essentially a small rocket engine system that rides on a larger rocket and then fires its own engine – in this case, a powerful engine called Deneb – to propel spacecraft to their final destination.
Helios is meant to be the “same day” courier from LEO to higher altitude orbits. If it performs as advertised, commercial operators could reach higher orbits much faster, and the Department of Defense could maneuver more quickly in an increasingly contested region of space.
GEO isn’t just far away. Getting there and operating satellites from there presents special challenges. Spacecraft must transit the high-radiation Van Allen belts — zones of charged particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field — deal with latency in long-distance communication, and maintain their precise position.
The partnership between Anduril and Impulse could prove especially lucrative. The pair will jointly build a demo satellite for rendezvous and proximity operations — a capability that allows spacecraft to approach and inspect other objects in orbit — which the Space Force has identified as critical for space domain awareness and deterrence.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
Impulse is supplying the spacecraft – called Mira, which flew for the first time last year – while Anduril will provide a mission data processor, long-wave infrared imager, and other software-defined payloads aimed at tracking and high-precision navigation.
As part of the demo, Helios will ferry the spacecraft to GEO in under a day, after which the mission aims to capture images of other resident space objects, analyze them, and autonomously execute precise maneuvers to observe the objects.
U.S. officials often describe the goal as “maneuvering without regret,” or the ability to reposition satellites on orbit without jeopardizing the mission or wasting costly fuel.
On the commercial side, Astranis signed on for a 2027 mission that would see its MicroGEO satellites launched to LEO on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and then delivered to geostationary orbit in less than 24 hours by Helios. That mission profile is super valuable to Astranis, as it will allow the company to dramatically accelerate satellite activation dates for customers waiting for their satellite broadband services here on Earth.
Finally, Impulse signed a multi-launch agreement with France’s Infinite Orbits to carry several satellite servicing spacecraft to GEO via a ride-share program called Caravan. Impulse says the Caravan offering will deliver multiple small satellites at the same time, much as SpaceX’s ride-share program lets companies split the cost of a launch. The first Caravan mission is fully booked for 2026, Impulse said.
In recent years, the space industry’s explosive growth has mostly focused on LEO as operators shifted to smaller, less expensive satellites for applications in communications and remote sensing. But if Impulse has its way, the next phase of growth will be in GEO.
Source link
#Sameday #delivery #space #Impulse #promises #satellite #transport #hours #months #TechCrunch
![Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual OrientationThe US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.”This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.“If we don’t know certain things, we can’t challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don’t know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s some massive inequality.’”Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.”Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration. The data from the census inform everything from the apportionment of congressional seats to federal funding that is allocated based on the size of a population.An employee at the Department of Health and Human Services, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that “many HHS programs use Census data to appropriate funding. Removing undocumented individuals from the census will cause localities with high numbers of those populations to lose critical federal funding.”The employee says that removal of racial categories could specifically impact Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding. “Some programs use the ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities,” they say.#Census #Proposal #Stop #Counting #Undocumented #Immigrantsand #Ignore #Race #Sexual #Orientationus census,immigration,undocumented immigrants,race,lgbtq+](https://i0.wp.com/media.wired.com/photos/6a7630b55d2ebc1c5247b509/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/GettyImages-157580450-edited.jpg?ssl=1 "Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual OrientationThe US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.”This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.“If we don’t know certain things, we can’t challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don’t know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s some massive inequality.’”Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.”Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration. The data from the census inform everything from the apportionment of congressional seats to federal funding that is allocated based on the size of a population.An employee at the Department of Health and Human Services, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that “many HHS programs use Census data to appropriate funding. Removing undocumented individuals from the census will cause localities with high numbers of those populations to lose critical federal funding.”The employee says that removal of racial categories could specifically impact Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding. “Some programs use the ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities,” they say.#Census #Proposal #Stop #Counting #Undocumented #Immigrantsand #Ignore #Race #Sexual #Orientationus census,immigration,undocumented immigrants,race,lgbtq+")
Post Comment