When the goal is to construct a multi-tiered orbital missile-defense platform, there aren’t a lot of contractors to choose from.
Sure, there’s Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose satellites are inexplicably exploding in low earth orbit. Or there’s Moog Space and Defense Incorporated, currently the subject of a $77.9 million lawsuit after it delivered numerous spacecraft nearly a year behind schedule.
In today’s orbital environment, beggars can’t be choosers, which may explain why Donald Trump tapped the space tug company Impulse Space to build the orbital layer of his convoluted Golden Dome missile defense system.
First revealed by Bloomberg, the decision involves a partnership with controversial military tech firm Anduril Industries. The companies have inked a deal with the Pentagon to design prototypes of “space based interceptors,” which are vehicular weapons platforms meant to destroy US-bound missiles from orbit.
Under the arrangement, Impulse would work beneath Anduril as a subcontractor, Bloomberg reported.
Impulse, founded in 2021 by former SpaceX co-founder Tom Mueller — who famously worked as a lumberjack to put himself through college — is an up and coming player in the wacky world of space tugs, more professionally known as “orbital transfer vehicles.”
OTVs are satellites designed to carry spaceborn cargo to various orbits. For example, NASA might contract an OTV company to drag a derelict weather satellite from geostationary Earth orbit down to low Earth orbit, where it can — ideally — safely disintegrate into the atmosphere, thus clearing room for a replacement.
Much of this remains theoretical. NASA previously studied space tugs back in the late 1960s, but they never came to be thanks to budget cuts in the 1970s. The space agency’s most recent motions in the OTV space came in 2025, when it contracted six satellite companies to publish feasibility studies on low-cost tugs — one of which was by Impulse.
Speaking of Impulse, it only launched its first OTV in 2023, a 650-pound craft roughly the size of a chunky dishwasher.
Impulse’s relative youth notwithstanding, there has yet to be any successful demonstration of an orbital craft intercepting a missile. And let’s be real: while contractors will probably make some money off it, it’s hard to believe Trump’s Golden Dome will ever become any more of a reality than Ronald Reagan’s doomed “Star Wars” missile defense system.
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