Antioch hospital the first in East Contra Costa to offer robotic surgery Space tugs are useful for satellite operators who want their craft to reach a specific orbit but don’t want to pay for a customized launch or spend a lot of time transitioning their vehicle to a custom orbit. “Most commercial customers will take a very slow transfer orbit to get to their final destination. That will take anywhere from six to 10 months. Helios will get you there the same day you launch,” Eric Romo, president of Impulse Space, said in an interview. “That time is worth money.” Romo declined to comment on the company’s valuation but said, with the latest round, California-based Impulse has raised $525 million. Romo was also among the first employees at SpaceX, working under Mueller on the development of engines and related systems for SpaceX’s family of Falcon rockets. Impulse Space plans to use the funding to hire more engineers and mission operators, accelerate production on Mira and Helios and develop new vehicles for NASA and national security customers. Impulse is seeing a surge of demand for their space tugs from defense sector customers like Anduril and the US Space Force to help protect valuable assets in space from adversaries like Russia and China, Romo said. It is also seeing increased attention from legacy operators like SES who are reinvesting in their satellite networks in response to increased competition from SpaceX’s Starlink internet service, he added. Impulse currently holds contracts worth about $200 million, including from deals with other customers like Vast, which is developing a successor to the International Space Station. The firm also announced in August a rideshare program in which it offers customers a spot on Helios to bring their spacecraft from low-Earth orbit to a much higher altitude known as geostationary orbit. The first of these missions — billed as a cheaper way for operators to move between orbits — is scheduled for 2027. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.