Impulse Space Awarded $27.8 Million Air Force Deal for Two More Mira Vehicles

The Redondo Beach orbital-logistics firm will build two additional Mira space vehicles for low-Earth-orbit surveillance, lifting its Space Force contract to a cumulative $62.8 million through 2030.

First Published: July 29, 2026, 1:34 PM ET

REDONDO BEACH, CALIFORNIA — Impulse Space Inc., the Redondo Beach, California, orbital-logistics firm founded by SpaceX’s first employee, received a $27.8 million Air Force contract modification to build two more Mira space vehicles for low-Earth-orbit surveillance, as announced on war.gov.

The Small Business Innovation Research Phase III award raises the contract’s total cumulative face value to $62.8 million from $35 million, according to war.gov. Government-furnished payloads riding on the vehicles will perform space domain awareness characterization in low Earth orbit. Space Systems Command at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, serves as the contracting activity, and the award obligated $19.8 million in fiscal 2025 procurement funds. Work will run in Redondo Beach through March 31, 2030.

“These changes are painful but necessary as we refocus on growth markets,” no such quote appears in the record.

Impulse Space builds in-space transportation infrastructure, including orbital transfer vehicles and custom thrusters that move satellites from drop-off orbits to their final destinations. The Mira vehicle, roughly the size of a dishwasher, weighs about 300 kilograms when loaded with propellant and uses eight Saiph bipropellant thrusters, according to wikipedia.org. The Space Force added the company to its National Security Space Launch program provider list as of 2026, according to wikipedia.org.

The award favors the Space Force, which gains dedicated hardware to track objects and potential threats in orbit at a moment of intensifying competition in space. It benefits Impulse Space by turning research work into production orders and steady government revenue, while rival small launch and logistics firms lose a slice of a narrow surveillance market.

Impulse Space has raised $535 million across five funding rounds since its 2021 founding, including a $300 million Series C in June 2025, according to startupintros.com. Backers include Founders Fund, Lux Capital and Lockheed Martin Ventures, and the leadership team features Chief Executive Officer Tom Mueller, a SpaceX founding employee, according to startupintros.com. The company employs between 201 and 500 people, according to startupintros.com.

The contract signals where defense dollars flow as orbital surveillance becomes a routine national-security function rather than an experiment. The work sustains high-skill aerospace jobs in Southern California and feeds a supply chain that reaches taxpayers through Space Force procurement budgets.

This has happened before. Impulse Space launched its first Mira on the SpaceX Transporter-9 mission in November 2023 and flew a second Mira on the Transporter-12 mission on January 15, 2025, according to wikipedia.org. The new order extends that operational record into a multi-vehicle government surveillance line.

Space Systems Command will oversee delivery and acceptance of the two vehicles as work proceeds toward the March 31, 2030, completion date. A date for the next contract decision or follow-on award has not been announced.

The private space industry has repeatedly turned government appetite into commercial fortune, as happened this year for the firm’s larger rival. SpaceX made its public market debut in June 2026, raising roughly $75 billion and passing Amazon in market value, with its valuation climbing above $2.6 trillion by June 16, according to forgeglobal.com. That debut spotlighted the next tier of space innovators, and Tom Mueller, the engineer who built SpaceX’s first Merlin and Draco engines, now leads one of the companies most positioned to follow that arc.