Orbital tug startup Impulse Space wins contract with satellite company SES

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May 24, 2025 3:15 pm Robert Zimmerman

The orbital tug startup Impulse Space has won a contract to use its Helios tug to transport the satellites of the long established Luxembourg company SES to their correct orbit after launch.

The companies announced May 22 that they signed a multi-launch agreement that starts with a mission in 2027 where Impulse’s Helios kick stage, placed into low Earth orbit by a medium-class rocket, will send a four-ton SES satellite from LEO to GEO within eight hours. The announcement did not disclose the vehicle that will launch Helios and the satellite, or the specific SES satellite.

The agreement, the companies said, includes an “opportunity” for additional missions to transport SES satellites to GEO or medium Earth orbits.

This the first satellite tug contract for Impulse’s Helios tug, which is the larger of the company’s two tugs, the smaller version dubbed Mira. While Mira has completed an orbital demo mission, Helios has not yet flown, though it has three planned launches beginning in 2026.

4 comments

Dick Eagleson
May 24, 2025 at 5:47 pm
SES was a key early customer of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and its first customer for a mission launched on a reused booster – technology Impulse’s CEO/Founder Tom Mueller had a major role in producing as SpaceX’s former VP of Propulsion. Now that he’s hung out his own shingle it is only fitting that SES comes calling again. The fact that Impulse has no future plans to compete in any way with SES just sweetens the deal.
Edward
May 24, 2025 at 6:45 pm
From the Space News article:

“Today, we’re not only partnering with Impulse to bring our satellites faster to orbit, but this will also allow us to extend their lifetime and accelerate service delivery to our customers,” Adel Al-Saleh, chief executive of SES, said in the same statement.

Well, there’s the real news! An extended lifetime is a real savings.

Assume a $100 million satellite, $60 million launch cost, and $30 million insurance policy for a 15 year lifetime (typical lifetime of geostationary communication satellites). That is $190 million total cost, or $1 million per month of expected operation. Saving propellants from the orbit circularization phase of the mission in order to extend the operational phase is a big deal.

We already saw that a mission extension vehicle (MEV) extended Intelsat 901’s lifetime by five years (~$60 million value).
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/may-9-2025-quick-space-links/

If this works as Impulse and SES hope, then I think that the orbital tug industry could ramp up fairly quickly. Of course, I probably thought the same thing of the MEV industry, five years ago.
Richard M
May 25, 2025 at 11:42 am
Well, there’s the real news! An extended lifetime is a real savings.

Assume a $100 million satellite, $60 million launch cost, and $30 million insurance policy for a 15 year lifetime (typical lifetime of geostationary communication satellites). That is $190 million total cost, or $1 million per month of expected operation. Saving propellants from the orbit circularization phase of the mission in order to extend the operational phase is a big deal.

And that’s why there’s clearly a market for the “last mile” service that Impulse is marketing.

Just as every day that a satellite is sitting in storage is a day that it’s not making you any money, every day that a satellite is travelling to geosynchronous orbit is a day that it’s not making you any money, either. Helios and Mira are now the affordable means to get your satellite where it needs to be in order to make you money far more quickly. Far cheaper than shelling out for a Falcon Heavy or a New Glenn or a Vulcan VC6.

So you get to your orbit faster, and you save propellants to stay active there longer. We don’t know what Impulse charges for a Mira or a Helios, but it could be pretty substantial before it reaches the cost of all those propellants, let alone the differential cost of a heavy left launch.

As Eric Berger’s story on Impulse last year put it:

At present, for medium and large satellites, there are two ways to reach geostationary orbit directly. A customer can buy a launch on a Falcon Heavy or United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, which is fairly expensive, likely about double the cost of a single Falcon 9 launch. Or a satellite can launch on a medium-lift vehicle and go into a transfer orbit to geostationary space, necessitating a robust on-board propulsion system, up to $5 million in Xenon or other propellant, and six to eight months of lost revenue during the ride up.

“We’re offering to get there in a day, for a much lower cost than either of those,” Mueller said.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/meet-helios-a-new-class-of-space-tug-with-some-real-muscle/

Can’t wait to see it in action.
Jeff Wright
May 25, 2025 at 11:04 pm
Now, if a probe like New Horizons (smaller than most) were to use this and FH, what kind of performance will that allow?

The ISS-deorbit package may have even more umph.

Orbital tug startup Impulse Space wins contract with satellite company SES

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