Check out Valley of Depth #043 on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Eric Romo spent his early career as employee #13 at SpaceX, left for nearly two decades, and came back to one of the hardest unsolved problems in the space economy: what happens after launch. Getting things to orbit is largely figured out. Moving them once they’re there is not.
Impulse is now over $1B raised, embedded in the Golden Dome architecture, and with a GEO rideshare program booked out before a first flight. We get into how they got there, why Eric thinks every business model predicated on cheap Starship launch is broken, and what it actually means to be building in-space mobility at the moment GEO becomes a contested domain.
We cover:
- The single Mira flight that changed Impulse’s relationship with the Space Force
- Mira, Helios, and Caravan: three products, three markets but one key through line
- The Golden Dome partnership with Anduril and what it means to be embedded in that architecture
- How exposed American GEO assets actually are right now
- Why every Starship-dependent business model is broken
- The $4.26B valuation and what has to be true for that number to look cheap in ten years
- What the Impulse team debates most internally right now