Tom Mueller, the man behind SpaceX's rocket engines!
The most launched American rocket ever made is SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and the most important part of a rocket is its engines. The Falcon rocket family is made up of two rockets, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy, and are powered by SpaceX’s own Merlin engine – nine on F9 and twenty-seven on FH. Such a great engine requires a great engineer, and this is where Tom Mueller comes in.
Mueller is SpaceX employee number one, joining founder Elon Musk in 2002. But before his revolutionary work at SpaceX, he worked for TRW, an automotive and aerospace company where he took the role of managing the department for propulsion and combustion products. While in this position, he led the development of the TR-106 rocket engine, as lead engineer. Before SpaceX was even created, Mueller was working on a product that had SpaceX values at its heart. The TR-106 was created through the Space Launch Initiative by NASA and the US Department of Defence to increase safety and reliability and decrease the cost of flying America’s “next generation of space launch vehicles” the first generation being that of the Space Shuttle. In the end, the development of the TR-106 engine was halted when NASA cancelled any further work on the Space Launch Initiative.
Some of the most successful businesses in the world, such as Google, Apple and Microsoft, have all started in a garage, and this is where Tom Mueller started his next project in late 2001. The project? Developing the biggest amateur liquid-fuelled rocket engine, weighing in at 36kg (80lb). After moving the project and its work to a warehouse of one of his friends in 2002, his work caught the eye of Elon Musk.
In the same year, not long after he caught the eye of Musk, he joined SpaceX as the VP of Propulsion Engineering. His first project at SpaceX was leading the team that created the Merlin 1A and Kestrel engines that powered SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon 1. After the Falcon 1, he carried on leading the SpaceX rocket development teams and created the Merlin 1C which powered early Falcon 9 vehicles, the Merlin 1D and MVac engines which now power all Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, the Draco Thrusters used to orientate the Dragon crew and cargo capsule, and the Super Draco engines that provide propulsion for the Crew Dragon launch escape system.
From 2016 he went through multiple role changes at the company, first moving into the position of Propulsion CTO, then becoming a part-time senior advisor in 2019, and then, in November of 2020, he announced his retirement from SpaceX.
In February of this year, a Merlin 1D engine flew to the edge of space for the 22nd time, making it the most-flown rocket engine ever, overtaking a Space Shuttle Main Engine with a record of 19 flights.
His legacy lives on in the business end of all SpaceX Falcon family launches, powering over one hundred launches this year alone.