Tom Mueller

Thomas John Mueller, known as Tom Mueller, is an American aerospace engineer and rocket engine designer. Born in St. Maries, Idaho, he built model rockets as a child, worked as a logger to pay for his studies, and earned a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Idaho in 1985 and a master degree at Loyola Marymount University in 1992. He spent about fifteen years at TRW, where he was a lead engineer on the TR-106 hydrogen engine, and in his spare time built an amateur liquid fuel engine that caught the attention of Elon Musk. In 2002 he joined SpaceX as its first employee and led the propulsion team that developed the Merlin and Kestrel engines for the Falcon launch vehicles and the Draco and SuperDraco thrusters for the Dragon spacecraft. He retired from SpaceX at the end of 2020 and founded Impulse Space in 2021, a company building rocket engines, space tugs and planetary landers.