SpaceX’s first employee remains on mission: “Space is super important”

SpaceX’s first employee and Elon Musk shared an enthusiasm for model rockets. 

“I met Elon through an amateur rocket club, and he convinced me to leave that career and come do something exciting, which was one of the best decisions I ever made,” aerospace engineer Tom Mueller told CBS News senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent. 

On the eve of the space exploration company’s historic initial public offering, Mueller also praised Musk’s abilities as an entrepreneur and mentor, saying that the billionaire founder of SpaceX, Tesla and xAI “found good talent, and he energized good talent.”

Mueller also had faith that SpaceX, which he joined in 2002, would change the history of space exploration. “We believed it and we did it. So it was really cool,” he said.

Mueller is among the former and current SpaceX employees who own equity in the company, which is set to go public on Friday in the biggest-ever IPO.

“All of us are going to do great in this IPO. I mean, we’ve done great. SpaceX has been extremely successful. …it’s good for all the employees, and myself included,” he told CBS News.

As for Musk — the world’s richest person, with an estimated net worth of nearly $700 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — the stock offering could make him the world’s first trillionaire. 

“It worked”

Mueller, who as head of propulsion research at SpaceX helped build the engines that powered the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, said the IPO is another marker of the company’s success. 

“Elon really wanted to make a low-cost way to get space, which became Falcon 9…and it worked,” Mueller said.

Mueller eventually left SpaceX and founded Impulse Space, a startup focused on delivering payloads in space and moving satellites, among other services. 

He is also a steadfast evangelist for space exploration, noting the downstream benefits for people on Earth, such as GPS and more accurate weather forecasting.  

“So space is super important — more than people realize. And I think there’s a lot of things that need to be done in space that are starting to happen now, like orbital data centers using the resources of the moon and asteroids,” he said. “So I think it’s just really going to take off from here.”