Standalone Orbital-Tug Financial Risks
Impulse Space
The core problem is that an orbital tug is expensive to build, fly, and insure, but hard to sell at scale until it has already proven it can reach orbit, maneuver safely, and win trusted anchor customers. Momentus shows that trap clearly. It launched through a SPAC before the business was mature, reached only about $1.1M of 2025 revenue, finished 2024 with $1.6M of cash and 2025 with $12.8M, and had to keep leaning on financings while building flight history mission by mission.
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Flight heritage matters because customers are buying a physical delivery service, not software. Momentus says it has launched four missions and deployed 17 customer satellites, but its own mission page shows how slowly that history accumulated, with an inaugural demo in 2022 and subsequent flights still framed as commissioning and milestone building.
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Government traction helps fill the gap between technical promise and commercial demand. By 2025 and 2026, Momentus was highlighting NASA work, a NASA VADR position, and a DARPA expansion, which shows that even a struggling tug company still needed public sector contracts to fund vehicle development and validate the platform.
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The public market punished the mismatch between capital needs and weak early revenue. Momentus disclosed reverse splits, warrant inducements, and repeated capital raises, and third party market data tracked its equity value at distressed levels during this period, which is what happens when a space hardware company reaches the market before proving repeatable demand.
Going forward, orbital tug winners are likely to look less like standalone transport bets and more like bundled space infrastructure companies. The durable model pairs proven flight cadence with government work, repeat launch partners, and adjacent products like hosted payloads, mission operations, or satellite buses, so each mission does more than earn a one time delivery fee.