I SOMEHOW MISSED THIS FROM FRIDAY’S ROCKET REPORT: Impulse Space enters military launch competition.

This week, the US Space Force brought two more companies into the pool of bidders eligible to compete for its launch contracts—Impulse Space and Relativity Space. For a rocket company, cracking into the lucrative US military launch market is both a sign of maturity, as well as an important source of revenue. The inclusion of Relativity Space, which is making credible progress toward the launch of its heavy-lift Terran R rocket, is perhaps not a huge surprise, Ars reports. But the other company, a provider of in-space propulsion, was.

The Space Force gets creative … Impulse Space is developing a “kick stage” it calls Helios, which can provide up to 9 km/s of delta-V to a payload, rapidly boosting it from low-Earth orbit to geostationary orbit about 36,000 km above the Earth’s surface. Essentially, this allows the company to transform a medium-lift rocket, such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 vehicle, and give it the performance of a larger and more powerful rocket.

Nifty.