Relativity Space has big dreams. Is the company for real?

[Karlston]

All the rockets that are fit to print —

Relativity Space has big dreams. Is the company for real?

Relativity now operates one-third of the test stands at NASA’s Stennis Space Center.

Enlarge / Relativity Space tests a component of its Aeon engine in December at the E-2 test stand at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

Relativity Space

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STENNIS SPACE CENTER, Miss.—David Giger bounded up 26 steel steps and emerged onto a rocket engine test platform. Off to his left, an unbroken stand of stately pine trees spread out over the Mississippi lowlands. Straight ahead, Giger had a clear view of two Apollo-era test stands through the trees. “It’s quite a view,” he said.

 

Here, the past meets the future. Giger and his company, Relativity Space, seek to create the most futuristic of rockets. To do so, they have come to the NASA center where rocket scientists tested the mighty engines that carried humans to the Moon half a century ago. Relativity has, over the last two years, steadily occupied more buildings and test stands here as part of its quest to build a rocket made almost entirely of 3D-printed parts. And if that goal were not fantastical enough, Relativity also seeks to automate as much of the rocket assembly and test process as possible, with the ultimate goal of additively manufacturing a rocket on the surface of Mars.

 

It is a wild, seemingly impossible dream—and yet it has captured the fancy of aerospace investors. Relativity has raised $185 million in four years and hired industry leaders like Giger. Now the program manager for the company’s Terran 1 rocket, Giger spent more than a decade at SpaceX, where he led development of the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Today he superintends Relativity’s plans for launching its first rocket into space, perhaps as early as next year. So as we stood on top of the E-4 test stand in Mississippi last month, I tried to do more than simply admire the view.

 

I wanted very much to see if Relativity Space could possibly be for real.

Relativity's origins

The company’s co-founder, Tim Ellis, grew up in Plano, Texas. To pass the time during his early teenage years in the sprawling but rather dull suburb north of Dallas, Ellis played with LEGOs. Passionately. For 14 to 16 hours a day, he would design his own spaceships from large piles of black LEGOs (because they looked most “cool”). He’d build his own designs, admire them, and then break them apart. To this day, one of Ellis’ thumbs is permanently bent backwards from this effort.

 

This mix of creativity and desire to build things led Ellis to the University of Southern California in 2008, where he majored in aerospace engineering. While there he got involved with the university’s Rocket Propulsion Lab, a student group that builds amateur rockets. He befriended another aerospace engineer, Jordan Noone, who would go on to lead the club as it sought to become the first student organization to launch a rocket beyond the edge of space, 100km above the Earth’s surface. Although they failed, their experiences setting off rockets in Mojave, California, and Black Rock, Nevada, led the pair to prestigious aerospace internships and then jobs. Ellis would go to Blue Origin and Noone to SpaceX.

 

Ellis worked full time at Blue Origin for two years, from 2014 to 2015, in the propulsion department. At the time the company had moved deep into testing the BE-3 engine and started preliminary work on the much larger BE-4 rocket engine. While at the company’s headquarters outside Seattle, Ellis looked for ways to bring additive manufacturing into the production process. “I started the metal printing program there,” Ellis said. “I was kind of a young, optimistic engineer. I thought printing was going to take off and replace the entire factory.”

 

It didn’t. By January 2015, Ellis and Noone were talking to each other most evenings on the phone, around 10pm, during their commutes home. Ellis lived in downtown Seattle, and Noone commuted from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to Pasadena. Both were just at the beginning of their careers, trying to establish themselves at companies already considered technology leaders in the space industry. Perhaps it was because they were young—neither was even yet 25 years old—but they felt as though things weren’t moving fast enough. Ellis and Noone looked at the rockets and spacecraft being built at SpaceX and Blue Origin, and they saw processes that were still labor intensive. They saw untapped potential in the emerging technologies of 3D printing and automation.

 

“Initially, we were just conceptually talking about things,” Ellis said of the late-evening phone calls. “Eventually we realized we both wanted to have a company that was all-in on the technology, to really achieve breakthroughs.”

Enlarge / Tim Ellis, founder and CEO of Relativity Space at the 35th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2019.

JASON CONNOLLY/AFP via Getty Images

So they went for it. Ellis and Noone quit their jobs at the end of 2015. A few days later, at the beginning of the new year, they founded Relativity Space to bring about the future they envisioned.

 

Ellis, who took the role of chief executive officer, remembers the first email he sent from his new Relativity Space account. It was to Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and an investor famed for his starring role on the television show Shark Tank. They shared a background in North Texas, and Cuban invested in technology start-ups, so Ellis figured his out-of-the-blue effort was worth a shot. He received a reply five minutes later. Initially, Ellis asked for $100,000. They began to talk.

 

“I felt like I was on Shark Tank,” Ellis said. “He ended up writing us a check for $500,000.”

 

Soon, Ellis and Noone were accepted into Y Combinator, a prestigious program that provides investment opportunities and advice to start-up companies. The initiative has an infamously low acceptance rate. Over the next three months, the pair of engineers began to hammer out their idea for a company that would 3D print its rockets, and they developed the first prototype of their Stargate printer to demonstrate its ability to print real hardware. At the end of this period, they participated in the program’s Demo Day to pitch their ideas to many of Silicon Valley’s most notable investors.

 

After the program, Ellis and Noone set themselves a hectic schedule to see if they could raise enough money to make Relativity a going concern. Over six weeks, Ellis said, they held 90 in-person meetings or phone calls to explain their plans in depth and woo potential investors. After this, Relativity Space raised $10 million in series A funding. They were a real company.

 

Expanding presence at Stennis

For start-up rocket companies, absent a billionaire founder like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, the fundraising churn never really stops. One of the venture funds Ellis met with in 2018 was led by Giger, who had spent nearly 13 years at SpaceX. Giger Joined SpaceX back in early 2005, more than a year before its first Falcon 1 rocket launch attempt. He would serve as “mission manager” for the launch from Kwajalein Atoll, which ended up failing after a fuel leak in the engine. Giger’s background in propulsion led him to the company’s Dragon program, first the Cargo version then the Crew variant. Eventually, he led the Dragon program for SpaceX before leaving the company.

 

“The Crew Dragon design was pretty much done by the end of 2017,” Giger said. “I pride myself on being a development guy, who takes napkin sketches to reality. I felt like I’d done that with Crew Dragon.”

 

Giger spent a year working with another SpaceX veteran, Bulent Altan, to identify and fund new space opportunities. Their firm was called Global Space Ventures, and over the course a year they spoke to the chief executives of more than 100 space companies with the intent of helping investors pick winners. During that process, Giger met with Ellis and came away impressed. Giger also realized he liked being in the thick of operations, so when Ellis offered him a job he took it, joining Relativity in January 2019.

 

“I lived and breathed SpaceX for a long time,” Giger said. “And I felt like the industry was changing. Reusable launch vehicles were the big step of the last decade. I think that printing and automation are really what the next revolution in aerospace is going to come down to.”

 

Since coming to Relativity, Giger has helped mature the Terran 1 rocket and overseen testing of its Aeon 1 rocket engine. On the afternoon of February 18, 2020, Giger stood inside a control room at Stennis, waiting for a test of the Aeon engine’s thrust chamber assembly, essentially the heart of the engine.

 

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The company has returned to the basics with Aeon engine testing because it upgraded to a more powerful design. Last year, in response to customer requests, Relativity resized its rocket to provide a larger volume for payloads. It expanded the diameter of the fairing at the top of the rocket to 3 meters, and height to 7 meters. While this is smaller than the fairing used in big rockets like the Falcon 9, in the class of “small satellite” launch vehicles it is quite large. The one privately developed smallsat launcher in service is Rocket Lab’s Electron booster, which has a fairing 1.2 meters in diameter and 2.5 meters long. Relativity's move to a larger fairing necessitated a more powerful engine with a gas generator cycle.

 

The Terran 1 rocket’s first stage has nine engines. The original Aeon engine had a thrust of 17,000 pounds at sea level, and the new version boosts the power considerably to 23,000 pounds. Initial testing began in December, and components of the new engine are now making their way to Mississippi from Relativity's factory in Southern California—thrust chamber assemblies, injectors, turbopumps, and more. Giger says he expects to begin conducting tests of the complete engine by this summer.

 

For now, however, he’s focused on the thrust chamber. With video monitors showing the Mississippi stand from several different angles, the action is short, hot, and controlled. The igniter turns on, initiating combustion of the methane fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer. After two seconds, the thrust chamber shuts down. The purposefully short test was a complete success.

Enlarge / Terran 1 rocket with larger payload fairing. Relativity Space

The test occurred at a new facility that Relativity acquired last August, the E-2 complex at Stennis. The company has not publicly discussed this new facility until now. NASA built the two test cells at E-2 stand in the 1990s, and they have impressive capabilities. Cell 2, where the thrust chamber test occurred, is capable of highly pressurizing rocket fuels, which makes testing engine components like the thrust chamber assembly relatively easy. The facility was last occupied in 2014 by SpaceX, when the company used the high-pressure capabilities of the horizontal test stand to conduct a full-power test of the Raptor engine’s oxygen preburner.

 

Cell 1 of the complex is a towering vertical stand that has gone largely unused since its construction more than two decades ago. It is large enough to test very powerful rocket engines, up to 500,000 pounds of thrust, similar in power to that of a space shuttle main engine. Long-term, Relativity has grand plans for this large stand, but first the company must demonstrate it can reach orbit with the Terran 1 booster.

 

In addition to these two stands, Relativity previously acquired four test cells at the E-4 complex a little less than half a mile away. From there, it will run whole Aeon engine tests as well as integrated second stages of the Terran 1 rocket. The modified test cells have fully automated regulators that control the flow of fluids and power to the rocket. The goal, Giger said, is to reduce the number of engineers needed to conduct an engine test to two people—a primary conductor and an extra set of eyes.

 

With these two complexes, Relativity now has one-third of the test stands at NASA’s Stennis Space Center under its control, which seems pretty remarkable for a company started by two guys in their 20s, just four years ago. This ability to work with the government is one of the intriguing things about Relativity, reflecting an uncharacteristic maturity for young disruptors. Even as Ellis and Noone have made a radical push into printing 3D metal parts for rockets, they won 20-year leases for both the E-2 and E-4 facilities in competitive processes at NASA's venerable Stennis Space Center. They also acquired one of the last available launch sites at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, Launch Complex-16.

 

This revolution is one seemingly being fought from within the system.

Can this work?

The hard questions remain yet to be answered, however. Can a 3D-printed rocket really fly? Can its engine work? Can the tanks, plumbing, and nine engines be assembled into a full first stage? The early returns are positive, but Giger knows that Relativity won’t prove anything until the rocket launches.

 

Until last year, the company had been targeting a 2020 launch date. Last year, after announcing the decision to double the Terran 1’s fairing volume, the target slipped to “early” 2021. Now, Giger said, Relativity is working toward fall of next year. There is plenty of funding to see Relativity through the development process, he said.

 

“I feel good about that date,” Giger said of fall 2021. If the company completes its second stage testing this year and qualifies the engine and the rocket’s structure, it keeps the Terran 1 on a good path toward a launch during the second half of 2021, with a reasonable amount of margin for the technical problems that invariably crop up with new rockets.

 

First image of article image gallery. Please visit the source link to see all 9+ images.

 

The theoretical benefits of 3D printing are alluring. When Ellis and Noone were at SpaceX and Blue Origin, they saw aerospace companies using off-the-shelf 3D printing in fits and starts, plugging in parts where they were cheaper. Although it would require time and investment, the young engineers believed that going all the way toward additive manufacturing would eventually yield large gains in performance and cost cutting.

 

By printing 95 percent of the rocket, Relativity could slash a rocket builder's traditional supply chain and need as many as 100 times fewer parts. There would also be no need to have inventory sitting on the shelves. Indeed, the company believes it will eventually reach the point where it can go from raw material to flight in 60 days. A single printer can print about 1 foot in the length of the rocket, which is 110 feet tall, per day. With six printers, a rocket could be printed in two weeks.

 

Already, Giger said he is seeing theoretical benefits turn into real ones. During a tour of Relativity’s facilities in Mississippi, Giger walked into a clean room. He showed off the shear-coaxial injector used to push 100 different streams of liquid oxygen and liquid methane fuel into the Aeon engine’s thrust chamber during the combustion process. It is a phenomenally complex piece of machinery. The build process for an injector used in a space shuttle main engine took two years, with untold hours of human labor. Relativity printed this injector in two weeks—and it could go faster.

Enlarge / Machining a Space Shuttle Main Engine injector in 1977. The process took a couple of years.

NASA

Additionally, 3D printing offers the potential to rapidly iterate. Last year, Relativity changed the diameter of the rocket's first stage. At a more traditional rocket company this would have been a momentous change, necessitating the removal and replacement of old tooling, a cumbersome and expensive process. A Relativity engineer changed the software code, and the company was printing a different sized rocket the next day.

 

Valuable tech if it works

Building a rocket on its own is hard enough. Tom Markusic learned this lesson in 2014 when he founded Firefly. The Texas-based rocket company is arguably Relativity's biggest competitor. Both companies are working to bring privately developed, liquid-fueled rockets to the market with the capacity of about 1 ton to low-Earth orbit. (Firefly’s Alpha rocket tops out at 1 ton, Terran 1 has a capacity of 1.25 tons). Markusic first sought to develop Alpha with some advanced technology, such as an aerospike engine and other innovations. After nearly going bankrupt a few years ago, he has opted for a simpler design, with more standard technology.

 

“I just have a lot of respect for anyone that tries to build a rocket,” Markusic said in an interview a year ago. “There are a lot easier ways in this world to make money. So I’m going to be the last person to ever, like, discourage or say something bad about competitors. Having said that, trying to invent an entire new manufacturing methodology, in parallel with developing a rocket, I personally think is too much to bite off. Maybe there are some people who are so visionary that they’re going to totally change the world from the outset. And good for them. But that’s not the route that I would go.”

 

Josh Brost understands this sentiment. Like Giger, he worked for a long time at SpaceX, nearly a decade selling rockets commercially and then leading government business development. He joined Relativity a month after Giger came on board. He understands the concerns expressed by Markusic.

Enlarge / Relativity Space will move into a new headquarters (rendered here) in Long Beach later this year.

“Rockets are hard and 3D printers are hard,” he said. “At the founding of our company it would have been totally fair push back. We were biting off two really big challenges. Maybe your odds of success are not really high. That’s why half the team was focused on getting large-scale additive manufacturing to work for two years.”

 

What Brost has seen at Relativity makes him believe the company will succeed. And he has good reason to think the government will support this home-grown, transformative effort. The ability to iterate rapidly on a vehicle’s design to meet customer demands, and launch rapidly, are the kinds of capabilities the US military seeks in the 21st century. And Relativity Space has made no secret of its US-based supply chain, American workforce, and domestic financial backers.

 

“Those things all feed in well into national defense applications of the rocket,” Brost said.

 

The government is interested for other reasons as well. This kind of metal printing has applications far beyond that of rockets. The founders of Relativity Space realize that if they can succeed in printing something as complex as a rocket, then surely additive manufacturing can be broadly applied to other industries. If this works, it could become a real boon for the US economy.

 

“In 20 years, everything that flies will be printed, it’s inevitable," said co-founder and chief technology officer Jordan Noone. "There is incentive alignment between printing and aerospace, it’s cheaper and faster to print something the lighter it is. You’re financially rewarded for optimizing your product.”

The Mars thing

Of all the aerospace companies founded in the last 20 years, and which have attracted significant funding, only two have Mars squarely in their business plans. Elon Musk and SpaceX, of course, have blazed that trail with the goal of making humans a multiplanetary species and building a Starship to make that happen. But Relativity would like to be there right beside them. The company wants to 3D print a rocket on Mars for the return trip to Earth.

 

And if you stop to think about it, having the ability to make parts and print materials on the surface of Mars, possibly even using some of the in situ regolith or other Martian resources, would help make the cold, nearly airless world livable.

 

This big dream attracted Giger to SpaceX, and it also drew him to Relativity. “I would love to see humans become multiplanetary,” he said. “I want to see more than a select few astronauts go to space, or go to Mars. I want spaceflight to be more like an airplane ride, and I would like to see that in my lifetime. Relativity wants to be a big part of that.”

 

Being honest, it's still not clear to me whether Relativity will succeed in this grand venture. In rocket development, there is a long road between thrust chamber assembly tests and reaching orbit. I suspect, if the company really pushes it, a launch about two years from now is possible. This is a hard, hard business, as Giger well knows. SpaceX suffered three failures with its Falcon 1 rocket before reaching orbit. The company almost went under. Giger lived through those lean years once, and he understands the challenge. In this sense, Relativity has a nice mix of brilliant young optimists and experienced veterans to keep the company on a path to orbit.

 

What seems undeniable at this moment is that Relativity is trying to make a huge leap forward in aerospace, one that if successful would result in better rockets, built faster, for less money. So while it is difficult to know whether they will make it, it is not hard to hail their progress and hope for success.

 

 

Source: Relativity Space has big dreams. Is the company for real? (Ars Technica)  

 

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