Is 3-D Printing Relativity Space the Next SpaceX? – Exponential Series

Relativity Space recently raised $650 million from Fidelity, BlackRock and Tiger Global to potentially compete with SpaceX within the next 3 years. While SpaceX has a dominant lead in the aerospace industry, and most people are familiar with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, there is a new contender in the industry that is capitalizing on the technological breakthroughs that are associated with 3-d printing.

The raised capital will be used to design the Terran R rocket, a launch vehicle that can be compared in size and power to the SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. We will explore why the Terran R rocket is important, who is Relativity Space, and why investors should pay attention.

Who is Relativity Space?

Relativity Space has now raised $1.34 billion in capital since its founding in 2015, and was most recently valued at $4.2 billion. What is interesting is how it only took 6 years to catapault an obscure aerospace company into a potential gamechanger that is building an autonomous rocket factory with launch services for satellites.

Relativity Space sets itself apart by applying state of the art 3-d printing techniques to build rockets. The advantage of 3-d printing are numerous due to the benefits that are associated with additive manufacturing.

To describe it simply, additive manufacturing uses data computer-aided-design (CAD) software or 3D object scanners to direct a printer to deposit and add material, layer upon layer, in precise geometric shapes. The process of additive manufacturing therefore adds material to create an object instead of substracting material. This results in significant waste reduction, is more environmentally friendly, and results in a product with significantly less weight. The weight reduction benefits are extremely important in the aerospace industry as typically each pound in weight can equal an extra $10,000 or more to launch into space due to fuel costs.

Relativity Space is the brainchild of two brilliant Co-Founders.

Tim Ellis started as an intern in the propulsion group at Blue Origin when there were approximately only 150 people. In 2013, he was responsible for buying the first metal 3-d printer at Blue Origin and served as a Propulsion Development Engineer on Crew Capsule RCS thrusters, BE-4, and New Glenn.

It was clear while he worked at Blue Origin that they had a bottom up approach versus a top up approach. In other words Blue Origin was interested in 3-d printing individual parts that would then be integrated into a legacy built rocket, meanwhile Tim Ellis believed that it made more sense to 3-d print the entire rocket versus individual parts.

Tim Ellis believes that additive manufacturing is destined to be the most disruptive industry of our generation. He also believes that aerospace is lagging other industries due to incumbents not adopting automation in the building of rockets.

Relativity Space was started in 2015 after Tim Ellis sent Mark Cuban an unsocilicited email. In return he received a $500,000 investment from Mark Cuban. That same week he was accepted into the YCombinator accelerator program for the YC W16 batch.

The other Co-Founder of Relativity Space was none other than Tim's college roommate Jordan Noone, a brilliant American aerospace engineer who studied at USC at 17 and became Head of USC’s Rocket Propulsion Lab, overseeing the first two attempts ever to launch a student designed and built rocket to space

Afterwards he interned with Blue Origin's propulsion group in 2013, and then proceeded to be hired by SpaceX as an In-Space Propulsion Development Engineer.

While at SpaceX, he asked himself why aerospace industry incumbents were failing to adopt 3-d printing. He firmly believed that the benefits of using 3-d printing were twofold, it would reduce both the manufacturing line and supply chain needs. The end result is faster iteration speeds, exponentially lowering the part count, with rapid production time that could be counted in days instead of months or years.

These benefits would dramatically reduce costs in all departments, with quality improving due to the business being able to focus on fewer moving parts. Jordan Noone was the CTO of Relativity Space for over five years and eventually stepped down to become an Executive Advisor, and to focus his attention on launching his venture fund Embedded Ventures.

When reviewing the roster of staff it is quite clear that some of the most brilliant minds that have worked at Blue Origin and SpaceX are at the helm of this disruptive company. Most recently Zach Dunn, Senior Vice President of production and launch for SpaceX, joined Relativity Space.

The Benefits of 3-D Printing

If humans are to build a factory on another planet, it needs to be small, lightweight, have intelligence built-in, and require little human assistance. What is described is precisely what 3-d printing was designed for. The strongest materials are often difficult to manufacture the traditional way and 3-d printing is disrupting the supply chain of rocket building for reasons that include fast iteration times, significant waste and weight reductions, and fewer parts.

A 3-d printed rocket that is designed by Relativity Space has as many as 100x fewer parts. Fewer parts results in less opportunity for technical issues, but more importantly results in much faster production time. While the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took 18 months to build, Relativity Space can quickly produce a rocket in less than 2 months. This accelerated production time enables a compounding iteration in quality and time improvements. The reasons for this is avoiding supply chain issues, with no fixed tooling being needed. In other words factories do not need to be designed from scratch or modified every time a new rocket is built, instead the 3-d printers can quickly adopt new design changes, with each iteration of a rocket being an improvement over its predecessor.

Currently, Relativity Space is printing 95% of the parts in the rockets, almost everything with the exception of electronics,  and computer chips.

Terran R Rocket

The Terran R rocket is the world's first fully reusable, entirely 3-D printed rocket. TheTerran R is fully reusable including its engines, first stage, second stage, and payload fairing, and will be capable of launching over 20,000kg to low Earth orbit (LEO) in reusable configuration.

The rocket uses exotic 3D printed materials, and unique design geometries that are not possible with traditional manufacturing. The reduced costs that are associated with 3-d printing provides both commercial and government customers affordable access to space, in LEO and beyond.

The end goal is to be able to provide a point-to-point space freighter capable of missions between the Earth, Moon and Mars.

Terran R will launch from Cape Canaveral, starting in 2024.

The Future

In late 2020, NASA selected Relativity Space to place CubeSats into LEO as part of its Venture Class Launch Services Demonstration 2 (VCLS Demo 2) contract. They've also recently won a U.S. military contract for a 2023 launch.

The Defense Innovation Unit picked Relativity Space to become a launch service provider for the DoD Space Test Program’s Rapid Agile Launch Initiative (RALI). RALI is managed by the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center Launch Enterprise to identify viable commercial launch systems with capacity between 450 to 1,200 kilograms to LEO.

One of the biggest indicator of the future potential of Relativity Space is both the venture funding that has been invested in the company, and the staff of engineers that are leaving NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin to work there.

The fast iteration time of printing a rocket in less than 60 days, ensures that improvements in design are tested and manufactured at a timescale that aerospace legacy companies cannot compete with. It is this exponential improvement in quality that will ensure the future success of this trailblazing autonomous rocket factory company.

Lastly, Relativity's Space founding mission is to built humanity’s industrial base on Mars, it will become the factory of the future, this includes everything from habitats to the first rocket that is 3-d printed on another planet.