{"id":17539,"date":"2021-06-08T18:11:11","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T10:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/relativity-space-announces-650-million-in-funding-to-build-a-bigger-3d-printed-rocket\/"},"modified":"2021-06-08T18:11:11","modified_gmt":"2021-06-08T10:11:11","slug":"relativity-space-announces-650-million-in-funding-to-build-a-bigger-3d-printed-rocket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/relativity-space-announces-650-million-in-funding-to-build-a-bigger-3d-printed-rocket\/","title":{"rendered":"Relativity Space announces $650 million in funding to build a bigger 3D-printed rocket"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Terran
An artist\u2019s conception shows Relativity Space\u2019s Terran R rocket in flight. (Relativity Space Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Relativity Space, the space venture that got its start in Seattle and is now working on 3D-printed rockets in California, says it\u2019ll build a bigger launch vehicle with the aid of a similarly huge $650 million Series E funding round.<\/p>\n

The startup says its fully reusable, two-stage Terran R rocket will be capable of launching more than 20,000 kilograms (44,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit. That\u2019s 16 times the listed payload capacity of its first-generation Terran 1 rocket, which is due to make its debut this year, and roughly equal to the capability of SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom our founding days in Y Combinator just five years ago, we planned on 3D printing Terran 1 and then Terran R \u2013 a 20X larger fully reusable rocket \u2013 on our \u2018Factory of the Future\u2019 platform,\u201d Tim Ellis, CEO and co-founder of Relativity, said today in a news release. \u201cToday we are one step closer to this goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Relativity says the newly announced funding round will help the company scale up production of the Terran R rocket at its 3D-printing facility in Long Beach, Calif. The round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Co. with participation from investors including Baillie Gifford, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Centricus, Coatue, K5 Global, Soroban Capital, Tiger Global, Tribe Capital, XN, Brad Buss, Mark Cuban, Jared Leto and Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff\u2019s 75 & Sunny.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9BhkjEc6Q64<\/p>\n

The $650 million Series E round follows up on a $500 million Series D round that closed last November. Total investment to date is in excess of $1.3 billion, and the company\u2019s valuation is said to be higher than $4 billion. Since November, Relativity\u2019s workforce has risen from around 230 employees to more than 400, with plans to hire another 200 team members this year.<\/p>\n

Ellis co-founded Relativity after spending years working at Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space venture in Kent, Wash. Relativity\u2019s other co-founder, Jordan Noone, did an internship at Blue Origin in 2013 and worked at SpaceX in 2014-2015. Last year, Noone left his position as Relativity\u2019s chief technology officer to co-found a tech venture capital firm called Embedded Ventures.<\/p>\n

In a 2018 interview with GeekWire, Ellis recalled that he and Noone started up Relativity in a WeWork co-working space in Seattle. \u201cThat was the first month we were there,\u201d he said. The company soon moved to sunny California, however, and has now settled into a 120,000-square-foot headquarters and 3D-printing factory in Long Beach.<\/p>\n

From the beginning, the idea behind Relativity was to build rockets \u201cwith zero human labor,\u201d using low-cost metal 3D-printing technology. The process doesn\u2019t exactly involve zero human labor, but the goal for the Terran 1 project is to produce launch-ready rockets from raw materials in less than 60 days, and then launch payloads into low Earth orbit for a price as low as $12 million.<\/p>\n

Terran R will up the ante. \u201c\u201cOver the last year, we found ourselves being asked by the market to accelerate development of our larger launch vehicle, so we knew it was time to double down on our existing plans and scale the Terran R program even faster and build production capabilities at scale sooner,\u201d Ellis said.<\/p>\n

\"Terran
This graphic compares the size of the Terran 1 rocket (at left) with the Terran R (at right). A human figure has been added to the illustration for comparison\u2019s sake. (Relativity Space Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Relativity\u2019s 216-foot-tall Terran R rocket is designed with a 16-foot (5-meter) diameter and a payload fairing to match \u2013 again, roughly equivalent to the Falcon 9. The rocket also has Falcon-style grid fins for maneuvering during descent.<\/p>\n

The main innovation is that both stages and the fairing are designed for reusability (which explains the \u201cR\u201d in the Terran R\u2019s name). That includes the seven 3D-printed, 302,000-pound-thrust Aeon R rocket engines on the first stage, as well as the Aeon Vac engine for the upper stage. Relativity says 3D-printing technology makes it possible to design an upper stage that can endure the heat of re-entry.<\/p>\n

Like the Aeon 1 engine that\u2019s being developed for the Terran 1 rocket, the Terran R\u2019s engines will use cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen as propellants.<\/p>\n

The Terran R is due to blast off starting in 2024, from the same Cape Canaveral launch complex that\u2019ll serve as the Terran 1\u2019s home base. Relativity says that it\u2019s finished 3D-printing more than 85% of the first Terran 1 flight article, and that it\u2019s signed its first launch contract with an anchor customer for the Terran R.<\/p>\n

Relativity intends the Terran R to serve as a means for deploying large satellite constellations in Earth orbit, and as a point-to-point space transport for missions to the moon and Mars.<\/p>\n

\u201cRelativity was founded with the mission to 3D-print entire rockets and build humanity\u2019s industrial base on Mars,\u201d Ellis said. \u201cWe were inspired to make this vision a reality, and believe there needs to be dozens to hundreds of companies working to build humanity\u2019s multiplanetary future on Mars. Scalable, autonomous 3D printing is inevitably required to thrive on Mars, and Terran R is the second product step in a long-term journey Relativity is planning ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

The road ahead could be challenging for Relativity, with competition from larger launch vehicles such as SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy and Starship, Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn and United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan as well as from smaller launch vehicles such as Rocket Lab\u2019s Electron and Virgin Galactic\u2019s LauncherOne. But at least Ellis is thinking big \u2013 like Blue Origin\u2019s Jeff Bezos and SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk, the space billionaires who now loom as Ellis\u2019 rivals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An artist\u2019s conception shows Relativity Space\u2019s Terran R rocket in flight. (Relativity Space Illustration) Relativity Space, the space venture that got its start in Seattle and is now working on 3D-printed rockets in California, says it\u2019ll build a bigger launch vehicle with the aid of a similarly huge $650 million Series E funding round. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1685],"class_list":["post-17539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-relativity-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17539"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}