#Rocketship video full#

'That's really why I started the company to 3D print a whole rocket,' he said.Įllis decided he would disrupt the rocket business by putting metal 3D printers at the core of the manufacturing process.

#Rocketship video full#

'I saw that we had this giant factory full of fixed tooling, building a whole rocket one at a time by hand with hundreds of thousands to millions of individual piece parts,' Ellis told Insider. Then an executive for Blue Origin, Ellis said looking around the factory floor, he realized that the company was upheaving the rocket business, but one thing hadn't substantially changed: the assembly line.

'So to go from a blank sheet to build the first full of the engine, which we just completed, and then already doing engine component testing at full scale is quite incredibly fast,' he said.Įllis, CEO and co-founder of Relativity Space, said his eureka moment came while working at Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. 'That was a blank sheet of paper about a year and a half ago,' he said. AEON R, the engine that will propel the second stage of the rocket forward, has already been tested, he said. Though it's still being developed, Ellis is confident it will be put together quickly. This is the rocket Ellis wants to send to Mars.

The company is planning to launch this rocket in 2024. It should also be almost entirely - at least 95% - 3D printed. That's about the same as SpaceX's Falcon 9. Terran R should be entirely reusable and should carry 20,000 kilograms of payload. Starship aims to carry 150 metric tons into orbit, then return to Earth to be reused for more.īut for Ellis, the Terran 1 launch is just a step toward his real goal, to build a much bigger rocket called Terran R. Though Terran 1 is Relativity's biggest rocket to date, it's a relatively small rocket compared to SpaceX's Starship, for instance. It often indicates a user profile.Ī rendering shows what Terran R would look like next to Terran 1. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.