- 3D printed organs, 3D printed houses, bridges
nuclear reactors, and now 3D printed space rockets.
3D printing is transforming industries that have
undergone very little change in the past 50 years.
Like the aerospace industry,
where the fundamental principles
of how we build a space rocket,
haven't really changed since the Apollo program.
So, how did we go from this,
to this?
- I'm Tim Ellis,
I'm the CEO and co-founder of Relativity Space.
We're a company that designs, builds,
and flies our own entirely 3D printed rockets.
So we've built the largest metal 3D printers in the world,
and we're just a few months away
from our first launch to orbit with our first rocket,
Terran 1.
We've got about 750 people at the company right now.
Over 150 are just developing our own 3D printers,
which are the largest in the world.
And they consist of a robot arm in a really big cell.
So, about 30, 32-feet-tall or so.
Can print up to 20-foot diameter in these 3D printers.
And the robot arm is fed with an aluminum wire.
And so, essentially, this aluminum raw wire
comes into the factory,
and then out comes the entire fuselage of the rocket.
We can print it in about 30-foot-tall sections
and then join them together in a horizontal joining machine.
And that's how you can get up to the 220-feet-tall
that we'll see with Terran R,
which is our next rocket.
- 3D printing
has already infiltrated the space industry.
But it's been primarily used for building
smaller bits and pieces,
like, for example, this 3D printed rocket engine.
- SpaceX has done metal 3D printing.
Aerojet Rocketdyne, NASA.
And now startups like Rocket Lab and others,
are all using it for bits and pieces.
So we're going way all in on 3D printing
an entire product,
and in the process,
creating an entirely new factory platform for aerospace.
So these 3D printers that Relativity's invented
are very, very huge.
And, of course, that results in a much lower
part count for our products.
We estimate about a hundred times fewer parts
than a traditional rocket.
We can also build one from raw material to complete
in about 60 days,
once our factory's fully operational.
And you're watching, in our case,
these giant 3D printers that I think a lot of people
can't believe it's even possible and that it works,
but we've now tested our technology thousands of times
and it works very reliably.
So 3D printing rockets is not an 'if' at this point,
it's a 'when.'
We've raised $1.4 billion to make this happen.
We still have most of the money in the bank.
So, really, we're still just getting started at Relativity,
as a company.
- 3D printing
a whole new, fully functional rocket, built in two months,
sounds fictional, based on how we do things now.
And Relativity Space is seeking to capitalize
on this opportunity,
to transform manufacturing from an industry of the past
to an industry of the future.
A spacefaring future that stretches
way beyond the boundaries of this planet.
- It's getting to this vision of,
not just creating rockets,
but doing it in an entirely new way.
It's really replacing this traditional paradigm
of aerospace manufacturing and factory design,
and development and test and analysis of a whole product,
that hasn't really changed in the last 60 years,
and I think is fundamentally required
if we're ever going to build on Mars, as well,
which is Relativity's founding long-term vision.
- Speaking of Mars,
3D printed rockets may or may not get us there one day,
but the technology could be essential
in enabling humans to stay there for extended periods.
The last thing you'd need after a grueling journey
to the Red Planet,
is having to build your own home.
3D printing may mean habitats
can be constructed autonomously,
and using local materials.
Still, we are way, way, way off
from a private or government-led colonization of Mars.
But the proof of concept is just starting to emerge.
- We're definitely aware
that once you can 3D print a rocket,
you can build all sorts of other things.
The aerospace industry, globally, it's a trillion dollars.
No one has really created an at scale startup
to do other things in aerospace.
Habitats on Mars and the moon,
certainly is something in our long-term mission and vision,
because when I sketched out
on the back of a Starbucks receipt when founding Relativity,
going to Mars has been the biggest part
of why I founded the company,
and want to inspire more companies to go after that.
So, certainly building habitats
and an industrial base on Mars,
whether it's collaboration with some of the concrete-based
or regolith-based 3D printers,
together with our metal-based technology,
I think there's a lot of good synergy there.
- So, how did 3D printing
go from an almost artisanal manufacturing process,
to transforming how we approach space travel and settlement?
We are now so far beyond the democratization
of the at home printers that can shape molten plastic
into a variety of useful objects.
3D printing is the factory of the future.
- It's actually very similar to Tesla.
For many decades
people were trying to build electric cars,
because we knew it was the future.
They were just trying to put batteries and electric motors
into existing automotive products,
whether it was Nissan or Honda or Ford,
and it didn't really ever build a compelling product.
It wasn't until Tesla realized the shift
from gas internal combustion-based engines
to electrification,
really actually meant the whole factory supply chain,
the car itself, the business model,
around having more software components
and fewer parts which allowed automation.
They were really the first ones to stitch
that whole end-to-end product strategy together.
And I think 3D printing's going to be identical to that
and no one's just tried it yet.