I love the Ars Technica headline: "Relativity Space has a successful failure with the debut of Terran 1"
While technically a failure, it succeeded at many difficult tasks, like Max-Q, staging and not exploding. They got lots of data back and are in good shape for a second try.
Nobody has ever successfully launched a rocket to orbit on their first try, so Relativity was not expected to either. Some rockets have have succeeded on their first try, but no companies or space agencies have. For example Falcon 9's first try was successful, but they failed 3 times on Falcon 1 before its first success.
OP maybe didn't word it perfectly, but they were talking about organizations not rocket families. Space Shuttle was not exactly NASA's first rocket, just as F9 wasn't SpaceX's first rocket. I don't know if no organization at all has ever been successful on the first try with an orbital rocket or not. The quote Eric Berger at Ars has given was a lot more specific [0]:
>No private company has ever launched its first independently developed, liquid-fueled rocket and had it reach orbit on the first try. And Relativity is pushing a lot of boundaries with its methane-fueled booster. Probably the biggest test here is whether the 3D-printed structure of Terran 1 can withstand the dynamic pressure of ascent through the lower atmosphere.
At the same time though it's important to acknowledge that the "works on the first try" for typical Old Space projects came at absolutely enormous expense [1], and it's reasonable for expectations to be different for a project representing billions to tens of billions of expenditure and billion(s) per rocket vs a private company doing something for tens to hundreds of millions. A properly done hardware rich test program has a lot of advantages.
1: Not just in money either, but in terms of baking in bad designs until it was way too late to change them, which then could and did cause ongoing challenges for as long as the rockets were used. Like yes the first Space Shuttle made it, the design was made to work through heroic efforts, but the design also meant that heroic efforts were needed every single time. Which isn't very sustainable for something used for decades. And in turn we ended up losing multiple ones with humans on board and all lives lost.
For more insanity, it was initially suggested to be a return to launch site (RTLS) abort test. The mission commander shut that down in a hurry. I've always thought it was interesting that Buran could fly autonomously while the Shuttle couldn't.
2 failed, but part of why the Shuttle was grounded as soon as its ISS construction flights were done, despite there being no other way for America to independently take people to space was that it was found to be a death trap, with it being a miracle that more losses hadn't occurred.
Yes, however, one of those failures was due to a flaw that remained basically unsolved for the entirety of the shuttle program. That puts things in a different light, no?
I'm not sure why organizations matter in this context. NASA was public with their lessons learned. Why is "NASA 1980" held to higher standards than "Space X 2008" or "General Relativity 2023"?
Haha, Eric Berger does know his stuff, so he carefully qualified it with "liquid rocket" because Pegasus was a solid. RocketLab was actually quite close but had a flight termination mishap IIRC.
> The Space Shuttle was launched successfully to orbit in it's first try.
And it was clear both during the development and in the retrospect, that the crewed launch was extremely presumptuous, as the STS-1 could have easily crashed due to the mistakes made during the development. It's been done to show that the modeling could replace testing (turned out it couldn't), and to cut the costs, as the Shuttle was supposed to be "economical", in the original concept anyway.
True enough, but let's not forget that NASA blew up a lot of rockets before they ever got to orbit. Relativity did pretty darn well for a private enterprise. Good on them.
Perhaps, but "successful failure" seems very apt. Part of your rocket explodes in space... and all three crew still makes it back alive. I've done much worse to my Kerbals.
I bet Mission Control saw many high-fives when those astronauts touched down on Earth safely.
Yes it was, trollerator was right, I was wrong, at least as far as Pegasus goes. But the second part of his claim is wrong: AFAICT there aren't any others. Pegasus was solid fueled, which is an easier design than a liquid one, but it's not that much easier. Big props to Orbital Sciences (or at least what's left of them in the Northrop Grumman behemoth).
Watched the live stream and man, that was pretty awesome! That it passed max-q was what I was waiting for, because that lets them know that 3D printed materials are strong enough to deal with that stress, then their is no need to "rack and stack" ring sections like they do at SpaceX. Riveting and seam welding take a surprisingly long time over all! Also those joints are the most likely to fail when things get stressed.
I am still curious about the 15% that isn't 3D printed. Clearly the avionics, wiring, and carbon-fiber over wraps would not be 3D printed but is that it? Any other fittings or parts?
I am definitely looking forward to launch 2 and the root cause analysis of the second state engine startup issue.
I am curious why would anyone expects that 3d printed tanks are a good idea. We have sheet metal, it has well controlled and probably close to optimal performance (that is, the maximum mechanical resistance that you can get out out of a given mass of aluminum or stainless steel). The resulting rocket is a long, hollow tube. What exactly do you gain by 3d printing the entire body, other than a nice investor buzzword?
I could see a gradual move to 3d printing, the engine of course with it's complex features, then the bulkheads, downcommer & manifolds, maybe fairing and other aerodynamically shaped pieces etc. But why would you try to print sheet metal transversely, one slice at a time? What possible design you could think of, other than a long, slender tube, that can utilize the flexibility of 3rd printing and provide value to justify the necessarily reduced mass ratio ?
Because they're not trying to do the same thing as everyone else. They're also building the worlds largest 3D printer. Something like this could be shipped to the Moon or Mars in the future.
I'm not sure but I would bet it takes less time to build a rocket with traditional means than through 3d printing.
There are other advantages (leverage with investors not the least of them, imo) to the 3D printing angle but simplicity of development and speed of production are not them.
I'm far from an expert but it seems like at least some companies use cnc milling very extensively which I can't imagine is all that fast either. Many of the huge parts in this SmarterEveryDay video at ULA have tool markings e.g. at 8:40. I'm also skeptical of 3d printing being as big of a boon as they pitch but I also wouldn't be super surprised if it nets an improvement in speed for some parts.
Yes and no. Some of the piece you have to make need to be cast, which means having a forge make the molds, test the molds out, and then, if you find an issue, start the whole process over again. That process can take at times around 6+ months, and more if you find an issue or have to redesign. Similarly, because of the limits of machining, 3D printing allows you have to have much more complex parts and geometries, especially for the engines. I was at GE Aviation for a bit, and they showed us some nozzles they printed that would be impossible to make if not for 3D printing just because of the complex geometries.
It takes a long time but a lot less human labor, so the cost can probably be brought way down. Don't know if it can be competitive without reusability though, or at least partial reusability of the engines.
The thing is, Relativity Space doesn't really disclose much about how the rocket is made. They say it's some percentage 3D printed by weight, but that doesn't really tell you if, for example, they use carbon fiber COPVs for the fuel tanks inside.
We don't really know that 3D printing saves them much time. Rockets are large cylinders, which there are other efficient ways to manufacture. Other companies will 3D print parts of rocket engines. I'm sure Relativity Space does as well, but they probbaly do that separately from the main body of the rocket with some hand assembly after.
Is the engine 3d printed? Or at least components of it? The only footage I’ve seen of their 3d printing process is on, relatively parts like tanks. That may just be to protect IP, but I would be very impressed if they’re printing and using really complex engine components.
I’d wager most modern rocket engines are 3D printed. At the very least SpaceX uses 3D printed engines. It greatly enhances the ability to cool the engine using the supercooled propellant and the technology to achieve it isn’t exactly cutting edge. 3D printing metal using SLS has been around since the eighties
Laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) of polymers was only in its infancy in the late 80s. This was research out of UT Austin that would eventually lead to DTM. Proper L-PBF of metals (fully melted, fully dense parts) didn't come about until the late 90s in the research world. L-PBF of metals wasn't really commercialized until the 2000s.
In any case, this is lightning speed for an industry that still produces something initially designed in the 60s (Boeing 737).
Huge congrats to the team that worked on this! Had the pleasure of being there to witness it and meeting many of them, both old and new employees and what a great group of engineers!
EDIT: Shameless plug I know one the cofounders Jordan Noone, and he’s brilliant.
Hopefully without the added scent for leak detection. I'd assume for rocketry, they have more advanced methods of detecting leaks than our sense of smell.
To this and sibling posts: as far as I know no, the methane used for rocketry is extremely pure and doesn't have any scent, nor indeed does natural gas getting moved around or used industrially. It's expensive as an additive, but more importantly sulfur is bad news for a big range of applications, and when it comes to engines in general let alone rocket engines combusters/injectors etc are not sulfur loving. Sulfur is bad in vacuum chambers too for that matter, gets into the walls and then the chamber is contaminated forever. This isn't just a methane thing either, it's an issue with traditional fuels. The formulation for RP-1 has changed significantly over time in that respect for example, from the original 500ppm down to 30ppm now. And if it was cheap enough and still mattered one reason rocketry and aerospace companies might be interested in synfuels beyond the environmental aspect is being able to have zero sulfur at all from the get-go.
While I don't disagree with you, the Terran 1 actually runs on LNG rather than pure methane. I'm not sure what type of constraints they place on the LNG that ends up in the rocket but to my knowledge it's not pure methane like the Starship or other methalox rockets.
Actually, there's probably a fair amount of relatively controlled leaking that goes on. There's a certain amount of boil off of the cryo temp methane. In the video of the launch you can see active flaring in the wide shot. And at various points plumes come off the rocket on the pad, that's venting through pressure relief valves.
They probably do have better means to detect it, but why give up such a powerful and useful one as "every human being that goes anywhere near it can instantly detect it"?
Mercaptan is incredible at what it does. A minuscule amount is noticeable by our noses.
So great to see. Interviewed with them back in June of 2017 from a job listing on HN. They were ~15 people if I recall at the time. My phone went from 50% to zero halfway through the final interview before onsite. I ran to my car to charge and called back 10 minutes later. Interview was dead. Such is life. Wild to see how far they have come but not surprised. Congratulations
> My phone went from 50% to zero halfway through the final interview before onsite. I ran to my car to charge and called back 10 minutes later. Interview was dead. Such is life.
That must've been extremely frustrating. Just out of curiosity, what was the phone lol? I'd be _MAD_ if that ever happened to me. Like really mad. But as you said, such is life.
Even for an experienced company losing a couple of flights in the first ten with a new rocket is par for the course. For a new company to get all the way through stage separation before anything went wrong is a sort of vaguely encouraging sign.
This is a massive success, congrats. I had a look on CrunchBase - founded in 2015 and they've raised a total of $1.3B, with the last round being $650m in 2021. That means it took them 8 years and $1B to reach this milestone, which is really good in space terms. Before SpaceX a single a launch would cost into the hundreds of millions of dollars and program costs well into the tens of billions. Amazing how far space flight has come.
- Relativity Space was founded in 2016. Just to compare, Blue Origin was founded in 2000. It serves as a stark example of how throwing money at something doesn't necessarily solve problems. Who would've thought in 2000 that 23 years later Blue Origin still wouldn't have reached orbit?
- SpaceX's Falcon rockets use oxygen and RP-1 (ie pure kerosene) as fuel. Starship (like the RS Terran rockets) are attempting to use methane instead of RP-1. This is incredibly complicated because RP-1 is liquid as normal temperatures and methane isn't. So instead of chilling one fuel, you have to chill both. A big reason to do this is relevant to rocket reuse. RP-1 leaves behind a soot-like residue all over the inside of the engines. This process has a name that I can't recall. Methane does not have this problem so should reduce reuse cost and turnaround time;
- The company claims they will be hopefully flying the Terran R (reusable and larger version of the Terran 1) as early as next year. I am extremely skeptical. RS hit some important milestones with this launch but ultimately did fail to reach orbit. To argue we're 12-18 months away from a newer, larger and reusable version seems beyond optimistic at best. Landing a first stage is nontrivial. I think 2-3 years is more realistic and still aggressive;
- Falcon 9 can carry ~22,000kg to LEO. The Terran-1 has a projected payload of 1250kg so even with the low launch cost, the cost per kg is uncompetitive. Remember a rocket can carry multiple payloads (eg the Starlink launches a bunch of satellites at once). Still, there might be a market for this;
- RS seems to be putting all their eggs in the Terran-R bucket, which aims to be a reusable vehicle. I don't have details on this but I assume like Falcon it'll be a reusable stage 1 that lands. I'm not sure what the projected payload and cost of this is;
- 3D printing is mentioned all the time in RS news. I'm honestly not sure why. Is this really an advantage? Rockets are big. They're made of very large components. The usual advantage of 3D printing is not in cost but in your ability to produce things that cannot be made with traditional methods. For example, newer planes like 787 do this for key components in the engines. Ultimately i don't think people care how it's made, just what the payload cost, launch lead time and potential launch volume is.
Personally I'd like to see more competition in this space so I wish them well.
Re: why 3d printing. Generally agree with your points, tho for early stages the iteration benefits outweigh the economies of scale.
BUT! Rocket manufacture in space.. that's where it shines. If you're a small Mars, Lunar or asteroid base and depends on rocket transit, you'll want full reproducibility on your side and complex economy-of-scale factories are not going to be feasible for a long meanwhile.
- 3D printing is mentioned all the time in RS news. I'm honestly not sure why. Is this really an advantage?
You can print some shapes that are very hard to make otherwise, or even generatively designed and optimized. Integrate a bunch of parts into one, saving weight on bolts etc. Iterate on the design faster, as there's no need to make custom tooling and fixtures etc. 'Just' a ginormous printer.
> - Relativity Space was founded in 2016. Just to compare, Blue Origin was founded in 2000. It serves as a stark example of how throwing money at something doesn't necessarily solve problems. Who would've thought in 2000 that 23 years later Blue Origin still wouldn't have reached orbit?
I'm as unimpressed by Blue Origin's (non-results) as the next person, but at the same time from the article it sounds like both co-founders came from Blue Origin...
I read both founders Wikipedia articles this morning. As far as I can tell, they bother interned at BO, and one had a job at SpaceX for a few years. I definitely wouldn't say they "came from" BO. They seem to have (successfully!!) started a rocket company straight out of college.
did 3D printing help them iterate on some component design maybe? also they need to differentiate themselves, so they aren't just another spacex, so being the "3D printed rocket company" sounds better for getting investment I guess
While I'm not convinced on the utility of 3D printing a cylinder (I think they have plans for more complicated lifting body type shapes in the future), it's great to see more players in the game!
As an aside, I'd love to know what alloy they're using. I know NASA had problems with fusion welding 2195 and had to switch to friction stir welding.
In my opinion printing the whole (±) rocket is a fantastic way to build your first protoypes and iterate your designs with high pace. This will probably not scale very well though, especially for geometrically simple parts like cylinders, as you said. But for novel applications where until recently a part like this couldn't have been manufactured realistically, 3D printing is a very exciting new technology in the field. Take a look at their tank caps, which are designed exactly with printing in mind. They have shapes that before their new processes couldn't have been dreamt of. Very excited to see where this goes! I'm currently doing my aerospace engineering bachelors in Germany, hoping to see similar concepts here or at least in Europe soon!
I think the idea is that if they can get the process down and prove it's viable (today was a huge step in that direction, especially surviving MAX-Q and not blowing up), it will scale because instead of spending TONS of money on tooling that is typically not reusable past a singe iteration, they can iterate and produce quickly and efficiently. Curious, though, why you say it won't scale? Why not?
It's a wonderful un-process hack. You talk about tooling, but there's also just so much less process, so much less variability, so many less joints & non-uniformities. It may be slow, but you only really have a limited set of lessons about printing to learn.
By compare, look at videos comparing Starship nosecone over time. So much rocket building is a manual process, and it's hard work figuring out how each thing has to happen. I think even the cylinder fab has a lot of lessons that have gone into it.
At first this kind of felt like a gimmick, but being able to go deep on one ultra-flexible thing & reapply those lessons again and again seems divine. Being constrained by chiefly imagination, asking only where you want to put material not how you want to get it there is such an enormous liberator.
And once it's working well, they have such deep parameterization tweaks they can make, to optimize hone & refine. Thin this in this area, try some different reinforcement patterns on this wall... having a totally abstract way of building feels like cheating, it's such an obviously easier better freer constraint-less way of making real.
The potential savings here seem to more than make up for a potentially slightly slower build speed.
And, if the build speed it that much slower, get another 3d printer! Because it takes so much less manual labour, you can parallelize it in a very cost effective manner and ultimately end up with a faster production rate.
3D printing a rocket would be a lot more convincing if it hadn't taken Relativity ~7 years and billions of dollars to make it to a first launch attempt. They'll probably do alright, but that's much more capital and much longer than others (SpaceX, Rocket Lab, ABL)
That's a good point about scaling. They're not trying to build 50 of them right now, just a handful of prototypes. And AM is particularly well suited to that.
I don't think they ever planning on building 50 of them. If they can get reusability sorted out quickly, they're unlikely to ever need more than a dozen or so.
Pretty much every modern rocket engine manufacturer does. The engines have a lot of unconventionally shaped pipes that could be manufactured as a single structural element using 3d printing to avoid the need for extra welding and potential points of failure.
Just because most cars use round wheels doesn't mean trying different wheel shapes is necessarily a good idea. Sometimes there's just a clear best way of doing things and there is no benefit in diverging from that.
SX picked rolled steel (really, a custom variant) as a good tradeoff for performance, durability and cost. That was trying something different, and Relativity's goals for low-cost and reuse look much more like these goals
the only use case I can think of for the rocket body 3d printing, combined with methane engines, is a something weird: fly to mars with a 3d printer and some technology to extract iron from the sand and methane from the atmosphere and build multiple rockets there to fly something useful back to Earth. But that's such a big leap of imagination.
One of my close friends has been working here for the last few years, it's been exciting watching the journey. Congrats to everyone who made this happen.
They applied to YC in late 2015. I thought "Wild idea, but the founders know what they're talking about, have built stuff in the past, and understand the challenges." Other partners agreed and we gave them $120k. They built a prototype huge 3D printer on the cheap, showed it to more investors who were impressed enough to write checks, and it grew from there.
I've read various places that it's about 85% printed, by mass. The tanks & payload shroud, and portions of the engines as well. For the latter, the expansion nozzles and the crazy custom propellant plumbing were 3D printed.
The manhole cover from the nuclear test (if that's what you're referring to) most likely evaporated from air friction, sadly. From the time between video frames we can infer that it did achieve orbital velocity, but it would have been going too fast in the denser parts of the atmosphere to survive. Rockets don't go that fast until they're already quite high up, so they suffer much less.
While technically a failure, it succeeded at many difficult tasks, like Max-Q, staging and not exploding. They got lots of data back and are in good shape for a second try.
Nobody has ever successfully launched a rocket to orbit on their first try, so Relativity was not expected to either. Some rockets have have succeeded on their first try, but no companies or space agencies have. For example Falcon 9's first try was successful, but they failed 3 times on Falcon 1 before its first success.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/relativity-space-has...