How the World's Largest Metal 3D Printer Makes Rockets
Space
Speaker 1: This rocket was nearly entirely 3D printed by the world's largest metal 3D printers. It belongs to a company called Relativity Space, which has made 3D printing a key part of its rocket development and manufacturing process. We spoke to the company's CEO, Tim Ellis, to learn about what makes 3D printing and rockets such a good match, what lessons they learned from their first launch and what comes next for this budding aerospace company. [00:00:30] Relativity investment into 3D printing as a core part of its manufacturing process was put to the test with the company's first rocket, the TN one, which launched earlier this year.
Speaker 2: So with TN one, it was really like a concept car for relativity. So we pushed the 3D printing technologies. We've invented way beyond what anybody else has done. So this rocket was 110 feet tall, seven and a half feet diameter, and it was 85% 3D printed. So everything from the rocket engines, the turbo [00:01:00] pumps, valve components, and then the whole, uh, tall fuselage, um, which is most of the rocket that you see was all metal 3D printed. Uh, a lot with our own custom 3D printers. We developed and house with our own custom aluminum alloys, and then a bunch of other types of 3D printing went into this. The
Speaker 1: Only parts Ellis says weren't 3D printed were things like movable parts, electronics, batteries, rubber gaskets, and seals.
Speaker 2: Because these 3D printers work in pounds per hour output rate. So 3D [00:01:30] printing is really gonna disrupt, uh, technologies and industries that have very high dollar per pound products. Uh, so that's rockets to start. And then overall, there's about a trillion dollars of aerospace manufacturing systems that I really believe will be heavily disrupted by 3D printing. Uh, in the next couple years,
Speaker 1: The company has also successfully used 3D printing to build complex parts like engines, a process which offers some significant advantages.
Speaker 2: For example, just this year we have six different [00:02:00] design iterations of the engine that are all 3D printed, and we're building one almost every two or three months and actually testing it so that way we get data much faster on, on the product and how it's really operating, and then incorporate that data and learnings into a new design that's 3D printed very rapidly. Right after
Speaker 1: The Teran one launched into space back in March while the rocket didn't reach orbit due to the second stage, failing to ignite the launch ushered in a series of historic firsts and set [00:02:30] up the company to embark on its next challenge of building the significantly larger and reusable Tran R Rocket.
Speaker 2: Tran R is 23 and a half thousand kilograms of payload. Um, so this can fit several school buses in the payload frame. This is a very big rocket, and each Teran r has about six times the amount of 3D printing as each Terran one
Speaker 1: Ellis says. His eventual long-term goal involves the use of 3D printing technology to establish a presence on Mars. Similar to one of Relativity Space's competitors.
Speaker 2: [00:03:00] I was watching SpaceX Land Rockets and Dock with the International Space Station. I thought it was incredibly inspiring. And seven years ago, they were only a 13 year old's company. Uh, but they were still the only company in the world that had this mission of making humanity multi-planetary going to Mars. Uh, I was really captivated by that idea, but I thought there really need to be more like a dozen to a hundred companies to go make Mars happen in our lifetime, and that it's inevitable somebody is going to be the company that develops an industrial [00:03:30] base on Mars. I thought intelligent 3D printing, uh, perhaps using AI or other enabling technologies are pretty clearly going to be the way we build stuff on other planets. And so somebody's gonna make this company and it could be us. And so at 25, I left Blue Origin, started relativity, and, and here we are today, um, making a pretty big leap already towards that eventual long-term vision. As
Speaker 1: Always, thanks so much for watching. I'm your host, Jesse Orle. See you next time with the fam.
