The American company Relativity Space wants to revolutionize the way rockets are made: instead of rivets and welding, Relativity Space uses components made using additive manufacturing processes or 3D printing. Thus, rockets could be produced faster and cheaper, and this approach could also have new technical solutions, since 3D printing could generate the shapes of some components that would not be possible with the classical approach.

Terran-1, Relativity Space’s first rocket, is now on the launch pad and preparing for launch. It won’t have a satellite on board because it’s a test flight: a rocket with 85% of its 3D-printed components has never been sent into space before. The mission is called GLHF, which means “Good Luck, Have Fun.” No one wants a launch to fail, but at the same time, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if it did.

Even so, the data collected during the launch attempt will be extremely helpful in preparing for the next flight. The Terran-1 rocket is 33.5 meters tall and 2.2 meters in diameter, and is powered by 9 Aeon engines powered by… liquefied natural gas (even the fuel selection is original to Relativity Space).

But Terran-1 is just the first step, because Tim Ellis, director and co-founder of Relativity Space, already has big plans. After only 3 flights, the 9 Aeon first stage engines will be replaced by a single Aeon-R engine, ten times more powerful than the current methane-powered version.

It is planned to be used in the future Terran-R rocket, which is much more powerful than the Terran-1. That’s because the current Terran-1 is a light-caliber rocket: it can lift almost 900 kilograms into a heliosynchronous orbit (at an altitude of 500 km) or almost 1.5 tons into a low Earth orbit (at an altitude of 300 km). Which is significantly less than the performance of the Falcon 9, but also at a lower price: only about $12 million.

Terran-1 is likely comparable to the Electron, another light launch vehicle, this time from RocketLab, which for $8 million can lift a 200-kilogram satellite into sun-synchronous orbit and a 300-kilogram satellite into low-Earth orbit to an altitude of 300 km.

Relativity Space has already received contracts for future launches, even though it has yet to launch a rocket. Terran-1’s second mission will fly for NASA, and there are already contracts for Terran-R, which is likely to debut in 2025. If you think the Terran-1 is already an interesting rocket, the Terran-R is almost unbelievable at this point: 95% of the components will be 3D printed, the rocket will still have two stages, but both will be reusable, and the performance will be better than the Falcon rocket 9! Terran-R will be equipped with at least 7 Aeon-R engines and will be able to lift approximately 20 tons into Earth orbit.

I believe that many of the employees at Relativity Space are not coincidentally engineers who come from SpaceX itself. Also, don’t you think Relativity Space started down the same path as SpaceX almost 20 years ago, with a few launches of a light launcher (Falcon 1) and then upgrading to a much more powerful variant (Falcon 9)? Also, is it worth mentioning that the first Terran-R mission is going to send a mission to Mars?

But let’s return to the present. The first flight of the Terran-1 rocket was supposed to take place last year, but I think it is not surprising that the project is delayed. On Wednesday, the rocket finally landed on the LC-16 launch pad of the Space Center at Cape Canaveral and the countdown reached T-69 seconds, when the on-board computer ordered to delay the launch: sensors detected abnormal temperature values ​​in the secondary stage, which

which automatically aborted the startup procedure.

There were attempts to prepare the rocket for a new attempt, but as a result, it was decided to postpone the launch to Saturday, at 20:00 Romanian time (the live broadcast of the launch will be on the Relativity Space YouTube channel). Why are there so many days between two launch attempts? Relativity Space said it needs time to refuel, so once the rocket is empty it will take several days for the next such attempt.

Relativity Space is a young company (5 years ago it had only 17 employees!), a breath of fresh air in the aerospace industry, even newer than SpaceX. It remains to be seen whether the idea of ​​3D printing rocket components turns out to be a good idea or not, but the courage of this company to come up with a new idea and launch a revolutionary rocket pad should be appreciated. Relativity Space are the companies I’d like to see closer to us, geographically speaking. Perhaps not necessarily the Romanian space of relativity, but at least the European one.

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