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3D Printing a Better Rocket · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Tim Ellis builds rockets for a living. He started
0:23
Speaker 1: his career at Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by
0:26
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos, and then in twenty fifteen he left to
0:29
Speaker 1: start his own rocket company. The company is called Relativity Space,
0:34
Speaker 1: and last year they launched their first rocket. The launch
0:37
Speaker 1: did not go exactly as planned.
0:41
Speaker 2: Launch day.
0:43
Speaker 3: A lot of emotions certainly come up thinking about it.
0:47
Speaker 2: There's really no way to describe it.
0:49
Speaker 3: It was actually a new emotion I don't think I've
0:51
Speaker 3: felt in my entire life.
0:58
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem? The
1:00
Speaker 1: show where I talk to people who are trying to
1:02
Speaker 1: make technological progress. Tim Ellis is really working on a
1:07
Speaker 1: couple of problems. He's working on a short term problem,
1:10
Speaker 1: which is how can you use three D printing to
1:13
Speaker 1: make rockets more cheaply and quickly? And then he's working
1:17
Speaker 1: on a long term problem, which is how can three
1:20
Speaker 1: D printing help humans colonize Mars? Trying not to start
1:27
Speaker 1: with the email to Mark Cuban, but I can't, so
1:31
Speaker 1: tell me about your email to Mark Cuban.
1:33
Speaker 3: I really was convinced that three D printing was going
1:36
Speaker 3: to be a highly disruptive technology and wanted to go
1:39
Speaker 3: try to print a whole rocket, but we didn't really
1:41
Speaker 3: have anything At the time I emailed to Mark Cuban,
1:44
Speaker 3: I actually had not even emailed anybody else with a
1:49
Speaker 3: relativity space email address. That actually was the first email
1:53
Speaker 3: I ever since. So I created the relativity Space email
1:55
Speaker 3: address to email Mark Cuban. That the idea really came.
2:00
Speaker 3: I mean, I am from Plano, Texas. It's a suburb
2:03
Speaker 3: more at the Dallas so I certainly grew up hearing
2:05
Speaker 3: a lot about Mark Cuban with Dallas Mavericks. And I
2:09
Speaker 3: had a friend at USC in Los Angeles, where I
2:13
Speaker 3: went to college, that was an entrepreneur, and I remember
2:16
Speaker 3: he had a blog where I think at one point
2:18
Speaker 3: he just said, you know, Mark Cuban does actually answer
2:21
Speaker 3: cold email. So it sort of heard about this, you know,
2:24
Speaker 3: phenomenon from that. So I thought, well, you know, I
2:28
Speaker 3: don't know any investors, actually don't really know anything about
2:30
Speaker 3: starting the company, but I know I need to raise money.
2:33
Speaker 3: I didn't know how to do it, so I just thought, well,
2:35
Speaker 3: I'm going to try emailing Mark Cuban and let's see
2:38
Speaker 3: if it works. So I didn't have his email address,
2:41
Speaker 3: So I had to guess twenty different versions of his
2:43
Speaker 3: email address, you know, Mark at Dallasmavericks dot com, Mark
2:48
Speaker 3: dot Cuban at Dallas Mavericks dot com, you know mcuban
2:51
Speaker 3: at Dallas Mavericks. And then I did Gmail. Does anybody
2:55
Speaker 3: have Hotmail or Yahoo anymore?
2:56
Speaker 2: I mean, let's be my mom does, but let's be honest.
2:59
Speaker 1: So it would be amazing if Mark Cuban, Yeah, Mark
3:02
Speaker 1: Cuban heady.
3:02
Speaker 2: Yeah.
3:03
Speaker 1: So so you guess all these email addresses.
3:06
Speaker 3: And then you know, from there, I knew he's a
3:09
Speaker 3: busy guy, so I couldn't write a lot of words,
3:13
Speaker 3: and so I just explained, you know, I'm from Plano, Texas,
3:16
Speaker 3: like so I led with that, and then you know,
3:18
Speaker 3: quickly talked about that I worked with Jeff Bezos personally,
3:22
Speaker 3: which is true for the three D printing projects, so
3:26
Speaker 3: kind of getting him hooked, making him realize I'm not
3:29
Speaker 3: so far away from him, and then showing credibility and legitimacy,
3:32
Speaker 3: especially because I was only twenty five. But he replied
3:36
Speaker 3: back in five minutes and then said, well, what do
3:38
Speaker 3: you want from me? And so it quickly got into
3:42
Speaker 3: the ask and then you know that almost felt like
3:45
Speaker 3: being on Shark Tank, I guess virtually. But yeah, you know,
3:50
Speaker 3: we said we were raising half a million dollars. Even
3:54
Speaker 3: that amount was a little bit pulled out of thin
3:56
Speaker 3: air because again we kind of just started the company
3:59
Speaker 3: and not even really started yet, like we hadn't even
4:01
Speaker 3: incorporated yet.
4:02
Speaker 2: It really was the first team all we sent.
4:03
Speaker 3: So yeah, I asked him for one hundred thousand dollars
4:07
Speaker 3: of a half a million dollar funding rounds, and then
4:12
Speaker 3: you know, he replied back almost immediately again asking you know,
4:16
Speaker 3: why does melon do this? Had a you know, kind
4:20
Speaker 3: of straightforward answered like he's just focused on other things
4:24
Speaker 3: and this is complimentary.
4:26
Speaker 2: And then he.
4:26
Speaker 3: Wrote back, We'll just do the full half a million dollars,
4:30
Speaker 3: like he just gave us the whole five hundred k.
4:33
Speaker 3: We've now done six funding rounds, we've raised one point
4:35
Speaker 3: three three billion dollars, and he's invested in every single one.
4:39
Speaker 1: Were you surprised by his reply when he said he'd
4:42
Speaker 1: give you five hundred dollars?
4:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, hell, yeah, of course, yes absolutely. I Mean I
4:48
Speaker 3: now know just how hard fundraising is, and it's a
4:51
Speaker 3: complete an omelet.
4:53
Speaker 1: So at that time, you're starting this company, like, what's
4:57
Speaker 1: your dream?
5:01
Speaker 3: So we wrote on the back of a Starbucks napkin
5:04
Speaker 3: all or Starbucks receipts, I guess, really kind of showing
5:09
Speaker 3: the relationship between three D printing a rocket and then
5:13
Speaker 3: one day, how we see this technology helping build an
5:15
Speaker 3: industrial base on Mars. So I thought, you know, really
5:19
Speaker 3: a lot of the inspiration behind starting Relativity space came
5:24
Speaker 3: from this realization that SpaceX had landed rockets and docked
5:28
Speaker 3: with the International Space Station. They were a thirteen year
5:31
Speaker 3: old company. It was super exciting to watch what they
5:34
Speaker 3: had done, even when I was at Blue Origin. But
5:38
Speaker 3: despite this once in a generation's success, they're still the
5:41
Speaker 3: only company in the world that wanted to make humanity
5:44
Speaker 3: multiplanetary and put a million people on Mars. So I
5:47
Speaker 3: thought it was inevitable there has to be a second. Clearly,
5:51
Speaker 3: if we're going to put a million people on Mars,
5:53
Speaker 3: there will be you know, dozens to hundreds.
5:55
Speaker 2: Of companies that make this happen.
5:57
Speaker 3: So I thought, heck, we could be the like, we
6:00
Speaker 3: are going to be the second company to go try
6:02
Speaker 3: to put a million people on Mars too, because there's
6:05
Speaker 3: clearly going to have to be a person that builds
6:07
Speaker 3: the company that builds all the industrial base equipment, you know,
6:12
Speaker 3: initially maybe spare parts and other things. So yeah, we
6:15
Speaker 3: could we could be those founders, and that was something
6:18
Speaker 3: that resonated a lot with me, and it's still true today.
6:21
Speaker 1: So if the dream is to put a million people
6:23
Speaker 1: on Mars, when you're starting, what's the what's the how
6:27
Speaker 1: you get there?
6:28
Speaker 2: Point?
6:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, what are you actually setting out to do
6:32
Speaker 1: in practical terms to achieve that?
6:33
Speaker 2: Of course?
6:34
Speaker 3: So you know, really the first major goal, which has
6:37
Speaker 3: now become Chapter one of Relativity, which we actually just completed,
6:41
Speaker 3: was to three D print an entire rocket, and then
6:44
Speaker 3: the second big piece was to develop the world's largest
6:47
Speaker 3: metal three D printer.
6:48
Speaker 1: So tell me about the sort of three D printing
6:51
Speaker 1: dream you know, when you're starting out, what's yeah, why
6:54
Speaker 1: why is three D printing sort of the core kind
6:58
Speaker 1: of technical piece or manufacturing piece that you're focused on.
7:01
Speaker 3: Early on, Really, what we thought was three D printing
7:05
Speaker 3: was more of an automation technology, and this was the
7:08
Speaker 3: kind of uns the thing, and I was certainly a
7:10
Speaker 3: user of the technology. By the way, like all of
7:12
Speaker 3: the parts and products I designed, a blue egin used
7:15
Speaker 3: off the shelf metal three D printers. So and that's
7:17
Speaker 3: why I started the three D printing division there, because
7:19
Speaker 3: I really, for myself saw firsthand just how great it
7:22
Speaker 3: was to design products that would normally be twenty different
7:25
Speaker 3: parts and you could print them as one piece and
7:28
Speaker 3: so then you only had to print a single piece,
7:30
Speaker 3: and it was a lot faster and cheaper, and it
7:32
Speaker 3: still functioned basically the same, but the key thing is
7:35
Speaker 3: it looked super different. So in order to combine twenty
7:39
Speaker 3: parts together and print them, you don't just take an
7:41
Speaker 3: existing product and press print. It really has to be
7:45
Speaker 3: designed from the very beginning for this technology. And I
7:48
Speaker 3: think that was the key thing that made me realize
7:50
Speaker 3: we had to start our own company because a printed
7:54
Speaker 3: rocket and all the way you test it, qualify it,
7:58
Speaker 3: make sure it actually works the material science, like so
8:01
Speaker 3: many pieces needed to be developed from scratch to make
8:05
Speaker 3: a whole printed rocket happen.
8:07
Speaker 1: You can't just say, yeah, let's make rocket the way
8:09
Speaker 1: we're making it, but instead of using machined parts, let's
8:12
Speaker 1: three D print them. Like that's not the way it works.
8:15
Speaker 1: You have to sort of re engineer the rocket from
8:18
Speaker 1: the ground exactly when you're starting the company, what's your
8:21
Speaker 1: thesis simply for why a three D printed rocket would
8:25
Speaker 1: be better than a traditionally manufactured rocket.
8:29
Speaker 3: A three D printed rocket, the thesis really was, we
8:32
Speaker 3: can reduce the part count by two orders of magnitude,
8:35
Speaker 3: so one hundred times fewer parts. That really comes from
8:39
Speaker 3: part count consolidation, and you print them together as single pieces.
8:44
Speaker 2: We believed we could build a rocket very quickly.
8:47
Speaker 3: So initially the tagline was building a rocket in sixty
8:50
Speaker 3: days and this sixty days later we could build another version,
8:53
Speaker 3: and sixty days after that another version. So this is
8:56
Speaker 3: the north star of where we see the tech getting
8:59
Speaker 3: to and then the others cost So clearly all of
9:02
Speaker 3: those those two things really help us reduce the cost
9:07
Speaker 3: of launch, and that that was really it. I mean,
9:10
Speaker 3: at the end of the day, people that are building
9:13
Speaker 3: satellites and need rocket launches, which is our primary business model,
9:17
Speaker 3: just want something that's reliable, It can actually launch their
9:20
Speaker 3: payload and has enough payload capacity, it's cheap, and it
9:25
Speaker 3: shows up on time. It's a pretty sure.
9:27
Speaker 1: They don't care how it's built right, It doesn't matter
9:29
Speaker 1: to them. They just wanted to go to space and
9:32
Speaker 1: not blow up and.
9:33
Speaker 2: Be cheap yep.
9:34
Speaker 1: So it's as you said, going on eight years ago
9:37
Speaker 1: that you started the company. I know you had your
9:39
Speaker 1: first launch earlier this year. So just to jump to
9:43
Speaker 1: the moment, like just before that launch, tell me about
9:47
Speaker 1: what you had built. Tell me about the factory and
9:50
Speaker 1: about the three D printers.
9:52
Speaker 3: Sure to the metal printer's relativity is built. Are the
9:56
Speaker 3: largest in the world. We had several generations in our factory.
10:01
Speaker 3: When you walk into them, it looks like Westworld a bit.
10:04
Speaker 3: So there's a big robotic arm, six axis industrial robotic arm.
10:09
Speaker 3: There's a print head at the end of it. That
10:11
Speaker 3: print head deposits metal and uses it was lasers at
10:17
Speaker 3: the time, but it's also plasma arc energy. So you basically,
10:21
Speaker 3: you know, using electricity, melt the wire and wherever the
10:25
Speaker 3: robot our moves, you just deposit molten metal and it solidifies.
10:29
Speaker 3: There's a whole of course control system. There's a bunch
10:31
Speaker 3: of sensors that are constantly monitoring this.
10:34
Speaker 2: How big is it.
10:35
Speaker 3: It's about thirty five feet tall. For the latest versions
10:43
Speaker 3: can print up to eighteen feet diameter.
10:47
Speaker 2: It's huge.
10:47
Speaker 1: Can print a rocket basically, I mean eighteen feet diameters
10:50
Speaker 1: like the tube of the rocket.
10:52
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean eighteen feet is the diameter of our
10:56
Speaker 3: next reusable vehicle, which is three point thirty million pounds
10:59
Speaker 3: of thrust.
10:59
Speaker 1: So one big yeah diameter, the big one.
11:02
Speaker 3: But they also built the ones that we launched, which
11:04
Speaker 3: is seven and a half feet wide. We had quite
11:06
Speaker 3: a few of these printers, so it really just looked
11:08
Speaker 3: like a field of robot arms, you know, melting metal
11:13
Speaker 3: and in a very precise way, very controlled, very high quality.
11:17
Speaker 3: It was actually quite a quiet factory because of this.
11:20
Speaker 3: You know, there really was not a lot of uh sound,
11:25
Speaker 3: the hustle and bustle. Certainly, that's very high energy. When
11:28
Speaker 3: you walk in a rocket factory that's actively building a rocket.
11:31
Speaker 2: You know, there's there's.
11:32
Speaker 3: A lot of people around, but overall less than you
11:35
Speaker 3: would normally have. And uh, you know, certainly something that
11:40
Speaker 3: looks like the future. There's no question about that. This
11:43
Speaker 3: looks like the future.
11:44
Speaker 1: So is there an example of a thing that initially
11:47
Speaker 1: didn't work, didn't work the way you thought it was
11:48
Speaker 1: going to work, and you had to figure out a
11:50
Speaker 1: different way to make it work.
11:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well one was you know, of course, in rocket
11:55
Speaker 3: engine development, you blow up rocket engines in fact, I
11:58
Speaker 3: actually encouraged the team to push hard enough to blowing
12:03
Speaker 3: up at some point.
12:04
Speaker 2: You don't like.
12:05
Speaker 1: If you're if you're not blowing them up, you're you're
12:07
Speaker 1: not really testing them exactly exactly.
12:11
Speaker 3: Now, you don't want to blow up the test stand
12:12
Speaker 3: because that tends to tends to be a.
12:15
Speaker 1: Much right amount of blowing up.
12:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a slower, slower recovery, but blowing up a
12:22
Speaker 3: rocket engine, now, Yeah, there's different failure modes. Some are
12:25
Speaker 3: more catastrophic than others. We were actually fairly lucky. We
12:30
Speaker 3: didn't have any that were insanely bad. We had one
12:33
Speaker 3: that was, you know, kind of kind of rough, really
12:36
Speaker 3: early in the program. I think it was our fourth
12:38
Speaker 3: ever chamber tests. We were a tiny, tiny company that
12:43
Speaker 3: particular one. So I remember watching the flame down in
12:47
Speaker 3: the flame trench slowly creep up, a little drip of
12:51
Speaker 3: methane that was still still kind of dripping from the
12:54
Speaker 3: engine at the end of the test, and you.
12:56
Speaker 1: Just fuse almost yeah.
12:58
Speaker 3: Almost almost, and you just watch this flame, you know,
13:01
Speaker 3: in the slow mode video, creep up, creep up, and
13:03
Speaker 3: then right when it goes in the engine chamber, it
13:05
Speaker 3: was just like a bomb, just went off. Now, of
13:08
Speaker 3: course nobody was hurt. Everything was safe. We got to
13:10
Speaker 3: give those caveats, but it was Yeah, it's pretty crazy video.
13:16
Speaker 3: But it took a few months to go fix that
13:19
Speaker 3: and to figure it out. So we're lucky at the
13:21
Speaker 3: time we had three engine tests that had been successful
13:25
Speaker 3: before that, so we knew it wasn't a fundamental problem.
13:28
Speaker 3: It was something we could fix. I think if you
13:30
Speaker 3: blow up your very first engine, that can be kind
13:32
Speaker 3: of hard because then you don't know exactly does it
13:37
Speaker 3: fundamentally work or not.
13:38
Speaker 1: So tell me about launch day. Right, this was whatever
13:41
Speaker 1: seven ish years after you launched the company. You're ready
13:44
Speaker 1: to launch the first rocket. Tell me about that day.
13:49
Speaker 2: Launch day.
13:50
Speaker 3: A lot of emotions certainly come up thinking about it.
13:54
Speaker 3: There's really no way to describe it. It was actually
13:56
Speaker 3: a new emotion. I don't think I've felt in my
13:58
Speaker 3: entire life. It was at night, so we had to
14:02
Speaker 3: launch at night due to the air traffic kind of coordination.
14:06
Speaker 3: It was around spring break, so we wanted to be
14:08
Speaker 3: a good kind of airspace, you know, citizen, so to speak.
14:12
Speaker 3: We weren't really sure what it was going to look like.
14:14
Speaker 3: By the way, so this is also the first methane
14:16
Speaker 3: fueled rocket to ever attempt orbit a launch outside of China.
14:19
Speaker 3: I'm China does not show photos or videos of launches.
14:23
Speaker 3: So this literally was the first time the world was
14:25
Speaker 3: going to see a methane fueled rocket fly. That was
14:28
Speaker 3: the other big thing. So we didn't know what it
14:31
Speaker 3: was going to look like as it was launching to orbit,
14:34
Speaker 3: and so when it you know and ended up. Of course,
14:39
Speaker 3: a lot of the activity at this point we had,
14:42
Speaker 3: you know, about a thousand people at the company, but
14:45
Speaker 3: so the team didn't need me to do anything. Like
14:48
Speaker 3: they're extremely coordinated, trained, they know exactly what they're doing.
14:53
Speaker 2: There's it was at caj.
14:54
Speaker 1: Getting in the way at that point, I mean bothering people.
14:58
Speaker 3: No, I think I do a good job staying out
15:00
Speaker 3: of the way. I was just enjoying it. I think
15:02
Speaker 3: that was the biggest thing. You know, certainly I was
15:04
Speaker 3: on the hook for whatever happened. To be clear, this
15:07
Speaker 3: is a first launch. No company had ever reached orbit
15:11
Speaker 3: in the world in history on a very first launch,
15:15
Speaker 3: and the major is intense, like you are getting kind
15:18
Speaker 3: of constant pings over the radio hearing as we're loading propellants.
15:22
Speaker 3: You know, preparing the rocket for flight. You know, each
15:26
Speaker 3: step there's different troubleshooting and things that are happening live
15:30
Speaker 3: because you know, a lot is automated, but it is
15:33
Speaker 3: all happening for the first time. You have tens of
15:35
Speaker 3: thousands of sensors and data channels all over the rocket.
15:38
Speaker 3: It is a very complex coordination. So even though people
15:42
Speaker 3: are well trained, there's on the fly, you know, is
15:46
Speaker 3: this temperature okay? On the batteries, is you know, it's
15:48
Speaker 3: out of bounds?
15:49
Speaker 2: Like is it okay?
15:49
Speaker 3: So there's like whole teams of engineers just going and
15:52
Speaker 3: doing calculations and coming back and saying yes, we're good
15:55
Speaker 3: to go. You know, the winds are a big issue,
15:58
Speaker 3: so we're launching weather balloons and tracking wind data to
16:01
Speaker 3: make sure the winds aren't too strong, not at the
16:03
Speaker 3: ground level but way up in the atmosphere because that's
16:06
Speaker 3: a huge factor of launch success. There's boats and we
16:10
Speaker 3: have Coastguard people chasing boats that are in the violation
16:14
Speaker 3: of the Keypout zone with like you know, we had
16:16
Speaker 3: like people with AK forty seven's trying to tell them
16:19
Speaker 3: like hey, you're you know, illegally in the zone, Like
16:21
Speaker 3: you got to get out of there. We had a
16:24
Speaker 3: Navy plane takeoff from an aircraft carrier in the middle
16:27
Speaker 3: of you know, almost the launch windows. It's counting down,
16:32
Speaker 3: so it's kind of controlled, very very controlled, but very
16:37
Speaker 3: intense because all of these things are popping up, even
16:40
Speaker 3: at the point of you know, getting down.
16:42
Speaker 2: To just a few minutes to the to the launch countdown.
16:44
Speaker 1: And just to be clear, this is purely a test flight, right,
16:48
Speaker 1: there's no commercial payload on it. There's no people on it.
16:52
Speaker 1: Basically just launch in the run.
16:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, correct, this one. You know, some companies decide to
16:56
Speaker 3: have a payload on the first launch.
16:58
Speaker 2: We decided not to.
17:00
Speaker 3: We ended up flying the first the very first shavings
17:04
Speaker 3: of a three D printed part that we ever made
17:07
Speaker 3: seven years ago. The idea behind that was, you know,
17:11
Speaker 3: all of the failure we had to overcome to get
17:13
Speaker 3: to this point, like we're launching that story. I had
17:16
Speaker 3: my Starbucks receipt, you know, every employee got a photo
17:21
Speaker 3: that kind of thing.
17:22
Speaker 1: But yeah, no, Palin, So okay, so it's time, what like,
17:27
Speaker 1: it's time for the racket to launch.
17:29
Speaker 3: So as sixty seconds was counting down, the energy is high.
17:33
Speaker 3: Now we had It's very normal for a rocket launch.
17:36
Speaker 3: At first, we had two other attempts that happened in daylight.
17:39
Speaker 3: They got very very close to launching. Actually one of
17:42
Speaker 3: them even ignited all the nine engines and then aborted.
17:45
Speaker 3: So at the time that you're several minutes close to
17:47
Speaker 3: the flight, it's really one hundred percent automated, and then
17:51
Speaker 3: once you're under seventy seconds, it literally is automated, so
17:55
Speaker 3: if anything happens, it just.
17:56
Speaker 2: Aboords and safes itself. It's all software driven.
17:59
Speaker 3: So we had had a few other launch attempts that
18:02
Speaker 3: just you know, a sensor was off or some temperatures
18:05
Speaker 3: slightly drifted because a lot of complex things are happening,
18:08
Speaker 3: and those final stuff twenty seconds, so that's also actually
18:11
Speaker 3: contributing to the anxiety and the you know, adrenaline is
18:15
Speaker 3: you actually don't yet know is it definitely going off
18:18
Speaker 3: or definitely not. Of course, it's counting down, so in
18:20
Speaker 3: the engines light it holds down for several seconds until
18:24
Speaker 3: they get up to full thrust. There's a bunch of
18:26
Speaker 3: health checks, you know, which are all automated on the rocket,
18:29
Speaker 3: and then there's the final command that sends which has release.
18:33
Speaker 3: So right when what are called the rocket holdbacks or
18:37
Speaker 3: hold downs release back. Then the rocket moved up and
18:42
Speaker 3: I saw ice, you know, start kind of falling off
18:45
Speaker 3: of it all over the place because it's really cold propellant,
18:47
Speaker 3: so there's ice all over it. So this ice just
18:49
Speaker 3: like you know, kind of cheers off of it and
18:52
Speaker 3: looks like a star dust or something coming off. So
18:56
Speaker 3: right when that happened, you know, the engines had already
18:58
Speaker 3: been let. It's like this crazy blue and purple and
19:01
Speaker 3: orange flame like methane rockets, like really really insane compared
19:05
Speaker 3: to normal rockets.
19:06
Speaker 2: I waited for that moment.
19:08
Speaker 3: I absolutely had planned I was going to run outside,
19:11
Speaker 3: so I had the path already set and kind of
19:14
Speaker 3: like very very quickly but also careful not to trip
19:18
Speaker 3: and fall. Went out the door and went around the corner,
19:22
Speaker 3: and I just remember the feeling of opening the door,
19:25
Speaker 3: and right when you open it to go outside, it
19:27
Speaker 3: just nails you in the chest. I mean, rockets, of
19:30
Speaker 3: course are really intensely powerful. I'd seen engine tests before,
19:35
Speaker 3: but yeah, you just immediately feel this like fluttering kind
19:39
Speaker 3: of almost like somebody's pounding your chest a little bit.
19:42
Speaker 1: The sound is the sound that ye yeah, yeah, so.
19:46
Speaker 3: Loud, super loud, and then I turned around the corner,
19:50
Speaker 3: so I basically heard it before I saw it. Then
19:52
Speaker 3: turned around the corner, and then you know, just a
19:56
Speaker 3: hundred or so feet in the air, was just this
19:59
Speaker 3: rocket flying and there's a crazy bright blue flame that
20:02
Speaker 3: looks like looking at a star, you know, being launched
20:05
Speaker 3: to space. I mean, videos really don't do it just
20:08
Speaker 3: it is. It is so so much brighter and so
20:10
Speaker 3: much cooler looking in person. And then you just feel
20:15
Speaker 3: energy in the air, Like the air almost feels dense
20:17
Speaker 3: and thick, and it sounds like a whip cracking plus
20:20
Speaker 3: sub base, you know, just at eleven out of ten intensity,
20:25
Speaker 3: so it feels alive like that. That's what's so cool.
20:28
Speaker 3: Microphones and video really just don't capture the feeling of
20:32
Speaker 3: a live launch because it's like, yeah, just very visceral.
20:36
Speaker 3: And then of course people around me are like screaming
20:40
Speaker 3: and cheering and crying. You know, we like literally crying
20:43
Speaker 3: like viscerally and say, oh my god, oh my God.
20:46
Speaker 3: Like it's like a pretty religiously spiritually kind of intense
20:50
Speaker 3: experience just because all the hard work and tears go
20:55
Speaker 3: into it. It was out of our control at that point.
20:57
Speaker 3: The rocket flies autonomously, nobody can do anything. But we
21:01
Speaker 3: needed to get past eighty seconds. So that was the
21:03
Speaker 3: goal of this mission, was to prove the three D
21:06
Speaker 3: print instructures were actually strong enough to serve vibe and flight.
21:10
Speaker 3: That was the very unique technology. My personal goal was
21:14
Speaker 3: to get to space. I think, you know, that was
21:17
Speaker 3: above the company stated goal, but I did really want
21:19
Speaker 3: to get to space on the first flight and have
21:22
Speaker 3: a full first stage you know, successful launch and stage separation.
21:26
Speaker 3: That was really what I wanted. And so, you know,
21:29
Speaker 3: I was watching kind of the live stream. I had
21:32
Speaker 3: my iPhone next to me, but also just watching live
21:35
Speaker 3: but at least on the YouTube live stream. They were
21:38
Speaker 3: calling out different milestones and I was looking for that
21:41
Speaker 3: eighty second mark to really make sure, yes, we did it.
21:46
Speaker 3: So I remember when we passed eighty seconds. You know,
21:50
Speaker 3: of course, everybody started screaming and cheering because that was
21:53
Speaker 3: full mission success by what we were concerned with, and
21:57
Speaker 3: it was still rumbling, it was still definitely visible. It
22:00
Speaker 3: was just like a bright blue streak that went across
22:02
Speaker 3: the sky. But then as we made it to space
22:06
Speaker 3: and then had stage separation, you know that that was
22:10
Speaker 3: for me the moment where I really started celebrating and
22:15
Speaker 3: then what happened? Yeah, So then you know, I was
22:17
Speaker 3: looking at the live stream, it became clear that the
22:21
Speaker 3: second stage engine didn't light. It tried to light, so
22:24
Speaker 3: at first I actually thought it did because there's just
22:27
Speaker 3: some sputtering of flames, but they went out, so it
22:31
Speaker 3: was clear that that second stage didn't light. We weren't
22:33
Speaker 3: going to make it all the way to orbit. So
22:36
Speaker 3: then I went back inside. You know, of course at
22:39
Speaker 3: that point, the team's mood is much more serious, like
22:42
Speaker 3: we're in data collection mode, you know, we're working with
22:46
Speaker 3: the FAA mode to safe everything. Everything there was good.
22:50
Speaker 3: Then I went down into the basement so kind of
22:53
Speaker 3: took over where the live stream recording was, and then
22:57
Speaker 3: just addressed the overall team.
22:59
Speaker 1: And what happens to the rocket when the second stage, Like,
23:03
Speaker 1: does it blow itself up? Does it fall into the sea?
23:05
Speaker 1: What happened?
23:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, it actually just goes and falls in Atlantic Ocean,
23:10
Speaker 3: So it's way out in the middle of the ocean
23:12
Speaker 3: at that point, and then we use satellites later to
23:15
Speaker 3: determine that it, you know, did actually sink. You know,
23:18
Speaker 3: at that point, it's more than ten thousand feet at
23:21
Speaker 3: the bottom of the ocean, so you know, we kind
23:24
Speaker 3: of do all the proper steps to make sure that
23:27
Speaker 3: things are taken care of from a safety perspective.
23:31
Speaker 1: And so you were saying you went and talked to
23:33
Speaker 1: the company.
23:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was ta talk to the company, address everybody,
23:38
Speaker 3: and then from that moment after, I felt like then
23:41
Speaker 3: I was kind of off the hook, you know. So
23:43
Speaker 3: it's definitely very I was very on up until that point,
23:47
Speaker 3: and then at that point I could stop and then
23:50
Speaker 3: just start to let you know what happened sink in.
23:57
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute to discuss the rocket
23:59
Speaker 1: that Tim and his colleagues are working on now. Also Mars.
24:12
Speaker 1: After that test launch, Tim and his colleagues talk to
24:15
Speaker 1: their customers and potential customers basically companies that want to
24:19
Speaker 1: launch satellites, and based on those conversations, they decided to
24:23
Speaker 1: develop a much bigger rocket. The one they're working on
24:26
Speaker 1: now is two hundred and seventy feet tall, which is
24:30
Speaker 1: about as tall as a twenty five story building and
24:33
Speaker 1: more than twice as tall as the rocket they launched
24:35
Speaker 1: last year.
24:36
Speaker 3: So what we're doing for the next three years is
24:38
Speaker 3: building and testing a ton of hardware so we're constantly
24:42
Speaker 3: almost every week doing engine testing, collecting data, using that
24:46
Speaker 3: data to then three D print new versions which slightly
24:49
Speaker 3: tweak the design. This is really the big competitive advantage
24:53
Speaker 3: of printing, as you're able to iterate the design very quickly.
24:57
Speaker 3: So this is really the kind of core principle of
25:01
Speaker 3: development is doing that first at very small component levels
25:06
Speaker 3: and then building up more and more into a full
25:08
Speaker 3: end and then a full rocket stage which would have
25:13
Speaker 3: thirteen engines on it. We'll actually touch that on the
25:15
Speaker 3: ground before flying, and then so at the time of flights,
25:20
Speaker 3: by the time you actually fly the rocket in twenty
25:21
Speaker 3: twenty six, almost every component on the rocket has already
25:25
Speaker 3: gone through several flight like environments for a full duration.
25:30
Speaker 1: And yet like if history is a guide, it still
25:32
Speaker 1: probably won't work, right, Like that's how hard it is.
25:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, reaching orbit on a very first rocket is difficult.
25:40
Speaker 1: Like, it would be very reasonable for you to do
25:43
Speaker 1: all this work for three years and for it not
25:45
Speaker 1: to work the first time, because that's the way it works.
25:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, that wouldn't be a total you know, like Company Ender,
25:51
Speaker 3: for example, we would plan for that. The chrick is
25:54
Speaker 3: how do you make a rocket be successful and not
25:57
Speaker 3: have a government's budget to subsidize it. I mean, so
26:02
Speaker 3: NASA is successful on first launches all the time. You know,
26:05
Speaker 3: the Europeans are national security launch vehicles.
26:09
Speaker 1: Because they spend way more than a private company would
26:12
Speaker 1: ever spend, correct, because they really don't want it to face.
26:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
26:16
Speaker 3: So the trick is how do you get a low
26:18
Speaker 3: cost rocket which is highly reliable to be successful.
26:22
Speaker 1: So it's an interesting like optimization problem at some level
26:26
Speaker 1: of like basically when do you launch, Like, you don't
26:30
Speaker 1: want to launch too late, weirdly, right, you don't want
26:32
Speaker 1: to be too sure it's work because that's probably too expensive.
26:35
Speaker 3: Correct, you have to have a macro view of you know,
26:38
Speaker 3: the overall company. And ultimately, I think this is a
26:41
Speaker 3: pretty interesting lesson learned just in the industry on iteration.
26:45
Speaker 3: So if you look at you know, SpaceX's reliability record
26:49
Speaker 3: for example, is extraordinarily good. But how you get there
26:53
Speaker 3: is a different solution. So traditional aerospace, like you mentioned,
26:58
Speaker 3: needs to get it perfect on the first try.
27:01
Speaker 2: So NASA everybody does.
27:02
Speaker 1: And that's sort of for like governmental political reasons, right,
27:06
Speaker 1: Like they have a sort of different constituency than a
27:08
Speaker 1: private company. They're not optimizing for the kind of exactly well,
27:12
Speaker 1: they're not so cost constrained.
27:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's all true, and optics, you're definitely right, they
27:17
Speaker 3: have a different incentive structure. But what's interesting is if
27:20
Speaker 3: you take an approach that we're doing and other commercial
27:23
Speaker 3: companies do, where you build and test a lot of
27:25
Speaker 3: hardware on the ground before you actually do the flight,
27:28
Speaker 3: and then you practice a lot that actually creates a
27:31
Speaker 3: very robust product.
27:33
Speaker 2: So there is.
27:34
Speaker 3: A kind of study that I refer to a lot
27:38
Speaker 3: internally where a professor divided an art class into two
27:43
Speaker 3: groups that he gave him an hour to make clay pots.
27:46
Speaker 3: One group he said, make as many claypots as he
27:49
Speaker 3: possibly can in an hour. The next group he said,
27:51
Speaker 3: make a perfect clay pot, and so one he said
27:55
Speaker 3: make as many one was a kind of bid for quality.
27:59
Speaker 3: But then at the end of it, what he didn't
28:00
Speaker 3: tell them is he was just going to judge both
28:02
Speaker 3: groups based on quality. So what was interesting is the
28:05
Speaker 3: group that made as many as possible, actually, we're almost
28:08
Speaker 3: always considered higher quality, even though he literally didn't tell
28:12
Speaker 3: them to make something that looked good.
28:14
Speaker 1: Reps. Reps are underrated, reps are underrated. Tell me about Mars.
28:21
Speaker 1: Started out talking about Mars as like the big dream.
28:25
Speaker 1: Tell me more about your dream for Relativity Space and Mars.
28:30
Speaker 3: Well, I really want Relativity to be the company that
28:33
Speaker 3: builds an industrial base on Mars.
28:36
Speaker 1: Meaning like factories to build stuff on Mars as opposed
28:39
Speaker 1: to rockets to go to.
28:40
Speaker 2: Mars exactation too.
28:42
Speaker 3: So I thought, well, somebody's got to build the factory.
28:45
Speaker 3: It has to be small, lightweight, be able to build
28:48
Speaker 3: a wide range of products with very little human labor
28:51
Speaker 3: because people on Mars won't be quite abundant, and so
28:55
Speaker 3: all of those North Star parameters. To find an intelligent
28:58
Speaker 3: three D printing system. So that was where I got
29:01
Speaker 3: to this idea that three D printing has to be
29:03
Speaker 3: a part of building infrastructure on Mars. If it's going
29:06
Speaker 3: to be a self sustaining city andation.
29:10
Speaker 1: What's whatever the first thing a factory like that would make.
29:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I think it's going to start with things
29:17
Speaker 3: like spare parts and things that potentially break on rockets.
29:21
Speaker 3: So I imagine most early missions will actually launch some form
29:26
Speaker 3: of three D printing system really just as a way
29:28
Speaker 3: to make the mission more robust in case something went wrong,
29:33
Speaker 3: Because when you're that far away, you know, you are
29:36
Speaker 3: like nine months away from really getting any extra supplies.
29:40
Speaker 1: And is the advantage of three D printing there that like,
29:44
Speaker 1: ideally you can basically have one three D printer that
29:48
Speaker 1: can make a very wide range of parts as opposed
29:52
Speaker 1: to traditional manufacturing where kind of you need one machine
29:55
Speaker 1: to make one part and it can't make any other
29:57
Speaker 1: part yep, more or less yep exactly.
29:59
Speaker 3: So you can pre you don't need as much pre planning,
30:02
Speaker 3: and there's a lot more flexibility for what you can build.
30:04
Speaker 1: So it's a rocket spare parts factory. Yeah, it's basically
30:08
Speaker 1: the first I.
30:08
Speaker 3: Think that's the very first thing that's likely. And we
30:11
Speaker 3: actually have a relativity a mission that we have a
30:14
Speaker 3: partnership with the co founder and former CTO of SpaceX,
30:18
Speaker 3: this guy Tom Mueller. He started his own company. We're
30:21
Speaker 3: actually planning to launch payload to Mars with with his companies.
30:26
Speaker 3: We have multiple launch windows through twenty twenty nine to
30:30
Speaker 3: be able to do it with them.
30:31
Speaker 1: And that wait, just to be clear, you're providing the
30:34
Speaker 1: rocket and he's providing the payload.
30:35
Speaker 3: Yes, we're providing the rocket, he's providing the Mars transfer vehicle.
30:39
Speaker 3: The reentry vehicle and the lander. But I do think,
30:43
Speaker 3: you know, we haven't announced what the payload to will
30:45
Speaker 3: officially be yet. I personally think it would be very
30:48
Speaker 3: cool to send some sort of three D printer.
30:50
Speaker 2: I think that's probably expected.
30:53
Speaker 3: But why that's cool is that would actually be the
30:54
Speaker 3: first object ever manufactured by a human being off planet.
30:59
Speaker 3: And I do think that just starting to show we
31:03
Speaker 3: can build things is a really big part of taking
31:09
Speaker 3: first step, so to speak, towards one day having a
31:12
Speaker 3: robust civilization.
31:16
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the Lightning round. Okay,
31:29
Speaker 1: last thing to do is the Lightning Round, which is
31:33
Speaker 1: just a bunch of fast questions. So in high school,
31:38
Speaker 1: I've heard you say that you wanted to be a
31:39
Speaker 1: writer and that you actually wrote a couple of novels.
31:41
Speaker 1: So I'm curious, what's your favorite novel?
31:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. The novel that brought me to
31:47
Speaker 3: Los Angeles is a book by Brady ston ellis called
31:50
Speaker 3: Less than Zero No Relation to My.
31:52
Speaker 1: Amazing that that made you want to go to law sex.
31:55
Speaker 2: I know it is actually amazing.
31:58
Speaker 1: What's one thing you think everybody should know about how
32:01
Speaker 1: rockets work?
32:04
Speaker 2: You know? Okay, this is an interesting one.
32:06
Speaker 3: So I think there's a lot of focus on the
32:08
Speaker 3: rocket in you know, the tube, the structure you can see.
32:12
Speaker 3: I think what actually makes rockets hard is actually a
32:14
Speaker 3: lot of the ancillary systems, so pressure. You know, rockets
32:18
Speaker 3: need to be pressurized, they need to be filled, drained
32:21
Speaker 3: safe successfully. There's different systems you need to start them
32:25
Speaker 3: up to shut them down. It is the kind of
32:29
Speaker 3: details and the non sexy systems that are you know,
32:33
Speaker 3: firing fire that actually get a lot of conversation time
32:38
Speaker 3: internally because that's what can make a good rocket versus
32:41
Speaker 3: one that doesn't work.
32:42
Speaker 1: What's the over under on what year you think you'll
32:45
Speaker 1: go to space?
32:48
Speaker 2: What your I go to space? I think I hope.
32:52
Speaker 3: I hope by twenty thirty. I think that would be
32:55
Speaker 3: pretty pretty soon.
32:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty soon.
32:58
Speaker 3: That's going seven years. Yeah, it depends on suborbital versus orbital. Yeah,
33:04
Speaker 3: I think in the next seven years going suborbitally would
33:07
Speaker 3: be would be possible, definitely.
33:09
Speaker 2: Yeah.
33:10
Speaker 1: You think it will get cheaper or you think you'll
33:12
Speaker 1: be able to do it because you own a rocket company.
33:15
Speaker 2: I think it will get cheaper.
33:17
Speaker 3: I certainly hope it'll get cheaper because I know how
33:19
Speaker 3: much it is now, and it's a it's not the
33:21
Speaker 3: advertised price.
33:22
Speaker 2: It's expensive.
33:23
Speaker 1: Was it scary to leave Jeff Bezos Rocket Company, to
33:27
Speaker 1: leave Blue Origin in order to create a new company
33:31
Speaker 1: that would then compete against Jeff Bezos Rocket Company?
33:35
Speaker 3: Well competing it's Jeff is you know, he's a He's
33:40
Speaker 3: a capable guy. I think Elon maybe more crazy, more
33:45
Speaker 3: irrational from a competitive standpoint, But now I was inspired.
33:50
Speaker 3: I think at the time I was twenty five, my
33:52
Speaker 3: co founder was twenty two. I felt we had very
33:55
Speaker 3: little to lose by trying. I think in hindsight, I
33:57
Speaker 3: realized just how young, spunky, kind of naive.
34:01
Speaker 2: Maybe we worry about the challenges.
34:03
Speaker 3: I can definitely tell you it's been way harder than
34:04
Speaker 3: I ever expected to get to this point.
34:07
Speaker 1: Maybe necessarily naive, maybe usefully naive.
34:10
Speaker 3: Oh, definitely an usefully naive. I think that was a
34:12
Speaker 3: big benefit.
34:13
Speaker 1: What's one thing that would surprise me about Jeff Bezos.
34:18
Speaker 2: I think Jeff.
34:21
Speaker 3: Really when Yeah, he is actually really patient. So whether
34:28
Speaker 3: it was you know, when his vision of Blue Origin
34:33
Speaker 3: with people living and working in space and industrializing kind
34:36
Speaker 3: of orbid offer.
34:37
Speaker 2: I thought that was the vision, and that.
34:40
Speaker 3: He was willing to do it in a way where
34:42
Speaker 3: even if he doesn't see it in his lifetime, he
34:45
Speaker 3: doesn't care. That he doesn't care to a degree that
34:49
Speaker 3: just felt very unusual to me.
34:54
Speaker 1: Interesting. I mean, you don't think of Jeff Bezos and think, oh, yeah,
34:58
Speaker 1: that that guy is super patient.
35:00
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly, but but no, he really is, Yeah, he
35:05
Speaker 3: really is.
35:07
Speaker 1: What do you think? What do you think of the
35:09
Speaker 1: chances you'll go to Mars before you die?
35:12
Speaker 3: I have this vision of myself being very old and
35:19
Speaker 3: sitting in kind of a beach chair with a beer
35:23
Speaker 3: under some sort of biodome on Mars, and that being
35:27
Speaker 3: you know where I kick it during the retirement I guess, kind.
35:32
Speaker 1: Of like Arizona, but farther.
35:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know, under a big glass dome exactly
35:37
Speaker 3: that kind of thing. So, you know, I do have
35:40
Speaker 3: this vision of being there, but I would go towards
35:43
Speaker 3: the end of my life. I think it'd be a
35:45
Speaker 3: cool I mean, could you imagine a crazier end cap
35:48
Speaker 3: to to your whole life by just being on Mars,
35:52
Speaker 3: especially since that's something I'm dedicating my life to make
35:55
Speaker 3: happen now with relativity, I think that'd be you know,
35:58
Speaker 3: pretty pretty cool ending.
36:05
Speaker 1: Tim Ellis is the co founder and CEO of Relativity Space.
36:09
Speaker 1: Today's show was produced by Edith Russlo and Gabriel Hunter Chang.
36:13
Speaker 1: It was edited by Lydia Jean Kott and engineered by
36:16
Speaker 1: Sarah Bruguer. You can email us at problem at pushkin
36:20
Speaker 1: dot fm, and please do email us. I try and
36:23
Speaker 1: read all the emails. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be
36:26
Speaker 1: back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.