
Relativity Space raises $35M for a new process to build and fly rockets - timellis
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/that-3d-printed-rocket-company-just-got-35-million-in-private-financing/
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njarboe
I thought at first the fact that reuseablity is not mentioned as one of their
goals was a big problem with their business plan. If the Falcon 9 Block 5
really becomes highly reusable, according to Elon Musk's criteria, SpaceX will
be able to scale up launch rates and scale down prices that, by the time this
rocket is available (2021 stated, delays likely), it won't be able to compete
on price. I was thinking, "The more people working on different rockets the
better. Hope it works out for them in that niche."

But going to their website[1] this launch market does not seem to be the
company's main focus. They want to develop the technology to build currently
very complicated objects with two orders of magnitude lower parts count. This
is desired so that the products can be more easily built on Mars. I can see
that as a long term profitable outcome with applications on Earth along the
way.

From their mission statement[2]:

In the early days of settlement, there will be few people living on Mars.
Intelligent automation and lightweight, compact 3D printing are fundamental
technologies needed to quickly build a new society with scarce resources - and
the most scalable means to get back home.

An ambitious goal (with an incongruous phrase tacked on the end??).

[1][https://www.relativityspace.com/home](https://www.relativityspace.com/home)
[2][https://www.relativityspace.com/mission/](https://www.relativityspace.com/mission/)

~~~
gnode
With relatively cheap transport to Mars (due to reusable launch), I don't see
why building rockets there would make more sense than bringing them from
Earth, i.e. returning them to Earth.

Furthermore, to develop rockets on Mars you'd also need a substantial
supporting industry (metallurgy, testing, etc.).

~~~
njarboe
I would guess the goal is a self-sustaining civilization on Mars, a la Musk.
People there will want to build as many things locally as they can. Ground
transportation, energy sources, habitats, rockets, etc. Most of the parameters
of Mars can be simulated on Earth but there is a big one that can't be
simulated: 1/3 gravity. Iterating development on Mars for Mars will have large
advantages over building things on Earth for Mars, long shipment to Mars,
testing on Mars, build next version on Earth, ship to Mars, etc. Plus
simulated Mars environments will not be perfect. With this tech they are
hoping to drop the need for supporting industry for making stuff
substantially.

~~~
Retric
With current tech we might get a self sustaining Mars population at ~100
million people. But, at that point you don't need rockets so it's not solving
any real issues.

It's getting to that 100 million population with supporting infrastructure to
build things like CPU's that's the problem. Not simply building rocket engines
which would be relatively easy and relatively cheap to ship.

~~~
Ancalagon
Where the heck did you get 100 million? By all accounts I've seen it should be
far less than that.

~~~
Retric
I saw it based on back of an envelope calculation. The problem is for every
worker in a modern society you need X people to support them. Directly as in
children to replace them, old people that used to be them, fractions of people
to educate their replacement, doctors to keep everyone healthy etc.

Add to that police, a justice system, politicians and lawyers. Not just
miners, farmers, plumbers, researchers, and architects. Basically, everyone
needed to make every individual component physical and social of society, plus
all the people to support them and support the people that support them. And
beyond that people to support children born with physical and mental
handicaps.

PS: In the very short term you can get away with an unbalanced population and
hyper educated generalists, but that means an inherent dependency on Earth.
AKA you need to build a society supportable by average people not just select
highly educated, healthy, high IQ, elite. Further, this also removes things
like entertainers.

PPS: Now if you want some form of Science fiction dystopia where less
productive people are pushed out of an airlock then the numbers do shrink
somewhat. But, that's going to make recruitment a lot harder.

~~~
nostrademons
Something I've often wondered: could you recreate a civilization that vaguely
approximates modern society "from scratch" with dramatically fewer people by
focusing only on those technologies & institutions that are most important? In
other words, if society had a nuclear holocaust next year but several highly-
educated people survived and they managed to keep a complete readable copy of
society's collected knowledge, could they build an advanced technological
society with < 1M people?

I'm reminded of software rewrite efforts. Big software projects never get
designed from scratch and implemented, they evolve by accretion. Somebody
builds something halfway useful, they get capital (or volunteers) to help
improve it, and eventually you've organized the planet's information and made
it universally accessible and useful. In the process you acquire a shitload of
technical debt so that it becomes very difficult to understand or change the
lowest levels of the system.

Trying to rewrite large software projects with bug-for-bug compatibility and
feature completeness always fails. You run into the same issues as trying to
build a complex system from scratch.

But trying to rewrite a large software system _where you 're allowed to move
the goalposts and sacrifice feature completeness_ often results in a system
with an order of magnitude less code that's simpler for the majority of users
as well. You get to prune out all the features you thought would be useful but
turn out to be more trouble than they're worth, and you can often take simpler
paths once you know where you're going.

Are there similar shortcuts available for human society? For example, could
you race from farming villages to electricity by building wooden windwills
that turn dynamos of simple copper wire loops? What would that change in how
we approach industrialization, if you could start building machines without
needing the labor of thousands of people and their supporting society? Are
there similar shortcuts for semiconductors & integrated circuits, or do you
really need the full might of a modern industrial society before you even have
the raw materials?

~~~
Retric
On earth you can skip a great many things as you get air and water effectively
for free. This means you need a lot less redundancy not just in personnel, but
also how quickly you need to respond in an emergency. Further, people are
going to be vastly more productive with fewer people devoted to food
production.

The downsides are things like pest control becoming more important. On mars
you can avoid pesticides by either not bringing them or killing them off by
dropping the air pressure in a field to effectively zero and or dropping the
temperature to -100C.

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ryanmarsh
From a purely pedestrian point of view the hype video[0] on their site got me
really excited. Challenges aside it blows my mind that humanity is doing
research and prototypes like this today. I'm excited about the future again.

0: [https://vimeo.com/260505466](https://vimeo.com/260505466)

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madengr
Engine parts I can see, but is there some inherent advantage to 3D printing
the vehicle parts? Seems more hype.

~~~
Gravityloss
AFAIK one can't get something that competes with high strength carbon fiber
tanks made in a 3D printer. You need continuous long fiber placement, the
opposite of "a little material here and there" 3D printing.

Now, printing might work for some other materials than carbon with similar or
even higher strength to weight ratio. But AFAIK unproven so far. Would be a
whole separate science project with lots of other applications than rockets.

Also, looks like the engine had some machining work done, maybe after the
laser sintering aka 3D printing part, since the surface was smooth and shiny.

~~~
gnode
Large carbon fibre tanks are arguably 3D printed. They're made with a CNC
machine that winds carbon fibre tow onto the tank.

A larger challenge would probably be to cheaply produce the raw carbon fibre
on Mars.

~~~
Gravityloss
That's a winding machine, not a 3D printer.

But yes, if that's what's meant, it's completely a no brainer. Nobody's hand
winding tanks or airliner fuselages.

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erdle
Are there any environmental impacts re rocket launches?

~~~
monochromatic
They perturb earth’s orbit in a way that will become evident in a million or
so years.

~~~
marcosdumay
The Earth has 5e24 kg. A 1e4kg rocket going at 7e3m/s is going to cause
something around 1e-17m/s change in velocity. And that's considering that
Earth receive all the momentum from the rocket's exhaust, what isn't true.

You'll need way too many rockets to cause an even measurable change on Earth's
orbit in a million years. Try changing it to a few billions.

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cryptoz
Interesting news. All this newspace startup competition in the rocket launch
industry is huge.

One concern:

> The Terran booster will hit what the company believes is a sweet spot
> between smaller rockets under development by Rocket Lab (and others) and the
> much larger Falcon 9 built by SpaceX.

The market is moving very quickly right now. I'm not sure the Falcon 9 will
even be flying by the time this launches. Maybe that will mean more
opportunity for them, it is hard to say. But it seems to me that all these
small-rocket companies are banking on one specific idea: that the convenience
or dedicated customer service they provide will exceed the pros of going with
a more established low-cost provider like SpaceX. With BFR flying regularly in
the same timeframe as this rocket gets its first launch, their only hope is
that customers will not want to ride along as a 90th payload in a BFR but will
want a dedicated ride themselves.

Or perhaps I am being close minded, perhaps the market will grow sufficiently
such that SpaceX will not even be able to suck up all the new launches and new
demand, and the small-rocket companies will thrive.

I just don't want to see them left in the dust. A $10M price tag is incredible
(I mean, wow, that's low! for a dedicated launch!). But will that be the
expensive option by the time their rocket is ready for use?

Two concerns, it turns out. Will these rockets be reusable? I'm guessing not,
since the article didn't mention it and these days in the rocket world, if
you're not reusable, then who cares? You _will_ be left in the dust.

Edit: Wait a minute. I just went to their website. It says nothing about
reusability either. But it exclaims how great it would be to build and fly
rockets in days instead of years. Are they very specifically making a
disposable rocket? If so, fuck this company and fuck everything about it. It's
not the way of the future to build large objects and throw them away. It's
evil in fact, to research something like this in the modern era with an
attitude of 'fuck you' to the materials' sources where they are mined from the
Earth.

I'll hold off on an actual opinion until I know more. But I sure hope Y
Combinator didn't invest in a fake-new-space-actually-oldspace company. I hope
this is better than it looks because it looks awful.

Edit 2: What does the success case of this startup look like? Will they ever
research reusability? Or are they aiming to make 1,000 _new_ rockets per year?
That's the success case based on the financials (=$10B revenue/year) and it
sounds gross. Without reusable rockets that whole thing is extremely wasteful.

The efficiencies of 3D printing things quickly are not correctly accounted for
in the loss that the planet takes due to increased mining and wasteful dumping
that would have to occur (and which the investors and company do not pay for).

~~~
tlb
One extra efficiency to keep in mind: the rocket can be custom-made for each
launch to exactly the right size for the payload. If you only have a few
standard rocket sizes, launching small payloads is wasteful unless you can
bundle them together, which means they have to be on the same orbit (or else
carry extra fuel in the satellite to shift orbits).

The metal in a rocket isn't the most expensive part (it has to be well under
5% the weight of fuel). The expensive part is fabrication. So reusability is
important iff fabrication is expensive. Reusability also requires adding extra
launch weight for landing fuel and struts and guidance fins.

So it's too early to conclude that reusability is mandatory. For heavy
repeated lifts to a standard orbit, maybe. For small lifts to custom orbits,
maybe not. It all depends on the costs of fabrication.

~~~
Robotbeat
There's the rub: 3D printing is actually more expensive for fabrication than
conventional manufacturing if you're making dozens of things, and if you're
making hundreds, it's painfully obvious that conventional manufacturing is
cheaper.

3D printing buys you faster iteration and design freedom. It's also convenient
for making a regeneratively cooled rocket engine (which makes reusable launch
easier, by the way!).

Making a rocket a little bit bigger to enable reuse is not actually that
expensive. Costs don't scale linearly with rocket payload, so making it larger
has a smaller marginal cost than you might think. Besides, now you ALSO have a
larger rocket that you can fly in expendable mode if you need to.

So if anything, 3D printing allows you to do reuse, as it allows you to still
afford making a small number of vehicles per year with similar per-unit
fabrication costs as if you were making a large number. But because each
airframe can be used multiple times, you can do just as many flights per year
as if you invested in a large conventional tooling capability but at a much
lower cost.

The near-utter-lack of reusable smallsat launchers is baffling to me.
Especially now that reuse is effectively proven.

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baybal2
Well, they do that 3D printing thing. I do not believe this delivering much of
economic gain.

~~~
nugi
It would seem that way from a casual glance, but rocket piping is quite
complex, and currently assembled from hundreds or thousands of segments. Being
able to print such assemblies will permit faster, lighter production, and
production of shapes currently infeasible to cast/assemble. It could be
dramatic, or slight. The key will likely be implementing a scaling strategy
and qc.

~~~
baybal2
See, an R7 family launch vehicles - complete dinosaurs. Both complex, and
lengthy to assemble, in addition to having monstrously complex launch
sequence. What you say about that is totally true.

But there is a big BUT - being complex does not preclude them being produced
like sausages with big enough manufacturing complex, big and competent labour
force, and very good rigid procedures perfected over 60 years.

In comparison to the cost of the whole space program, launch vehicle costs are
almost microscopic.

Every rocket is a project, not a product.

Every rocket launch is not a service, it is also effectively a project.

And it was an achievement of the crippled post-Soviet space industry in making
launch vehicles and launches more close to being a product and a service.
Prior to that, a commercial satellite launch was hard to do without spending
an eternity doing talkshops with likes of Boeing, Lockheed or French
government. When ex-Soviet rockets popped up on the market, procuring a
satellite launch service turned, figuratively, into a grocery shopping.

~~~
gnode
> produced like sausages

I think the trend may well go in the other direction, and become more like
shipbuilding. Due to reusability, we can afford to make costlier rockets, as
they're useful for many launches. This may for instance mean the use of
relatively expensive composite materials, such as in the BFR, which
prioritises fuel cost above unit cost. Also, the efficiency of rockets
generally increases with size.

~~~
Robotbeat
Honestly, large-scale composites are actually cheaper per unit dry mass than
metal 3D printed parts. Composites may be more finicky, but they're not
necessarily more expensive in aerospace!

Carbon fiber composites are more expensive than stamped metal parts like
automobile bodies, but if you're talking CNC machined or 3D printed metal
parts, then carbon fiber can indeed be cheaper.

