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