Main Engine Cut Off - T+154: Tim Ellis, CEO and Cofounder of Relativity

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

Tim Ellis, CEO and Cofounder of Relativity joins me for an in-depth discussion about Relativity’s status and work towards their first launch. We cover everything from their company vision, funding, new headquarters, wider fairing, customer backlog, potential west coast launch site, and dive into the details of Stargate and Relativity’s materials work.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 37 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous—and 354 other supporters.TopicsRelativity SpaceTerran — Relativity SpaceStargate — Relativity SpaceRelativity Space (@relativityspace) / TwitterTim Ellis (@thetimellis) / TwitterRelativity Space raises $140 million - SpaceNews.comRelativity to move headquarters to Long Beach - SpaceNews.comRelativity Space on Twitter: “Good afternoon from Los Angeles - this is our Stage 2 Iron Bird, which will be the first additively manufactured tank to feed propellants to a rocket engine.”Relativity Space has big dreams. Is the company for real? | Ars TechnicaRelativity Signs Telesat, Eyes Polar Launch Site - Main Engine Cut OffThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and I'm really excited for today's show. We have with us Tim Ellis, the CEO and co-founder of Relativity. They're one of the most exciting launch companies out there today. They've been working on a really groundbreaking idea, which is to 3D print nearly an entire rocket and hopefully one day an entire rocket, fully automated production. And they're really focusing on a different tactic

than many other companies out there. There's a lot of companies that are saying, let's do the simplest manufacturing that gets us to launch. And lot of companies that are saying, let's do the simplest manufacturing that gets us to launch. And Relativity and Tim are saying, let's change the way that we manufacture things. So I'm really excited to talk to him about that strategy overall, because it's just something that is really interesting to think about

and definitely sets them apart from the competition. They're in the category of small launchers that can launch about one ton to orbit. They're one of the few that has a launch site out at Cape Canaveral. They've taken over Launch Complex 16 out at the Cape, so we'll talk about that, I'm sure. And right now, they say that they're going to be launching in 2021. So we'll be talking about launch operations, manufacturing, and a whole bunch of stuff with Tim. So without further ado, let's give him a call. All right, Tim, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me here on Main Engine Cutoff. Yeah, excited to be here. It's a weird time right now, so we probably should

acknowledge up front the midst of the pandemic that we're in. You are in an interesting spot in that your whole company is focused on autonomous production, really. So I'm curious if you, you know, from talking to others in the industry, if you feel like Relativity is set up particularly well at this moment in time, or if it's, you know, still been a tough adjustment anyway. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, Relativity, of course, is 3D printing rockets. So we've designed our own launch vehicle. We also built the 3D printers and factory. designed our own launch vehicle. We also built the 3D printers and factory. But we've actually been largely working from home. We were pretty proactive about it here in Los Angeles around March 6th or so is when we started recommending work from home well before the stay at home

orders happened. And then we sent a lot of people home, but we're still actually printing. So with the 3D printers that we have building second stage sections, and then also the first stage section, we actually only have one person that's operating several printers that have been printing this whole time. So that definitely demonstrates how we can make progress remotely and use some of that automation with 3D printing, which is, by the way, an unintended use case. Pandemic planning was not part of your initial, you know, outset of your architecture. No, no, exactly. So that brings me to the question I really have always wanted to ask. I've been, you've been on

my list for this show for a long time. And there's one question that I think gets at the nut of relativity. It's this. Do you see yourself as a launch services company who currently produces vehicles by 3D printing or the inverse? Are you a 3D printing company who currently is focused on launch services? Yeah, that's a great question. It really has evolved as we've seen how the technology works and as we've had success with it. So my background, I worked at Blue Origin previously. My co-founder worked at SpaceX. So we had this idea to 3D print a whole rocket.

I felt like it was the future of manufacturing for rockets, not just on Earth, but Relativity's long-term vision is to 3D print infrastructure on Mars. So it was very important for building a multi-planetary species. But then for our strategy, we wanted to make sure, and what I saw is that building the factory and building the product itself was critically important because the factory that we're building is so different than what traditionally exists.

I mean, we're 3D printing 95% of a rocket. That's a huge percentage. And so we have to reinvent not just the 3D printing technology, but how do you design it? How do you build it? What's the supply chain look like? How do I would call an application layer 3D printing company, where the rocket is the first application. So Terran 1 is the first application of this factory that we're building. And there's other potential growth in the launch vehicle space, as well, the rest of the aerospace industry that I believe can be disrupted by this technology. So when you were starting out, was the focus on Terran 1 launch services, that kind of thing, was that, you know, your initial guess at what would be a good fit for what you had

in mind with Relativity? But was there ever any discussion that if you hit significant snags, if there was a major incompatibility between what you've developed at Stargate and launch services, that you would pivot to something else, a different product, but using the same production method? Or were you pretty set on launch services from the get-go? Yeah, we were 100% set on launch services from the get-go. So even going back, we started the company very late December 2015 and did a program called Y Combinator, which is a Silicon Valley startup accelerator. So even going back, reading our application that we submitted to get into that, everything was about Terran 1 and launch services. So we really felt that there was a big opportunity in the small launch space. Four or five years ago, there weren't that many small satellite launch companies like there are today.

So it was really Rocket Lab and we saw them being successful and felt like there was more opportunity in that market. So even our initial launch vehicle was only 300 kilograms to orbit when we started the company. So now we're at 1250. So we've increased a huge amount as we've seen market opportunities shift. But other than that, it's really remained true to the original vision that we're a launch services company. But in order to build that launch vehicle, we had to build the factory too. In order to build that launch vehicle, we had to build the factory too. Certainly, investors have all understood the value that once we can build a launch vehicle, we can, using the exact same factory, build all sorts of other things. But everyone's really on board for the launch itself.

So you mentioned it there that you originally started out thinking much smaller payload mass. What was it that drove that growth? You mentioned seeing the market itself develop. Is it the fact that there does seem to be this gap at the one ton to orbit range? There's a couple of other companies, Firefly, ABL, that are working at that range. But generally, you see SpaceX and Blue targeting much larger, Rocket Lab and others targeting much lower. Why is it the sweet spot that you've settled in on here? Yeah, sure. So we, you know, because of 3D printing, we were able to iterate the design without, you know, throwing away our entire factory and throwing away, you know, a lot of our designs. So increasing the stage diameter,

even as recently as last year, we increased the payload fairing diameter from two meter to three meter. And that was driven by a specific customer that needed the bigger volume. So this payload size we're at, it's large enough to do some pretty seriously sized satellites. I mean, it's much more competitive directly with Vega and PSLV, which are quite a bit larger launch vehicles than most of the other smaller satellite launch vehicles. And it can just do some pretty large payloads, both for LEO. We actually have payload capacity to geosynchronous orbits when working with Momentus, which is one of our customers. And so there's just a lot different range of orbits that we can get to because of the larger payload size too.

The fairing itself, that was an interesting increase. I feel like there is a trend that some of the newer rockets tend to be volume limited before they're mass limited. We're seeing that with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. They're pushing to a larger fairing. Is this newer, widened fairing the maximum that Terran 1 could support, or could you do a lengthened fairing beyond that if the need was proven out? I mean, yeah, we definitely could do a lengthened fairing. So not only do we have the printing tools for the actual manufacturing, but we're working on a ton of custom internal software tools on the design side that all link together and share data, both from our testing, but then also the guidance navigation control systems, how we actually do the dynamic modeling and, you know, acoustic modeling, all of that really feeds into one

software platform that we call Nova. And that is really important for even being able to redesign the rocket very, very quickly and run custom scenarios, you know, do Monte Carlos on different designs. And those are the kind of things that printing enables. Now we can actually go change that stuff rapidly and have either more customization for customers if they're required and need enough launches that it makes sense. But then also we can tweak just little parts about the design much closer to launch,

which provides flexibility that really just wasn't possible before for actually getting a satellite to mate with a rocket successfully and have all the dynamic modes work well together for what they're looking for. So are you talking specifically there about the meeting of the vehicle to the satellite and the payload, or is there actual changes that would occur to the vehicle itself, either lengthened tankage or anything different like that? I'm kind of unsure. I'm sure either are possible, but one sounds a lot easier to achieve than the other. Yeah, well, it depends.

So for a specific customer, like a good example is, you know, inside of our tank, there are different stiffeners and things that help prevent buckling in the actual launch itself. So depending on what the mass of the satellite is and what the configuration of the payloads are, those stiffeners can end up influencing some of the vibration frequencies. And it's called environments and loads that the payload sees. And so we're actually able to change some of those internal stiffening structures if they cause potential issues in compatibility with the satellite. So that's something we can do mission to mission and still achieve our actual goals of getting

the payload to orbit successfully. But then on the second part, our target once once we're fully operational, is to be able to build a rocket from raw material coming in the factory door to fully complete in 60 days, which is extremely fast. And the advantage of printing is that not only could we build a rocket in 60 days, but then 60 days later, we could do a better version. And 60 days later, a better version than that. So we really see 3D printing as this kind of hyper-evolvable way for us to improve the product very rapidly. And not only that, but each sort of successive improvement and iteration of the

vehicle itself, you know, making it lighter weights or more optimized or fewer part counts, making it lighter weights or more optimized or fewer part counts all reduces mass, which can increase payload to orbit as well as we keep iterating. And then that also lowers cost. In many ways, because it weighs less, we can actually print it faster because a lot of 3D printing is just how many pounds per hour are your printers able to generate. And so actually using stronger materials and more optimized structures over time, there's actually incentives to do that, where traditionally making something out of titanium or Inconel instead of aluminum would be a lot more expensive. Man, you're hitting like every topic that I've got on this list.

So I'm like, oh no, which question do I go to next? Focusing on just finishing off on the tooling change or the lack of tooling change, I guess, to change the vehicle itself. What does the qualification phase look like for those specific changes? Are you set up to run different testing or validate those changes that wouldn't have knock-on side effects that you didn't expect? Or is it the changes that you're doing, are they kind of minor enough that it makes the ride nicer for the payload, but it doesn't change the actual flight mechanics overall?

Yeah, sure. So really the vision is we want to get to what's called qualification by similarity. to what's called qualification by similarity. So that's really where you can buy a simulation and developing your internal CFD and structural analysis and thermal analysis tools that you get good confidence that whatever changes you make within, not huge changes, but there's kind of iterative changes, then you don't have to do a re-qualification of that particular piece. Now, initially, we are definitely going to test every single piece. So we're working on building up a combined pressure and thrust and structural testing, including with cryogenics. And so we'll actually have, you know, first stage structures and second stage structures that we do bending and pressure testing with cryogenics all put together.

So that really ensures that the 3D printed primary fuselage structures, you know, function properly and that we qualify those on the ground before we actually install the engines and then go launch. Now, you mentioned you're targeting about 95% automated printing assembly of the rocket itself. There's obviously some sort of final manual assembly required here. I would love a breakdown of, you know, you mentioned you're printing the second stage tanks. I've seen some photos on Twitter of that. You're doing the first stage like that, I assume as well. Can you just give us a breakdown of each component that is printed and then how those are put together to create the full vehicle? Yeah, sure. Of course. So just starting with the primary structure, so the payload fairing, the whole second stage with common dome, downcomer, all is one piece for the second stage tank the inner stage and then

all of the first stage including you know the we're using liquid oxygen and liquid methane and then the thrust structure so all of those are printed using stargate which is our large robotic 3d printer if people are familiar with it we developed that fully in-house. So it's the largest metal 3D printer in the world that we're aware of. And that's all printed using a custom proprietary aluminum alloy that we actually developed. So every single piece of that, we're not using carbon composites or different alloys. We're using this custom one. And that really simplifies the supply chain significantly because we only have that one raw material for all of those major structural parts.

And then going to what's called powder bed metal printing, where we're building some of the smaller, more detailed components. That's the engine injector, the combustion chamber, nozzle, the combustion chamber, nozzle, all regeneratively cooled, the igniter, the thrust structure for the engine. All the turbopump components are also 3D printed. And we've been testing those quite actively down at SEMIS Space Center. Valve housings, even the propellant feed lines, you know, we're printing. So we're able to do things like manifolding a lot of connections together so that, you know, lots of different valves can connect just through a very few number of printed manifold parts, which really reduces the part count on the engine. So pretty much of the 95%, I mean, the 5% is almost all electronics. Of the 95%, I mean, the 5% is almost all electronics. So we're not 3D printing any of the avionics or harnessing our sensors right now.

And there's not really plans to do that in the near future. But then also turbopump bearings and seals. So some of the moving components have to be a little higher tolerance than printing can withstand. But otherwise, yeah, really the whole rocket is pretty much three raw metals, actually. So the aluminum alloy, high temperature stainless steel for the engine and everything else, and then an exotic alloy for the second stage vacuum nozzle. And that's pretty much it. So it's very simple from a supply chain and process standpoint. And then the assembly that takes place after that, is that primarily humans doing it? Or is there some sort of automation that you've got for different

components there? Yeah, so it is humans. Yeah, and that we really took, you know, a lesson from other companies looking to do extreme amounts of robotic automation. It was interesting. So really, because of printing, you know, we really view printing as an automation process. And in many ways, you know, take our engine injector, for example. So looking at it traditionally, we've estimated that that single component would probably have been many hundreds of individual pieces all assembled together. And so when we print it, that's one piece. So in many ways, that's automating, shipping this thing out to dozens of different suppliers and different manual supply steps, assembling that all together,

all the logistics, the checkouts for quality assurance that you have to do at each of those steps. And so we're automating all of that away by printing it as one piece. And so when you do that, our whole rocket, the target is to have under a thousand components versus a rocket of this size, we estimate would normally have about a hundred thousand. So, you know, having a hundred times fewer parts means manual assembly is also a lot less work because there's just a lot less stuff to test and qualify. And since we're using fewer manufacturing technologies, there's also fewer things we have to be expert in. And we've just designed the product around this and these limitations. So there's lots of creative things

on the actual design that let us use just those three materials and make everything very simple from the manufacturing standpoint. Now, those three materials themselves, you mentioned one is for the upper stage nozzle, which is, you know, those are always a little bit nutty. But the other two, specifically the aluminum alloy and the stainless steel, how did you settle in on those materials for their different use cases? And I assume there was a bunch of other ones that you've tried and tossed out or, you know, theoretically tried and then threw out in your mind before it hit physical world. What was that process like to settle in on the alloys that you're using? Yeah, so we do have, I mean, right now Relativity is about 150 people. We have an in-house material science team.

So it was one of the first teams we created when we started the company. And yes, we've been looking at metal alloys for a while. It is, you know, I can't go into too much detail. It's a weird alloy for sure with the aluminum. So there's lots of things that we've done that customized that alloy for the 3D printing process that we're also developing in-house. So they actually work hand-in-hand together. And there's been, you know, different alloy formulation changes as we've evolved to the 3D printing process itself too. So I think, you know, with our own in-house

printing technology with Stargate, I mean, we've done well over a dozen iterations of what that fundamental printing tech looks like. So, you know, not only have we been iterating the rocket design, but we've been iterating the printer architecture, both as far as the size of what we can print, but then adding lots of features like automatic flaw detection and correction, making sure the quality gets better and better over time. Different things that make the material strength and material properties, you know, extremely repeatable and validated as we're actually printing. And so all of that we've been able to develop just because we're actually owning the whole process. company or a rocket company. What I believe is that since we're actually building our own product and the factory underneath it, we're our own customer. We don't have to convince anybody to use 3D printing. And what I really saw more broadly for the 3D printing industry is the

challenges when you're selling a printer or selling print services, there's a lot of customer adoption friction because you have to convince somebody else to use this totally new technology that looks like you're just selling them a machine, but you're really selling them a change in philosophy. It's a new design process. It's a new analysis process. What 3D printed products look like is entirely different. And so there's actually quite a lot of adoption friction for doing that. And so in our case, having a launch vehicle where we're still putting satellites on top and launching them to orbit as launch services, there's really no change in the customer interface. And by owning the whole process, it's more like what you see with Tesla, where no one

buys the gigafactory or the battery technology itself or any of the electric motor breakthroughs or manufacturing breakthroughs. They really just buy a Roadster and then a Model S and then a Model 3. just buy a Roadster and then a Model S and then a Model 3. And that's very similar to how we view the business evolution of what we're going for. Now, you said that there's these Stargates that you're producing yourself. So this is a whole other side of the company that is going to iterate alongside the vehicle. So how do you kind of balance the changes that are going on to Stargates and the changes that are going on with the vehicles? As you get better at Stargates, are you going to rethink pieces of the vehicle?

And what is that interplay like between the two parts of the company? Yeah, good question. So we have, you know, of the 150 people, I think about 40 people are just developing the 3D printer. So it is a really big effort internally. That's a good question. I mean, it's been one of the things that, you know, we've learned a lot about is, you know, we're simultaneously trying to build a rocket in this new printing technology. And that really required us to build a team that hadn't existed before. I mean, we've got a lot of robotics, computer vision, machine learning, software, material science, you know, weld physics and engineering that

you just wouldn't normally have in that percentage of the team within a rocket company. And so, you know, sort of blending those together and being able to design the rocket for what the printers can do. To your point, I mean, the printers initially could do extremely rough and very basic things. But now we've gotten it to a point where we can actually build those internal stiffeners and common dome and downcomer and second stage all as one piece. And so as we evolve that technology, we will be able to do things that are even more advanced with the rocket design.

And because all of that can happen very, very quickly, that's where we expect the compounding rate of improvement to be far faster with this technology stack than what we view as the traditional tech stack that hasn't really changed, frankly, over the last couple of decades. Yeah, on that point, you're rewriting the book in so many of these different areas. You've got things that you need to figure out about your process, like predicting the

properties of the structures you're producing, doing inspections on that, figuring out the materials fatigue, all these different things that others in the industry can rely on decades of collective wisdom. So how have you found it to develop all those processes? Are any of them particularly challenging? And then maybe even to touch on a little bit of, you know, you're hiring people that have been out in the industry doing things the traditional way. Has that been a big hurdle to, you know, rethink all of these different procedures that are sort of, you know, they're secondary, but they're very important to getting to that launch service? Yeah, of course. So, you know, I'm very proud of the team we've built. I think it is one of the most experienced teams in the industry, just as far as their prior experience at other companies

building and launching rockets to orbit. So I think that's really important because, you know, since we are trying to build a rocket in a totally different way than has been done before, you know, a lot of the traditional know-how does go out the window to some extent, but you can still, you know, have that skill set to apply to knowing, you know, what features of a rocket do need to look a certain way for it to actually work. And then what we need to figure out is what features need to change so that we can actually make it via 3D printing and reduce the part count and, you know, actually have that be successful.

So that was really important to have a very experienced team. And I mean, that's been evidenced just through the fact that we've got the launch site at Cape Canaveral. We're also working on a West Coast launch site that we haven't announced yet, but is there and work. And then the NASA Stennis Space Center that we have, I mean, we've really built quite a lot of infrastructure and, uh, you know, it's a, it's a large rocket. So there are more technical challenges, I believe, uh, because of that. I mean, the engines are

larger, um, higher pressure, you know, we're doing LOX methane, which is, uh, you know, advanced, or we're doing LOX methane, which is advanced propulsion, propellants. And so all of that is more technically ambitious, but I feel like that's actually important just to serve the customer market segment we're going after and being able to build this much larger launch vehicle. You mentioned a West Coast launch site that was definitely on my list. You've got Launch Complex 16 out at the Cape. Is this hypothetical West Coast launch site, did it once host another small launch vehicle? I can't comment too much on it yet. I've had this theory that I've been promoting in the past several years of

this podcast that there's a particular launch site not too far from your headquarters that once had a small launch vehicle that never actually got off the pad there and no one has shown interest in so that's quite interesting but yeah one thing that is coming up is that spacex is soon going to be flying to sun synchronous orbit from cape canaveral i don't know if that's something that relativity's shown interest interest in at all, or given the different payload ranges here, they can obviously take a much bigger hit out of their payload range, do that sort of dogleg maneuver, and still fly people that they've got on contract. I don't know if that's something that would necessarily fit with Relativity. Is that something that you've been thinking about at all?

So we have been monitoring that kind of rumor and progress for a while now. Um, so it has, it is something that's been on our radar at least to, to look at, uh, you know, so that's something we're just, you know, keeping, keeping in our back pockets. And, um, you know, I do think it's interesting. I'm curious to see how it works out. Uh, you know, I'm definitely excited that the range there is being very forward leaning and helping commercial space companies be optimum in their operations. So it's really right now just something we're watching and seeing how it goes. What is it like to be working out at the Cape? We've heard other stories from others that have been working out there in recent years that it's very busy and it's kind of hard to get a lot of work done from time to time. But has that matched your experience out at Launch Complex 16? No, I mean, it's been pretty fantastic. And, you know, I will say, yeah, the kind of new general stress coming in has been fantastic

to work with, you know, all the people down there. It really is the premier launch site in the US. So there's tons of resources. Our launch team is really quite experienced. They've built up infrastructure at the Cape before. So have a lot of those relationships and kind of know how that is helping us be able to move quickly.

So we're really just working on finalizing the environmental assessment for our site right now. And all of the designs of our launchpad are, you know, designed and analyzed and accepted internally. And so we should be starting very heavy construction, hopefully coming up here soon. Trying to mark off all the questions that we've already hit because you're so efficient at just jamming all these answers into one. I'm like, oh, he already answered that. Let me check that off. Yeah, we could go back.

You brought up something earlier that I think I could retouch on that was interesting. You talked a little bit about volum, volumetric price is sort of, you know, everyone talks about dollar per kilogram or dollar per pound, which is definitely important. I mean, you know, I will say satellite companies don't really buy rockets by the pound or by the kilogram, you know, usually buy the whole thing or buy a major slot on a launch vehicle. But we did start seeing a lot of satellites in this payload class start to be volume limited. So that's why we went to the bigger payload fairing as well. And then when you look at things on a dollar per cubic foot basis or dollar per cubic meter

basis, the price we're going to market with is extremely competitive just because then it's a very large payload fairing. And the $10 million price point, which we're currently pricing at, is really competitive against other launch vehicles in our class, but frankly, even much larger ones when you look at some of those. And, you know, that's a really big differentiating factor. Even when you look at some of the rideshare, you know, things on larger launch vehicles is one, just how big of a payload can you actually, you know, effectively rideshare? And then what's the actual volume that you have to fit it? Because, you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of satellites can't even physically fit, even if they could weight-wise. Right. And even if you do the math for what Falcon 9 can lift,

and you're like, well, that much mass and this much volume, this thing is launching the densest material anyone's ever heard of to some extent. So that is kind of interesting. The price point has been interesting to me as well, that you feel like you are sticking to that $10 million price point as you get closer to launch. Because there's others, you know, smaller than you, Virgin Orbit, they've seen some cost growth over the years. Firefly's price has risen over the years. Rocket Lab's price has went up from what they list publicly. I'm curious if that's a general trend or if you feel like you're pretty confident in that $10 million price point. Yeah, well, we have signed and announced now four, you know, four major customers. So the first one

being to support the Telesat LEO program, which, you know, we were very excited about and we're excited to continue working with Telesat and, you know, spaceflight industries, Momentus and Muspace. You know, but as we build the manifest and we are seeing increasing demand, there's really no question about that. Just as we make forward progress, technically with the program, get closer to launch, get our launch sites, the test sites, the team we've built, the funding that we've been able to attract, all know, all of that is increasing demand. And so, you know, what we want to do is just make sure that we're first taking care of our customers. But then as the manifest gets full, you know, we are just trying to make sure that, you know, the pricing is right for what the market conditions are. Now, the manifest size,

could you give us a number on that? How many in the backlog at this point? Um, I probably can't give a number yet. Uh, yeah, a lot of the customers wanted us to, yeah, kind of, I mean, you know, tell us that's a good example. They haven't talked a lot publicly about all the details of their plans. Um, but yeah, that being said, it is pretty significant. And we're very confident for the first couple years of launch

that we're going to have the demand. Two digits, three digits, what are we talking about? Three would be a lot. That would be a lot of launches. Yeah, two, you could say two. Two digits, cool. And then in terms of the early kind of operational flow that you want to get into,

we've seen Rocket Lab take the approach of a slower start, but then they hit this very consistent cadence. And there's a lot of the industry that really liked that model. Does that feel like what you're going to head towards, or do you have something different in mind in terms of launch cadence? Yeah, I would say it matches pretty well with that. So, you know, a lot of the, of course, we're very focused on the production scaling and being able to do that in a very small factory footprint with few processes,

few fixed tooling and iterate the product design very quickly. So that's really our core approach. And then on production scaling, there's other things like launch sites, payload integration, and just launch operations, making sure that's getting to a really healthy cadence. So we really want to make sure we're, in some ways, under-promising and over-delivering. I think

that that is important. And we certainly haven't had to present really crazy launch rate growth, you know, to get investments or anything like that. I think, you know, just based on the merits of the market segment we're going after and how disruptive the tech is, you know, that's really been what's able to attract the investment we've gotten. And then also, too, just the future growth plans and what's possible. I mean, again, I really can't highlight enough what I'm excited about is, yes, getting to first launch, really proving that that technology works and our rocket works. That's, of course, a huge milestone.

But really where it gets interesting is what happens after that um you know how we can actually use our our approach with the 3d printing factory to continue to upgrade terran one um to start looking at you know other products in the the space industry and launch and you know there's lots of plans that we do have internally. And we're being very laser focused on what we're doing today with Terran 1. But we have realized that once we actually can do that, there's just a lot of future things leading up to our long term vision of, you know, one day wanting to print on Mars and really help humanity, you know, become multi planetaryplanetary. Are there any eyes towards reusability in your mind, whether that be for cost reasons or like we've seen with SpaceX and Rocket Lab, one of the biggest boosts that they get

out of reusability is the production cadence that they can increase because you're getting these vehicles back. Any thoughts there as to how that could play into Terran 1 or even different vehicles? Yeah, sure. So Terran 1 initially is expendable. That being said, I'm a huge fan of reusability. I worked at a company before that was working on reusability. A lot of our team are fans of reusability.

I think when you look at the future, it's very clear that reusable rockets have to be part of the future. If you really believe space launch is going to continue to decrease in price and, you know, have much higher launch cadence and be available to a lot more space companies, that that has to be part of the future. You know, really, we thought 3D printing also has to be part of that future and automation and robotics. And so that's why we wanted to build that part first, because really then too, again, just being able to iterate the product very, very quickly means we can actually add more features that just wouldn't be possible before.

Whether it's even changing materials of the launch vehicle for, you know, helping stuff like reusability. And, you know, that type of thing is something that we are excited about. That's awesome. Tim, I know we've got limited time here, so I don't want to keep you too much longer. Is there anything that I should have asked you about relativity, the near future plans, or anything that's been on your mind lately? No, I mean, I think, you know, we didn't talk too much about launch date. So I'm really excited, you know, to launch next year. So 2021 is when we're planning our first launch to orbit. So that's very exciting, you know, building the team quite significantly. So we're actually hiring during COVID-19. We've hired quite a few people actually

and even onboarded them remotely. And then, yeah, so looking to grow the team quite a bit. We're still making forward progress printing. We decided to do full pay even for our hourly workers, even when they're at home, so writing up training manuals and things like that. But we are actively hiring and excited to build this future. And then once we're able to be with other humans again, you've got a nice brand new headquarters down in Long Beach. What's up with Long Beach lately?

Everyone's moving in there. Virgin Orbit, Rocket Lab, you have all announced stuff in Long Beach in the last year or so. Yeah. And Spin Launch as well. Yeah. And Spin Launch. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So yeah, it's really quite a great location, just both in Los Angeles, you know, places to live and have, you know, employees go work there. But then also there's just a lot of large facilities that are available. So this facility is six times larger than what we previously had. And even more importantly, the ceilings are almost twice as tall. So the new printers we're installing there

are nearly twice as tall in print capacity as the ones that we have in our current facility, just north of LAX airport. And so that is very important because the whole payload fairing almost needs that ceiling height to actually fit. So I am excited once we print those pieces and show them off because they're huge. And having that facility is pretty key. We are on the south side of the airport, so it's a little bit away from some of

the other companies up there. But yeah, it's just a good location. And Long Beach is a very supportive city of aerospace with a pretty deep aerospace history themselves. Yeah, certainly so. Well, that's awesome to hear, Tim. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. I'd be excited to come back later and keep giving updates. That would be awesome. And hopefully next year, maybe we can meet up at the Cape and talk when you've got a vehicle on the pad there. Yeah, fantastic. We'd be happy to do that. Thanks again to Tim for coming on the show. It's a pleasure to talk with him. But thanks to everyone who made this sort of thing possible. There are 391 of you

supporting Main Engine Cutoff every single month over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And I could not do these kind of interviews without your support. This episode was produced

by 37 executive producers. Brandon, Matthew, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Mintz, Eun Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for

making this episode possible. And if you want to join that crew, if you want to get headlines every single weekend, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and do it there. But for now, that is all I've got for you today. If you've got any questions or thoughts on the show, email me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or find me on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time, thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.