Main Engine Cut Off - T+243: Live Show Announcement! Plus Virgin Orbit Nears the End, While Relativity Flies Terran 1

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

I share some big news about MECO and Off-Nominal live at Space Symposium 2023, and then dive into some recent launch stories: Relativity’s first flight of Terran 1, and Virgin Orbit nearing its end.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 executive producers—Benjamin, Ryan, Joel, Jorge, Andrew, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Russell, Donald, Frank, Joonas, Robb, The Astrogators at SEE, Simon, Lars from Agile Space, David, Fred, Warren, Pat, Pat from KC, Moritz, Steve, Tyler, Kris, Chris, Bob, Lee, Dawn Aerospace, Theo and Violet, Jan, Matt, SmallSpark Space Systems, and four anonymous—and 831 other supporters.MECO Live at Space Symposium 2023! On April 18 and 19, I’ll be hosting several live shows—my first ever!—at the Redwire booth at the 38th Annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Redwire will be hosting a whole set of events on the stage at their booth, including 5 episodes of MECO and an Off-Nominal at happy hour.Find me at the Redwire booth (#1374). Come say hi and catch a show!TopicsLive at Space Symposium 2023! - Main Engine Cut OffRedwire Announces Live Event with Main Engine Cut Off Podcast, Previews Full Schedule of Activities at Space Symposium 2023 | Redwire SpaceVirgin Orbit lays off most employees - SpaceNewsT+169: Commercial Small Launcher Updates - Main Engine Cut OffRelativity Space has a successful failure with the debut of Terran 1 | Ars TechnicaRelativity launches first Terran 1 - SpaceNewsTim Ellis on Twitter: “Achieved 100% power on Aeon R thrust chamber assembly testing today, 💯 258,000 pounds of thrust.”Relativity Space on Twitter: “Listen to our customers’ responses to launch. Terran 1 has already served us exceedingly well as a pathfinder product for Terran R, our medium to heavy-life reusable rocket.”With eyes on reuse, Relativity plans rapid transition to Terran R engines | Ars TechnicaThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen 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 NewsletterMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by SpaceX

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and before I get into the main topics for today, which are the storylines of Virgin Orbit nearing the end of the road they're on, and Relativity having flown the first Terran 1 vehicle to space, not all the way to orbit, but they got to space. So I want to talk about those companies and where things are going with them in the future. But before I do, I have huge news for you. I'm going to be doing the first ever live shows of Main Engine Cutoff and Off Nominal live at Space Symposium 2023 in just a couple of weeks here out in Colorado Springs, April 18th and 19th, the Tuesday and Wednesday of the conference. I will be there doing five episodes of Main Engine Cutoff and one episode

of Off Nominal Live. I'm going to be absolutely exhausted, but I am thrilled to be doing this. Redwire has a stage at their booth on the show floor, booth number 1374, where it's right next to NASA, which is going to be fun in its own right. So they're having this stage there. They're going to be having panel talks and tech talks and a bunch of different events. And they offered me a couple of time slots and said, you come do whatever podcast you want to do. We don't have any say over the content. We just want to host you here. And they're Miko fans. So I was thrilled to take up that opportunity because it's an amazing opportunity to plop these shows right in the middle of a space conference. So I am very excited about it. I've put together a whole host of guests that will be joining me for these different sessions.

I'm still confirming a bunch of those. So there'll be names coming out over the next couple of weeks as I nail down the scheduling of all this stuff. But if you're going to be at the show or if you want to follow remotely, I'll talk about that in a second. Mainenginecutoff.com slash live is where to go to get all of the listings. I've got a bunch of stuff listed there with time slots and, and guests and everything else like that, uh, to keep you updated on what's going on. And I think there's going to be a live streaming situation. So I'll put the links there as well. Uh, when it does come time for the show and all of this stuff will be coming out on the podcast feed as well. So if you're somebody who's not going to the conference,

it'll be plopping right here in your podcast feed. Um, I don't know why I've said the word plopping twice in this plug, but that's where we're at at this point. I've got a lot of info stored in my head. So there you go. To run you through some of the stuff that we will be doing, and I've already confirmed a couple of these slots here. The Tuesday of the show, April 18th, we'll be doing two different episodes of Main Engine Cutoff. The first one I'm going to do is about international partnerships. Mike Gold, who is at Redwire, the chief growth officer, we've had him on the show before because he is one of the people behind the Artemis Accords. So he and I will be sitting down to talk about international partnerships, and we will have

some of the partners that is referenced in the international part of that, which is going to be really cool as well. So, so far, I've got Masamune Onoda lined up. She is the director of the Washington, D of JAXA. Uh, and we've working some on some other guests, uh, getting them lined up there, um, trying to get into touch with people through different contexts and things like that. So we will have some others join us. And then right after that, I'll be having a space policy conversation with, uh, none other than Lori Garver fan favorite of the show for sure for sure, the former deputy administrator of NASA.

And we'll be joined by Karina Dries, who is the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. So that'll be a really fun time to talk to them too about the current state of space policy. And like I said, we're within earshot of the NASA booth.

So that should be fun as well. Then on Wednesday, it's going to be a pretty wild time starting around lunchtime. There will be a classic episode of Miko on the show floor. I'm going to talk about the news and announcement that have come out from the show, hopefully line up some guests to drop in. Maybe some of the guests that have made news that week will drop by for a couple of minutes to talk about what's going on. It'll be kind of my thoughts and observations from being at the show and the things

that were announced. You know, there's going to be some good stuff coming out. I think NASA is going to be announcing the Artemis architecture, I think April 18th at that panel that they do, the heads of the agency's panel. It might even be some other different event, but I think that day they're going to be announcing it. So there's gonna be a lot of stuff happening at the show that I'll want to get to. And then after that, we're going to have a LEO and lunar commercialization session where I'll bring in a couple of guests from the commercial lunar payload services program and the commercial low Earth orbit destinations program, basically lunar landers and commercial space stations. It's been a hot topic that we've been talking about on MECO,

on Off Nominal lately. It's something I'm really interested in. And there's a critical mass of that kind of industry at Space Symposium. So it's a good opportunity to get to talk to some of the different players in there and specifically people that are building hardware or using hardware. That'll be a really fun session. And then after that, the last Miko of the day will be a session about finance and business strategy. I've got my friend Caleb Henry of Quilty Analytics to join me to then talk with Peter Beck of Rocket Lab and some other executive level people from companies that are either public or

private, but are really doing interesting things strategically to talk to them about how to manage that strategy, the finance side of things, given where the market's at right now. So that'll be really fun, especially because I have Caleb's mind to lean on there since he's so good at that stuff. And then after that, finally get to kick back, crack open a beer. We'll be doing an episode of Off Nominal live at the happy hour that's happening at the Redwire booth. So I'll have a couple of the journalists with me and we'll talk about things that are going on from the show.

Generally, just get into the Off Nominal spirit and that'll cap off what is going to be a total rock block of a session from Wednesday at 1230 Mountain Time all the way to 430. It's nonstop Miko and Off Nominal. So it's going to be a wild time. If you are at the conference, I would love to hear from you. Let me know if you're going to be there. Definitely come over to the booth. Come say hi. Try to catch a show if you can. If you can't, it'll come out in the podcast feed and whatnot. But come say hi. I've got stickers that I've ordered. I've got a bunch of swag. So you can come grab some of that stuff and say hi for a minute if you're out there listening and you'll be at the show. And certainly I'll be around the conference otherwise. So if I catch you at

some event one of the nights or just on the show floor, it'll be awesome to meet everyone out there. I'm really excited to be doing these live shows. It's going to be experimental. I'm really sad that Jake is away during this time. And we can't end up pulling this off together. But a little bit exploratory for one of us to get going on this kind of thing and we'll see how it goes. So hope to see you there. And I hope you all will enjoy the content that I've been lining up here. And I do want to say to cap this off, thank you for the support, for listening all these years. This kind of thing would not be possible if there weren't a group of people out there that like what this show is, that support it, that keep listening. It has been entirely organic growth

to this point. I haven't, you know, done any weird advertising or seed funding or anything like that. This has just been straight up organic growth that you enjoy what I'm doing and you are supporting me by way of either just listening or being a part of the Patreon or whatever it is. And, you know, together, we're at this point where we can take this legitimately and put it right in the middle of a space conference and see what happens. So I'm really thrilled to be doing that. But I definitely could not do it without the support all these years. So thank you all so much. Seriously, this is going to be the most amazing couple days because I just I don't even know what's going to happen there. It's gonna be awesome. And I'm so thrilled. And it's all because of all of you listening.

So thanks again. And I hope it turns out really well. All right. So let's talk about the stories that have been happening this last week. We'll start with Virgin Orbit because honestly, it's a little bit shorter of a story given the fact that I've talked about this recently on Off Nominal and on this show. This is not a surprise if you've been following the news lately, if you've been listening to headlines or this show, Virgin Orbit has been in a tough spot, right? They've been in a tough spot for a couple of years now. Their flight rate remained very low. They had clearly technical issues getting up to speed on some of the flight rate side of things um they were

uh really hinging a lot on this launch from the uk it was a huge amount of pomp and circumstance around this first launch from uk soil and it ended in failure and that was really just it wasn't the reason that the company failed right there was a million other things going on here, but it really was just the complete wrong time for that kind of thing to happen. Um, and, and it was, uh, something that they, they really couldn't come back from in, in at least its current form. Right. So at that point, uh, there, there was cash burn issues. They were clearly going to be all down for a couple months while they figure out what went wrong before they could fly again. And they were running out of money. And Richard Branson, and I'm forgetting the name of the Virgin Investment arm. I think it was like Virgin Investments Limited. I think that was the name of the company. They put in some money to kind of keep things rolling along. But at the same time,

they had really high interest rates on the money they were they were putting in and they also got rights to things like the boeing 747 that virgin orbit uses so none of this stuff was good sign for the company overall that it didn't look like they were putting in money because things were going great it just looked like they were putting in money to wind things down uh gracefully and make sure that you know things were covered that that they were interested in from the virgin investments arm side um but then over the last couple weeks you know there's been talk of all right we're gonna find additional funding sources um we're gonna furlough everyone for a couple of weeks while we line up this funding round there was a hot minute when

some guy named matthew brown looked like he was going to put in $200 million to take over the company. A whole weird side jag that apparently was like a producer on loose change. There was like a 9-11 truther element to this, which would have been really weird. But that fell apart, and then they thought they had another investor over the weekend, or over, I guess, the course of this early this week. But as of March 30th, no deals were imminent, and they are laying off, I've seen, 85% to 90% of those at the company. So it certainly looks like things are going to be winding down from the Virgin Orbit. And I'm not sure exactly who. If they weren't able to find an investor in this spot, I still can't figure out who would acquire virgin orbit and

take over the assets it's not like they have you know purposely they don't have launch sites so it's not like anyone's trying to get a particular facility from virgin orbit they're the technical side that they've been working on uh you know employees aside the people that are working there are clearly skilled engineers and they're going to go on to other companies and do great things there but there's no like technical asset that a company might want um to go and expand on the only way i see this going is is similar to like a strata launch situation where um it becomes not a space company they take it into like an aerospace hypersonic research kind of thing that i guess is, but I really don't see a space direction for whatever becomes a Virgin Orbit from here.

And that really goes back to what my main criticism of Virgin Orbit has been all these years. You know, go back into the podcast archive. I'll find the episode and I'll put it in the show notes. There was a small launch check-in show that I did. And I only know this because I made a little chart when I did that show. And I always go back to that where I keep all my notes for the show because I had a nice

set of like, here's the payload, here's the price ranges. In fact, I'll just do it right now. I'm going to search. It was like a check-in on small launch. Let's see. Is this the one that has the nice table? I don't know. I got to find the table. Oh, here it is. It was T plus 169. I had a good rundown of all the different small launch companies, where they were at the moment, from Electron to ABL to Virgin Orbit to Firefly to Relativity. And this was years ago at this point, right? And I think my criticism then is the same that it's ever been, which is Virgin Orbit was put into this spot where they had a very high price tag on their launch cost. It was in the teens of millions. I think it was like 12 to 15 that it was advertised for over the years, but 400 to 500 kilogram range. I had heard they had trouble getting up to that payload range over the years. So they were offering very low payload, almost electron level payloads for triple the price of electron or double the price of electron, even if you take what electron is selling

for now. And that's a rough spot to be in. Not only do you have pressure from electron continuing to fly, doing better and better performance, costs have grown a little bit, but as capabilities have as well fly, doing better and better performance. Costs have grown a little bit, but as capabilities have as well there, but they're actively flying every couple of weeks. Now they've done two launches within the last month here. And on the other end, you've had companies like Relativity, Firefly, ABL, at least offering about one ton of performance for significantly lower than the price that Virgin Orbit was

offering their flights. So they were half the performance for the same price as the higher end of the market on the Relativity and Firefly ABL side, and they were double the price for the same performance on the low end. So they just ended up in this really awkward spot. And coupled with that, they were not flying very regularly. They couldn't get the flight rate up to anything that they had promised. And that was a problem when the key selling point of air launch was responsive launch. That was a thing that they were going out and selling to the Department of Defense as this kind of niche service, which was anywhere we can take off with a 747, we can get into the air and get into a position to launch this rocket. We don't have to wait for the ground winds or something like that. So we can be very responsive. We can go out and fly and sync up with

an orbital track somewhere over the ocean rather than being restricted to whenever that orbital track comes over our launch site at the right time. So they got into the situation where what they were selling was responsive space and what they were doing was flying every three to six months. And that's a weird spot to be in when you're just selling responsive and it's like okay i'll sign a contract with you and it's like all right you'll fly in three years so at a certain point there was just this dissonance between the sales effort which i think was was valiant right like if i was the salesperson at virgin orbit i'd be selling the same damn thing because that was the one real like differentiator they had uh was there are certain things about air launch that differentiate you

from the competitors. On a technical side, it's debatable how good air launch is, right? We can get into like, let's go out sometime and just argue about technical attributes of air launch. And I'll probably be on the side of I don't like air launch. But from a sales side, there were unique things that you could go into a room and talk to people about that would at least make sense to people's brains. So it was sellable. It was a sellable thing, but they didn't seem to be able to sell enough of them. And was that because of the dissonance between marketing responsive but not being responsive? You know, I'm not really sure. And at that same time, you had all these new companies that are also coming up, you know, the ones that I've just been naming, that have either already built out multiple launch pads that give them access to any azimuth that

they want, or are currently building out a launch pad on the East and West coast of the U S or in New Zealand and Virginia, right. Or your ABL, uh, or Astra who has containerized launch, you know, you couldn't hear the air quotes I did because it's called a containerized launch. You know, you couldn't hear the air quotes I did because it's called containerized launch. And I've not, I've never really seen legitimate proof about how containerized each of those launch systems have been, but I believe it because we have seen some stuff, I guess. So at the same time that was being marketed as, well, we can just package up our container and head over to, you know, Scotland instead of Alaska. So I guess my point is Virgin Orbit was always kind of almost there in all of these different departments. You know, they almost had a good flight rate. They almost had enough

sales. They almost had enough differentiators, but they weren't quite able to close the full picture. And that was evident to me. You know, I looked up that show that I did. 169 was in August 2020. And that was probably even not the first time I had mentioned that stuff about Virgin Orbit. So the way that this has gone down was just evident to me, analyzing it from, you know, not even a skilled angle, just looking at, you know, the basic facts of the way the market had come about. And, you know, the development cost of Virgin Orbit was extremely high compared to the capability that the vehicle had. And that was an interesting kind of bigger picture challenge for them. So all in all, it's just to say, like, I'm not really surprised with how this went.

I'm interested to see where the people that are at Virgin Orbit go to and what kind of stuff they get involved in from here. I guess my one bet would be maybe Virgin Orbit becomes Virgin Hypersonic. And somebody's like, yeah, well, we'll take this kind of stuff and we'll do a couple of tweaks to it to then market to the hypersonic interested side of the DoD or something like that. You know, the other aspect that was a big selling point for them with the air launch aspect that we've talked about a lot was the ability to go to places like the UK and say you have a domestic launch capability on demand. Basically, can we take off from your airport and fly over a nearby body of water? You can now launch satellites from

your own soil. And again, in the Virgin Orbit way, they got most of the way there, right? They'd went and they were doing that from the UK on their final launch, and they failed to make it to orbit. And that was kind of the thing that capped all this off. Now, how much of a moneymaker would that have been? You know, I'm not sure because even in some cases, you look at, you know, some of the European satellites that have gone up on Falcon 9s recently, and it's like, well, even they've gotten over that and had decided to fly, I forget exactly what satellite it was that hitched a ride on a Falcon 9 recently, but it was one of those that was um you know in in yesteryear would have just been automatically an institutional payload as they call them and would have flown on on on a vega or ariane 5 or something like that

and uh went over to falcon 9 so if the responsiveness and the price is good enough and the performance is there a lot of times people would get over that and and the novelty of having this launch from your own soil thing, I think, would wear off after a couple of launches. So I don't know how sustainable that sales pitch was even, to be honest. So I never just was a big believer in what Virgin Orbit was doing. And so, you know, I'm not shocked at this news. It's certainly a bummer because you don't want to get into a situation where there's

just like two companies doing everything. You want the diversity of ways of doing things, of styles of doing things, of sales pitches. So it keeps everyone sharp, you know, iron sharpens iron, that kind of thing. But, you know, that's where it is. So again, we'll see where this goes. I don't exactly know what the path is from here

in terms of where the assets go. Do they just kind of fizzle out or is someone going to take them and turn them into something different? Not sure. So, you know, if you're at Virgin Orbit, I wish you the best. I hope you find somewhere to land that makes sense for the kind of stuff you're interested in and where you can take your

skill set and apply it to different problems or different challenges. And I'm really curious to see what everyone gets up to because, you know, it's not nothing to put an orbital rocket together to strap it under 747 and take it to orbit, which they did a couple times. So I don't want to downplay that either. They really did solve some pretty wild challenges there. And that should go a long way in terms of what they'll do next. So let's keep our eyes peeled for everyone from Virgin Orbit. And until then, I guess let's move on here. All right, before I move on to the Relativity Terran 1, Terran R discussion, I want to say thank you to all of you who support Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 876 of you supporting the show, and I'm so thankful.

Like I mentioned, I'm really thankful for your support because you've made this whole thing possible. There are 35 executive producers of this episode of Main Engine Cutoff, and you made this episode possible. This is a legitimate, legitimate credit. I will back you up if you tell someone you've executive produced a podcast. That is literally what the job title entails. So thanks to Benjamin, Ryan, Joel, George, Andrew, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Russell, Donald, Frank, Eunice, Rob, The Astrogators at SCE, Simon, Lars from Agile Space, David, Fred, Warren, Pat, Pat from KC, SCE, Simon, Lars from Agile Space, David, Fred, Warren, Pat, Pat from KC, Moritz, Steve, Tyler, Chris, Bob, Lee, Dawn Aerospace, Theo and Violet, Jan, Matt, SmallSpark Space Systems,

and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. As I mentioned, if you want to join that crew, help support the show, help me do things like live shows at the Space Symposium, or if you want to get Miko headlines in your feed. That is an entire other podcast I do every single week, running through all the stories that have happened in space, keeping you up to date. It's a great way to support the show and stay up on Space News. So do all that, maynagercutoff.com slash support. And once again, thank you all so much. Relativity flew the first Terran 1, an epically beautiful flight, a night flight, Terran 1, an epically beautiful flight, a night flight, really amazing looking blue engine plumes coming out of this methane, oxygen, and rocket. And they made it a really far way in for a company's first launch. The only person that I think made it farther was Rocket Lab on their initial attempt. They did not quite make it to orbit either. This Terran 1 flight launched,

made it all the way through first stage flight. They made it to stage separation, completed stage separation, and when it was time for the second stage engine to start up, it sort of just sputtered out. You know, there's some fire and sparks, but no full ignition, and that's where the first flight of Terran 1 ended, which was, again, an amazing achievement. I mean, we were going nuts for Firefly when they made it, you know, a couple of minutes into the first stage flight before it all flipped out because they lost an engine. And even that was like, oh, we're doing it. That was a good job. So Terran 1 made it, you know, farther than I think a lot of people gave it credit for. I think I bet on off nominal that it would make it past MaxQ and Jake betet under MaxQ. So I did win the bet, and I did even believe they would make it to MaxQ.

I think I was pretty convinced that... I think I bet ABL would make it on their first launch, but Relativity wouldn't, something like that. So it's kind of exactly where I thought it would end up. But again, an amazing achievement for a first launch. This is really good on the scale of things. So that's awesome to see in its own right. But most of my interest here lies in what now for relativity, and I find

this quite intriguing as you dig down into the what now question. I think it's kind of up for debate from the outside, and I will walk you through what's going on here. So before this first flight, we knew a couple things about Terran 1 and its manifest. We knew there was going to be this initial flight. We knew that they have a NASA Venture Class Launch Services Agreement, which I think is three CubeSats that was supposed to fly on the second flight of Terran 1. I think what that means is the second successful flight of Terran 1 is where those three CubeSats will fly. And then we also knew they had a whole bunch of hand-wavy payloads, that they've signed

a bunch of customers. We know the customer names. We have no idea what payloads they are. It's just kind of a yada yada, we'll launch an Iridium satellite someday. And I've always been suspect of the way that Relativity has handled their customer announcements, so much so that I wouldn't cover them on headlines or on this show, really, because I don't find that it's kind of just like, you know, and of course, I do this in my own work at Pineworks, where I do client work, you're adding some logos to a thing to say, like, all these people trusted me once, you should trust me too. So I totally get that from a person who runs an agency like that's that's a thing that you do uh but i i didn't relativity put out so little info in those releases they didn't announce

price or launches or timelines or anything it was just like this person is also a customer of ours at some point so not that i didn't believe that they were let me let me be clear it was not saying i don't believe that they'll ever launch something for Iridium. It was just that I kind of feel like it was a launch agreement more than a Terran 1 agreement. Let's put it that way. And I actually find this an interesting way to look at the launch industry generally. If you have named payloads on your list, that's a really good sign that you know when or if that's going to fly. If you just have a customer, you don't really know when or if that's going to fly. So look at New Glenn. That's a good example of someone who's signed up a bunch of customers, but we don't have

named payloads. Certainly there were Falcon Heavy and Starship contracts like that, and they've gotten more named over time. But it's it's a named a named payload not a named customer a named payload uh that that is an identifiable payload when you get to that point you know you've got something interesting cooking and terran one's never really had that we have three cube sets from nasa that is the named payload that we know about they didn't even name the payload that was going to go on this demo flight which turned out to be the test print the first test print that they did or something like that. It was like one kilogram.

So it was really small. But again, we didn't even know the name of that until pretty late in the game. So I do find that interesting to track. And the other thing to look at is the way that Relativity has been talking about not only this flight after the fact, but before the fact they were talking about. They were kind of pumping Terran R a lot. And they've even said in the past that Terran R was going to follow very quickly behind Terran 1. Terran R is the bigger vehicle, about 20 tons to low Earth orbit, supposed to be a fully reusable vehicle, kind of looked like a mini starship when they announced it. I think that might have drifted a little bit, but maybe not, you know, we don't exactly know what's going

on behind the scenes, but they were really pushing Terran R from day one as this is going to be a thing that we go to really quickly. So much so that an interview with Eric Berger last February, it's February 2022, Tim Ellis, who's the head of Relativity, talked about the fact that a future version of Terran 1 would go from the nine engines that they have right now down to a single Eon-R engine, which is the engine that they're making for Terran R. It would go down to a single engine to, you know, be common with Terran R, to have less parts

to fly Terran 1. I've always kind of just said, eh, like, Terran 1's going away the second Terran R's around. It doesn't make any sense to keep Terran 1 around if you've got a fully reusable Terran R. It's not a thing that makes any sense to continue to fly. So this just to say, they've talked up Terran R at every step. If you talk to them about Terran 1, you're going to be talking about Terran R in five seconds. That's been the model. And I don't think they're wrong. This criticism is not criticism, really. It's just noting that this is how interested in Terran R they are. I do think they're making the right call there. If Terran R is on their roadmap, I've questioned why they even flew this Terran 1.

I've questioned that to anyone I've talked to about this. Like, why are they still going through with this if Terran R is coming so hot and heavy? And, you know, clearly they're looking at it as kind of a tech demo. They've tweeted from the company account about how, you know, clearly they're looking at it as kind of a tech demo. They've tweeted from the company account about how, you know, let me pull this tweet up while I'm thinking about it. So yeah, this was a tweet from March 7th. So right before, it was in their launch campaign. It was during one of the kind of aborts that they've had on the pad between when they actually flew.

And this is talking about, you know, here's what we're hoping to achieve with this flight. They had three things they were hoping to achieve number one was prove that 3d printed structures can withstand the pressures of flight which will prove out our hypothesis that 3d printing is a viable way to manufacture rockets number two was data data and more data so they were like let's just get data from launching this thing and the data will help us inform how we number three listen to our customers response to the launch terran one has already served us exceedingly well as a Pathfinder product for Terran R, our medium to heavy lift reusable rocket. So March 7th, they're like, does the rocket stay together?

Can we get data out of it? How does that feed into Terran R? You know, they're laying the groundwork there. And even some of the tweets that they've had after the launch was like, very unclear about, oh, this one was so good. This Terran one was so good. I can't wait for the next one. It was like, we're going to put this to work in our future.

It was very, very wishy-washy on exactly what that next launch was. And, you know, the week before, Tim Ellis was tweeting about achieving 100% power on the Eon R thrust chamber assembly. So clearly they are following tightly behind with this Terran-R schedule. And then you looked at some of the coverage of this launch. Let me just bring up two examples. Again, Eric Berger of Ars Technica and Jeff Faust of Space News. There was two segments. I'll put links to these stories in the show notes. In Eric's piece, he pointed to the statement that Relativity put out after the launch.

Today's launch proved Relativity's 3D-printed rocket technologies that will enable our next vehicle, Terran R. We successfully made it through Max-Q, the highest stress state on our print structures, yada yada. Literally the first sentence was about Terran R. And then I went over to Jeff Faust's story, and there's always a thing that Jake and I love, is there's this paragraph in all Jeff Faust stories that is just like, tell us what you really think, and this is why we love him. So I'm going to read a paragraph from his reporting on Terran 1. Relativity did not announce plans before the launch

when or even if they would perform another Terran 1 launch. Before the first launch attempt, Ellis suggested the company might skip ahead to Terran R even if the launch failed, depending on the feedback the company got from its customers. Do they want us to continue down the path of producing more Terran 1s to solve for those issues on this vehicle, or would they like us to solve the remaining rocket science problems on the vehicle that they're actually most interested in, Terran R? That's from Tim Ellis. So in both articles, two very trusted sources are highly

doubting the future of Terran 1. We have no named payloads. And then what I found interesting was this first flight had a non-deploying nose cone on it. It didn't have a fairing. It had a non-deploying nose cone on this first launch. Now, you could say, well, that was just to attempt to speed up the fact that they could get to launch and not have to worry about

additional development time and i say yes for sure but also if if they were looking at this as a functional vehicle that would eventually have full-blown fairings it would be weird to skip over that part entirely until you've got your first launch successful you'd want to have a fairing system that was ready to go uh and you'd probably want to test that in some way. And on their site, they still have a mock-up of the fairing, but it's really just the nose cone that they're pushing in a lot of different images. And again, they only have three CubeSats assigned to Terran 1. Now, I've heard some people say, it's going to be a nose cone that just pops off the end

of the rocket instead of a kind of clamshell fairing. And that's how they get those payloads out into space. So maybe that's true. And maybe that's a small development tweak in the future. But I did find it interesting to note. And then I see all this doubt from people like Eric Berger and Jeff Faust. And you see relativity just pumping Terran R. And it does feel like something that it's, you know, I wouldn't be shocked if Terran R is the thing tomorrow instead of in a launch or two. Now, will they fly another Terran 1? You know, if they've got the

hardware coming together for the second vehicle, then maybe they do before they start turning the launch pad around. But they also got to turn around the launch pad for a new, bigger vehicle with much bigger engines and get ready for loading a vehicle of the size of Terran R at the launch site that they currently launch Terran 1. And that's kind of a real logjam as well. Now, I always joke that I'm not a capital J journalist. What I do is different. But there are some times when I use journalistic techniques to go after certain info and figure out what's going on. And as you can tell, even from my ranting about relativity, I don't know if I have a grand theory other than I'm trying to figure out what is going on with Terran 1 to Terran

R. And most of that is to see if they're leaning in the direction that I would hope, which was just bailing on Terran 1 if that's what you're going to do. And that's kind of been my take of like, why are we still doing Terran 1 if Terran R is that close behind and you're clearly pivoting into it that quick? Why not get on with it and go to Terran R? So I've had, this is where the journalistic strategy comes in. I've had three different, completely unrelated people talk to me about hardware issues that they had on the tanks for Terran 1. And not only the first one, but I've heard about, you know know testing that they've done elsewhere with tanks seeing issues with uh producing this and i find this kind of resonant with that quote that i read from tin ellis in the jeff faust story of do they want us to solve the issues on this vehicle before we go on to the next one or would they just like us to get on with the next one and fly that in a year or two? And so kind of merging that thought process along with the things that I've heard about the vehicles

and the issues that they've had and the performance that they've currently got out of Terran 1 and why that Eon R engine seems to be following so closely behind the first engine that they've produced, it really feels like they're setting the stage to move very quickly to Terran R. And then the other aspect there is, okay, quickly to Terran R. And then the other aspect there is, okay, well, Terran R is this like full-blown mini starship, fully reusable thing. Is that the first vehicle they're going to fly that's called Terran R? Or are they going to do, all right, let's build the first stage that's reusable and get that down and do a very traditional upper stage and fly that one first that has even more payload capacity than the

reusable version would before we go on to make that whole mini starship kind of thing. So now let me ruminate on that for a second, because they've advertised 20 tons to low Earth orbit on that reusable mode. Now, the reusable mode also brings to orbit the entire reusable thing, right? This is like the space shuttle, right? It could do, you know, 20 or 30 tons to orbit, depending on where you're flying in low Earth orbit. But it also brought with it, you know, 100 tons of a space shuttle. So it's like, the payload is 30 tons, but the whole payload that it launched is a lot more than that. So if they could do a traditional upper stage on top of the first stage from Terran R, does that put them well north of 20 tons to orbit, at least on paper? Does that put them into

the ballpark where they might see some other tweaks that could make it possible to bid on something like the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 contract that's coming up towards, you know, what is it? I forget the exact timeline. It was end of the year, they'll have the RFP out and then they'll name winners by next summer or something like that. Now, clearly, based on what we talked about on a recent episode of the show about that Phase 3 contracting, Terran R, Terran 1 for that matter, would have a place for itself in that program on the, I forget which lane numbers, it might be lane one where it's kind of bid out like commercial lunar payload services where it's task order based, you can go and you

can bid for a particular mission and fly that particular mission. And you don't have to be a vehicle that can do several tons directly to choose stationary orbit. So these vehicles fit in that program already. But what if they had their sights set on? No, let's go in and knock out either SpaceX or ULA on that upper tier of phase three with a vehicle that has the performance necessary to do this. Could they do that? What are the numbers like doing that on something like a regular upper stage on the Terran R first stage?

Is that possible? Does that put them into the realm of competitiveness for that thing? If I was at Relativity, I'd be running the numbers on that because that seems fairly lucrative for what Terran R could do. And then obviously that has implications for the schedule. They need to be on that by a year or two from now. They need to be developing that. They need to be significantly through the development process of that to have a play at that phase three contracting. Now, the last thing I'll bring up with Relativity is, um, the fact that they've had, you know, they've taken in north of a billion dollars of funding. They have been hugely invested in the thing that I've always wondered about Relativity. And if you remember, I've had Tim Ellis on the show many moons ago now,

and I asked directly, I said, are you a launch services company or are you a additive manufacturing company who happens to do launch services? And he was adamant that they were a launch services company. But every time I look at their website, I feel like the manufacturing is higher and higher up the main nav. It's like rockets and then infrastructure manufacturing. It gets more of the pump. There's more sizzle reels of their manufacturing hardware than there is of the rocket sometimes. So I'm still not sold that that is the case. I think a lot of their value is vested in the fact that that is their technology that they're building with.

And that's why they've taken in so much funding and why they've got so much attention. I think the only way they can get more funding is if they used a large language model to do some sort of their design of the rocket, then they'd have everything. They'd have launch services, they'd have additive manufacturing, they'd have AI. It would just be the way to get another billion dollars of funding. And I'm being a little facetious, but I kind of feel like that. And that led me to say, all right, let's like see what's out there in terms of thought about relativity from the investment angle uh and chamath palayapatiya who is was kind of like the guy from the spacks uh he was the one who made a bunch of money off the

virgin galactic spec so i i find him maybe not super interested in space development as a key thing but i wanted to say, like, how was he looking at this? And I heard him on his own podcast talk about relativity recently. And the way that he referred to it two different times was that he's excited for this flight because if they're successful, and this was before the launch happened, and actually even after the launch happened, if they're successful, and the way he put it was they unlock a huge backlog of orders that they can tap into, which was just kind of weird and like 40 off of what the reality probably is but i find that

interesting because i want to know how somebody in his position who has money in the company from pretty early on is looking at the situation that they're in is this the case where they were flying terran one because there was some sort of deals in those contracts they've already announced once they're successful they unlock more more of a reservation payment. Is there more money to be tapped into there? Does it unlock other deals that they've already... How is stuff structured on the back end? Is that why we haven't heard a lot of contract details about the deals they've signed?

I just found that kind of interesting. And certainly, I want to know the way that the investors who have put more than a billion dollars into this company, the way that they're looking at the roadmap for this company and what they want out of it and the results they want to see out of it. And if they had the appetite for bailing on Terran 1 and going to Terran R, or if they needed to see through Terran 1 because of those investments and the path they've taken to get to this point, if that was the pressure to continue with Terran 1 before they completely tear it down and rebuild and frame it in this way that they are in the company statements of, well, we listened to our customers and they said, good job with Terran 1,

but what we really want is you to go fly Terran R. I bet most of the customers they've signed up don't really care which of the vehicle that Relativity's flying their payload on. They just want it to get to space safely. I guarantee you they're not super tuned up about flying on Terran 1 or Terran R. If they've signed a deal about Terran 1, they don't really care if it's going to make Relativity more money to fly it on Terran R because they can put it with some other payloads. They just want their payload to get to space safely. They want a good deal on it. They want security that's going to get there. They want it to be on time. There are other things they care about rather than like, oh, you did great, but we really want to see this fly on top of a Terran R. I don't think they really care like

that. I'm sure somebody does, but most don't. So I do find that framing a bit odd. So anyway, this is my long-winded rumination on the state of relativity. I haven't talked about them for a while, so felt like it was overdue and hope you enjoyed it. So if you want to experience what this is like in real life, rather than me talking to you from my very small office here, Space Symposium 2023. Come see me live April 18th and 19th. MainNinjaCutoff.com slash live for the details. Find me at the Redwire booth on the show floor. Thanks again for all your support for everything over the years. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email Anthony at MainNinjaCutoff.com, on Twitter at wehavemiko, or on Mastodon at miko at spacey.space. And until next time, thanks again. I'll talk to you soon.