The exterior of The Wormhole.
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LONG BEACH, Calif. — It’s only a few days into the New Year, but the Relativity Space Factory hasn’t been quiet, a hive of activity with massive 3D printers buzzing and making construction noises.
Now about eight years after its founding, Relativity continues to grow as it pursues a new method for manufacturing rockets from mostly 3D-printed structures and parts. Relativity believes its approach will make building orbital-class rockets much faster than conventional methods, requiring thousands of fewer parts and enabling changes to be made across software—with the goal of creating rockets from raw materials in less than 60 days.
The company has raised more than $1.3 billion in capital to date and continues to expand its footprint, including the addition of more than 150 acres at NASA’s Rocket Engine Test Center in Mississippi. Relativity was named to CNBC’s Disruptor 50 last year.
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The company’s first rocket, known as Terran 1, is currently in the final stages of preparation for its inaugural launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. This missile is built at “The Gate,” the 120,000-square-foot factory the company built in Long Beach.
Inside “The Wormhole” Factory in Long Beach, California.
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But earlier this month, CNBC took a look inside “The Wormhole:” the more than 1 million square foot facility where Boeing The previously built C-17 is where Relativity is now filling in with machines and building its own larger line of reusable Terran R missiles.
“I actually tried to kill this project a few times,” Relativity CEO and co-founder Tim Ellis told CNBC, referring to one of the company’s newest additive-making machines — this one internally codenamed “Reaper,” a reference to the StarCraft games. – which represents the fourth generation of the company’s Stargate printers.
A close-up of one of the company’s “Reaper” printers in action.
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Unlike the previous Stargate generations of Relativity, which are printed vertically, the fourth generation that builds the main structures of Terran R is printed horizontally. Ellis emphasized that the change allows its printers to manufacture seven times faster than the third generation, and has been tested with speeds up to 12 times faster.
Scale of one of the Stargate “Reaper” printers.
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“[Printing horizontally] It seems very counterintuitive, but it ends up enabling a certain change in the physics of the print head which is then much faster,” Ellis said.
A pair of the company’s “Reaper” 3D printers.
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So far, the company uses about a third of Boeing’s cavernous former facility, where Ellis said Relativity has room for about a dozen printers that can produce Terran R missiles at a pace of “several a year.”
For 2023, Ellis said, Relativity is focused on getting Planet Earth 1 into orbit, proving that its approach works, and also showing how “quickly we can advance in additive technology.”
He added, “Looking at the macro economy, we’re obviously still very pessimistic, and we’re making sure we’re delivering on results.”
The company’s Terran 1 rocket stands on the launch pad at LC-16 in Cape Canaveral, Florida ahead of the inaugural launch attempt.
Trevor Mahlman / The Space of Relativity
Correction: A previous version of this story missed the company’s speed test of 3D printers.