Relativity Space Changes Course On Path To Orbit

March 17, 2025 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

In 2015, Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone founded Relativity Space around an ambitious goal: to be the first company to put a 3D printed rocket into orbit. While additive manufacturing was already becoming an increasingly important tool in the aerospace industry, the duo believed it could be pushed further than anyone had yet realized.

Rather than assembling a rocket out of smaller printed parts, they imagined the entire rocket being produced on a huge printer. Once the methodology was perfected, they believed rockets could be printed faster and cheaper than they could be traditionally assembled. What’s more, in the far future, Relativity might even be able to produce rockets off-world in fully automated factories. It was a bold idea, to be sure. But then, landing rockets on a barge in the middle of the ocean once seemed pretty far fetched as well.

Of course, printing something the size of an orbital rocket requires an exceptionally large 3D printer, so Relativity Space had to built one. It wasn’t long before the company had gotten to the point where they had successfully tested their printed rocket engine, and were scaling up their processes to print the vehicle’s propellant tanks. In 2018 Bryce Salmi, then an avionics hardware engineer at Relatively Space, gave a talk at Hackaday Supercon detailing the rapid progress the company had made so far.

Just a few years later, in March of 2023, the Relativity’s first completed rocket sat fueled and ready to fly on the launch pad. The Terran 1 rocket wasn’t the entirely printed vehicle that Ellis and Noone had imagined, but with approximately 85% of the booster’s mass being made up of printed parts, it was as close as anyone had ever gotten before.

The launch of Terran 1 was a huge milestone for the company, and even though a problem in the second stage engine prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, the flight proved to critics that a 3D printed rocket could fly and that their manufacturing techniques were sound. Almost immediately, Relativity Space announced they would begin work on a larger and more powerful successor to the Terran 1 which would be more competitive to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Now, after an administrative shakeup that saw Tim Ellis replaced as CEO, the company has released a nearly 45 minute long video detailing their plans for the next Terran rocket — and explaining why they won’t be 3D printing it.

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Polaris Dawn, And The Prudence Of A Short Spacewalk

October 3, 2024 by Tom Nardi 39 Comments

For months before liftoff, the popular press had been hyping up the fact that the Polaris Dawn mission would include the first-ever private spacewalk. Not only would this be the first time anyone who wasn’t a professional astronaut would be opening the hatch of their spacecraft and venturing outside, but it would also be the first real-world test of SpaceX’s own extravehicular activity (EVA) suits. Whether you considered it a billionaire’s publicity stunt or an important step forward for commercial spaceflight, one thing was undeniable: when that hatch opened, it was going to be a moment for the history books.

But if you happened to have been watching the live stream of the big event earlier this month, you’d be forgiven for finding the whole thing a bit…abrupt. After years of training and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, crew members Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis both spent less than eight minutes outside of the Dragon capsule. Even then, you could argue that calling it a spacewalk would be a bit of a stretch.

Neither crew member ever fully exited the spacecraft, they simply stuck their upper bodies out into space while keeping their legs within the hatch at all times. When it was all said and done, the Dragon’s hatch was locked up tight less than half an hour after it was opened.

Likely, many armchair astronauts watching at home found the whole thing rather anticlimactic. But those who know a bit about the history of human spaceflight probably found themselves unable to move off of the edge of their seat until that hatch locked into place and all crew members were back in their seats.

Flying into space is already one of the most mindbogglingly dangerous activities a human could engage in, but opening the hatch and floating out into the infinite black once you’re out there is even riskier still. Thankfully the Polaris Dawn EVA appeared to go off without a hitch, but not everyone has been so lucky on their first trip outside the capsule.

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Japan’s First Commercial Rocket Debuts With A Bang

March 27, 2024 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Though it suffered through decades of naysayers, these days you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would still argue that the commercialization of space has been anything but a resounding success for the United States. SpaceX has completely disrupted what was a stagnant industry — of the 108 US rocket launches in 2023, 98 of them were performed by the Falcon 9. Even the smaller players, such as Rocket Lab and Blue Origin, are innovating and bringing new technologies to market at a rate which the legacy aerospace companies haven’t been able to achieve since the Space Race.

So it’s no surprise that other countries are looking to replicate that success. Japan in particular has been following NASA’s playbook by offering lucrative space contracts to major domestic tech companies such as Mitsubishi, Honda, NEC, Toyota, Canon, Kyocera, and Sumitomo. Over the last several years this has resulted in the development of a number spacecraft and missions, such as the Hakuto-R Moon lander. It’s also laid the groundwork for exciting future projects, like the crewed lunar rover Toyota and Honda are jointly developing for the Artemis program.

But so far there’s been a crucial element missing from Japan’s commercial space aspirations, an orbital booster rocket. While the country has state-funded launch vehicles such as the H-IIA and H3 rockets, they come with the usual bureaucracy one would expect from a government program. In comparison, a privately developed and operated booster holds the promise of reduced costs and a higher launch cadence, especially if there are multiple competing vehicles on the market.

With the recent test flight of Space One’s KAIROS rocket, that final piece of the puzzle may finally be falling into place. While the launch unfortunately failed shortly after liftoff, the fact that the private rocket was able to get off the ground — literally and figuratively — is a promising sign of what’s to come.

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Crippled Peregrine Lander To Make Fiery Return Home

January 18, 2024 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Within a few hours of this post going live, Astrobotic’s Peregrine spacecraft is expected to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere — a disappointing end to a mission that was supposed to put the first US lander on the Moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.

In their twentieth mission update since Peregrine was carried into space on the inaugural flight of the United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket, Astrobotic explains that the craft has been put on a trajectory designed to ensure it breaks up over a remote area of the South Pacific.

Predicted re-renty point for the *Peregrine* lander.

It was previously hoped the lander, which suffered a severe system malfunction just hours after liftoff, could have at least made a close pass of the Moon in lieu of touching down. But mission controllers felt the more responsible approach was to have Peregrine make a controlled re-entry while they still had the ability to maneuver it. The alternative, allowing the craft to remain in an uncontrolled orbit between the Earth and Moon, could potentially have caused problems for future Artemis missions.

Over the last ten days, ground controllers at Astrobotic have been working to piece together what happened to the doomed lander, while at the same time demonstrating a remarkable level of transparency by keeping the public informed along the way. It’s now believed that the stream of gas being expelled from a rupture in one of the craft’s propellant tanks was acting as a sort of impromptu thruster. This not only made the craft difficult to keep oriented, but also wasted the propellants that were necessary to perform a soft landing on the lunar surface.

Although the craft was eventually brought under control, the damage to the mission had already been done. While this obviously isn’t the ending that Astrobotic was hoping for, we have no doubt that the company collected valuable data during the craft’s flight through space, which took it approximately 390,000 kilometers (242,000 miles) from Earth.

As for us space nerds, we won’t have to wait long before another lunar lander makes its attempt. Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) should be touching down at around 10 AM Eastern on Friday (YouTube Live Stream), and the Nova-C lander from Intuitive Machines is scheduled to be launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket sometime next month.

Democratizing Space, One Picosatellite At A Time

June 28, 2023 by Tom Nardi 50 Comments

There was a time when putting an object into low Earth orbit was the absolute pinnacle of human achievement. It was such an outrageously expensive and complex undertaking that only a world superpower was capable of it, and even then, success wasn’t guaranteed. As the unforgiving physics involved are a constant, and the number of entities that could build space-capable vehicles remained low, this situation remained largely the same for the remainder of the 20th century.

But over the last couple of decades, the needle has finally started to move. Of course spaceflight is still just as unforgiving today as it was when Sputnik first streaked through the sky in 1957, but the vast technical improvements that have been made since then means space is increasingly becoming a public resource.

Thanks to increased commercial competition, putting a payload into orbit now costs a fraction of what it did even ten years ago, while at the same time, the general miniaturization of electronic components has dramatically changed what can be accomplished in even a meager amount of mass. The end result are launches that don’t just carry one or two large satellites into orbit, but dozens of small ones simultaneously.

To find out more about this brave new world of space exploration, we invited Nathaniel Evry, Chief Research Officer at Quub, to host last week’s DIY Picosatellites Hack Chat.

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Bankruptcy Sale Scatters Virgin Orbit To The Winds

May 25, 2023 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

When Virgin Orbit filed for bankruptcy in April, it was clear the commercial launch provider was in serious trouble. Despite successfully putting four payloads into low Earth orbit, the spin-off of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism company had struggled to achieve a high enough launch cadence to become profitable, and had recently suffered a highly-publicized failure when their first launch from the UK from the newly-completed Spaceport Cornwall ended in a complete loss of the vehicle.

There was some hope that a buyer would swoop in and save them at the last minute, but now that the bankruptcy auction has spread out the company’s assets among several other players in the commercial launch industry, Virgin Orbital is officially no more. With future launches now off the table, the company’s remaining employees are set to be let go as operations wind down over the coming weeks.

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Virgin Orbit Pauses Operations, Seeks Funding

March 17, 2023 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

It looks as though things may have gone from bad to worse at Virgin Orbit, the satellite carrying spin-off of Richard Branson’s space tourism company Virgin Galactic. After a disappointing launch failure earlier in the year, CNBC is now reporting the company will halt operations and furlough most employees for at least a week as it seeks new funding.

It’s no secret that company has struggled to find its footing since it was formed in 2017. On paper, it was an obvious venture — Virgin Galactic already had the White Knight Two carrier aircraft and put plenty of R&D into air-launched rockets, it would simply be a matter of swapping the crewed SpaceShipTwo vehicle for the LauncherOne orbital booster. But upgrades to the rocket eventually made it too large for the existing carrier aircraft, so the company instead purchased a Boeing 747 and modified it to lift their two-stage rocket out of the thick lower atmosphere. Continue reading “Virgin Orbit Pauses Operations, Seeks Funding” →