3D Printed Rockets are Genius, Here's Why (Relativity Space)

this is a Stargate it's located at NASA's stennis Space Center and while this particular Stargate may not be an Interstellar portal to distant galaxies it is still a very impressive machine that can 3D print spaceships more specifically this giant 3D printer is being used right now to manufacture components for a brand new reusable rocket that will help the world to industrialize low earth orbit and eventually even colonize the planet Mars and we're not even talking about SpaceX this time this is relativity space and their 3D printed rocket the Teran R relativity space is a relatively small company with some very large Ambitions they've obviously made a good first impression on on NASA with the agency granting them nearly 300 acres of rental property at the agency stennis Space Center the largest rocket engine testing facility in the United States NASA has further supported relativity by supplying them with a coveted orbital Launchpad at the cape canaval space force station launch complex 16 is located just north of the SpaceX Landing Zone at the cape and just a little further down is blue Origins Florida headquarters at launch complex 36 these three are the only private companies so far to have been granted their own Launchpad at America's largest Spaceport to understand the overarching goals of Relativity space we look no further than their company logo at first glance it's just a RoR shock inspired abstract triangle that forms the v in their name but if we look a little deeper here the bottom dot represents our current home on the Earth moving up one row we see Humanity's first contact with a second planet Mars in the third level Earth and Mars have become separate entities but are still deeply interlined and by the fourth level we see a future where Humanity has two distinct and self-sufficient homes in the solar system that probably sounds familiar because it's the same stuff that Elon Musk is always talking about but while SpaceX is taking a Brute Force approach to colonizing Mars AKA Starship relativity has a broader and more nuanced range the company was founded in 2015 by current CEO Tim Ellis if he looks young that's because he is Tim was 25 years old when he started relativity Ellis went directly from his studies in aerospace engineering at the University of Southern California to his first job at Blue origin in 2014 after less than 2 years of working in the industry Ellis decided to set out on his own and founded relativity with college buddy Jordan noon the pair secured their first half a million dollars in funding by literally cold emailing markk cubin and asking him for money does anyone know Mark Cuban's email address from there the relativity Duo went straight into the Silicon Valley startup accelerator known as Y combinator in 2016 and came out ready to changed the Aerospace industry forever the primary ambition at relativity space has always been to introduce largescale 3D printing to the world of orbital rocket manufacturing of course 3D printing has been used by aerospace companies for years already this was Tim's job at Blue origin 3D printing engine components but no one had ever made an honest attempt at 3D printing the whole rocket from the ground up in theory you could have a fully autonomous rocket making machine where the entire spacecraft would simply Rise Up from The Ether fully formed and ready to fly and this is what that rocket was imagined to be the Teran R it's a very large and very shiny two-stage fully reusable methane fuel burning heavy lift vehicle that would be designed specifically to deploy Next Generation satellites and serve as a multiplanetary transport again that probably sounds familiar tanar was imagined to be much smaller than Starship at just 5 m in diameter and 66 M tall with significantly less thrust but at the same time Tran R looks even more exotic and futuristic than Starship it's smooth and curvy in a way that no other rocket has ever looked before this is where the advantages of 3D printing come into play instead of in of welding big straight sheets of aluminum or steel together to create a fuselage the relativity printer will build up an entire rocket stage line by line providing infinitely more freedom to shape the rocket in just about any way the designers can imagine free from the constraints of straight lines now we should note that this idea did not end up panning out the way that relativity first imagined their Teran our concept and that's fine it's not unusual for a startup company to have Ambitions that far exceed their abilities but the fundamentals that the company was built on have remained strong throughout strong enough for NASA to make a big bet on relativity a bet that would pay off when the company eventually went on to launch the world's first 3D printed rocket into space before we go there though let's establish some reasons why 3D printing is an advantage when it comes to building spaceships now one very obvious reason would be the Simplicity and autonomy of the manufacturing process we are going to keep using Starship as a comparison here just because it's very familiar to most people and SpaceX doesn't hold back any secrets about how they build their Rockets so we know what their process looks like SpaceX receives giant rolls of stainless steel which they then have to cut into sheets and then weld into rings three or four of those rings are stacked on top of each other and welded together into to a rocket section then the sections are moved to a high Bay where they get stacked again and welded together then on the inside of the body vertically stiffening rails are welded along the length of the rocket for additional strength for the curved pieces of Starship like the domes that separate fuel tanks and the nose cone SpaceX needs to get specially stamped and stretch formed pieces of stainless steel and then those all need to be welded together to form the Dome and then welded onto the main body of the rocket this all requires a lot of people to accomplish the workers are assisted by machines but if the people disappeared the process would grind to a halt now here is the way that relativity builds a rocket the company has their special aluminum printing alloy rendered into long coils of wire and that wire is fed into a robotic articulated print head the rocket segment is constructed on a rotating turntable style platform so as the print head lays down the material the part can continuously spins around and around and around slowly and steadily growing larger with every rotation this machine can make the straight sides the curves the domes all in one process without having to move around or be retooled 3D printing can even make this insane looking 3D part for Tran r that was being printed in this video clip it's some kind of a dome section with an intricate pattern of wavy ripples throughout I don't know what it does but it's definitely unlike anything I've ever seen go into a Starship I don't think SpaceX could physically make a part like this using their current materials and production methods so we've seen that 3D printing is a very unique and potentially gamechanging method to build a rocket but is it actually effective we know that the future lies in outer space where startup companies like axium space are leading the way by designing new orbital habitats and lunar exploration suits we also know that everyday people like you and I are being left out of the Space Race because we are not astronauts or rocket scientists but I found a way for us to get in on the action here's the deal space exploration startups like axium Quantum space and estanis space are not publicly traded companies they do still have investors though and access to these companies is only given to wealthy insiders like venture capitalists and private Equity firms but not anymore link to is a platform that removes barriers to investing in the future of space exploration giving you the opportunity to get in early on companies like axium space NASA's biggest partner in the next decade of interstellar Innovation so if you're interested in investing in the future of space consider starting your private Equity portfolio today using the link in the description below or the QR code on the screen by using the code space race 500 at checkout you will also receive a $500 discount on your first investment this is a limited promotion so thank you to link to for sponsoring today's video something that's held true across all of these new startup rocket companies is the strategy to begin with a small rocket and then move on to a bigger rocket this is what SpaceX did with the Falcon 1 before they upgraded to Falcon 9 and then to Falcon heavy and then to Starship blue origin is doing it with new Shephard before new Glenn rocket lab is doing electron before they size up to Neutron and relativity is no different so before there could be Teran R there was Teran 1 the world's first 3D printed rocket or mostly 3D printed the company claims that 90% of Tran 1 by mass consisted of 3D printed components which includes the eon1 engines which are just a scaled down version of the methane fueled rocket engine that would be used for Teran R the main purpose for Tan 1 was to provide answers to some very important questions about the design concept mainly whether or not a 3D printed rocket could withstand the intense pressure of an orbital launch there was only really one way to find out and on March 23rd 2023 we learned the answer kind of it's complicated so the Teran one took off from launch complex 16 flawlessly and it continued to accelerate straight through a period known as Max Q This is the peak of mechanical stress on the body of the rocket because the rocket will continue to accelerate as it rises up it will eventually get to an altitude where the air pressure dissipates and there is minimal resistance but before reaching that altitude the vehicle will be traveling at supersonic speed and carrying a tremendous amount of physical resistance from the molecules in the atmosphere this was the most likely time for the Tran one to falter but it held true and the rocket continued all the way to Stage separation and crossed the Carmen line that marks the boundary between Earth and outer space being in space is not the same thing as being in orbit so from here the second stage of the vehicle needs to ignite a vacuum optimized engine and continue accelerating to orbital velocity this is where things went wrong for Teran 1 that second stage engine failed to ignite properly it sputtered a few times but never reached stable combustion as a result the second stage was no longer able to fight against gravity and plummeted back to splash down in the ocean so Teran 1 accomplished two historic goals that night one it became the first 3D printed vehicle to reach space and it also became the first methane powered rocket to reach space but it did not achieve the overall mission objective which was to deploy a mock payload into low earth orbit it was still pretty far away from that one and that is also pretty normal for a first launch by a new company it's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of then in a relatively unusual step relativity proudly declared that their partially failed First Flight attempt was still successful enough to consider the Teran One mission accomplished and move directly into de development of the Teran R now this is the point where a lot of people get hung up and fair enough but if SpaceX can launch a Starship that ends up spinning wildly out of control for like a minute before exploding it in midair and spewing concrete debris for miles around and then Elon Musk can call that a success and people buy it then I'm pretty sure Tim Ellis should be able to call Tan One a success with total impunity I'm just saying with the new pivot to Tran R development came a refresh to the vehicle design unfortunately it was now looking a lot more like a conventional rocket and much less like Queen amadala Royal Starship and relativity has officially given up on the promise of a fully reusable second stage but there is a lot of good stuff about the new Tran R it's now bigger at 88 m in length and much more powerful with 13on r engines producing over 3.3 million pounds of thrust that gives the Teran R enough muscle to put 232 metric tons of payload into low earth orbit while still recovering their first stage booster with a propulsive ocean platform Landing this would be significantly more capable than Falcon 9 which tops out at just under 16 tons of payload to low earth orbit in a reusable configuration Teran R has a few modern upgrades over Falcon 9 that make it a better reusable rocket as well one being the new fuel source liquid methane Falcon 9 Burns rp1 fuel which is just refined kerosene It's very effective but also contains a lot of longchain hydrocarbons that don't fully vaporize when burnt so they're going to leave behind a lot of solid carbon residue inside the rocket engine which you might call soot but rocket Engineers call coking either way the residue needs to be removed from the inside of the engine before it can build up enough to cause trouble methane on the other hand does not do that it's primarily hydrogen with just a little bit of carbon so most of the exhaust is just going to be water vapor and that means the Eon engines won't need any deep cleaning in between flights making them faster and cheaper to reuse in addition the 3D printed body design of the Teran R includes some special aerodynamics better stability and control when re-entering the atmosphere these are called Arrow strikes and they are down at the base of the rocket booster pretty similar to the long triangular fins at the bottom of the latest Starship boosters these allow the rocket to come back down at a high angle of attack meaning closer to a belly flop than straight up and down this is going to create more aerodynamic drag with the body of the rocket and that will in turn reduce the amount of fuel necessary to slow it down for landing so in theory this should be one hell of a rocket and that's not the only new invention that relativity is working on at stennis space not only is relativity space pushing forward on new rocket designs they are also Reinventing the 3D printing process to meet their goals with Tran R enter the Stargate that's just a fancy name for a new kind of printing machine but it does kind of look like sci-fi Stargate the big innovation here is that the fourth generation Stargate Works horizontally check this out in the first few examples we showed you earlier the Teran one rocket SE were being printed vertically and that's fine for a small rocket but it does mean that the maximum height of your vehicle is limited by the heights of your factory ceiling and most factories are much wider than they are tall so the most logical way to 3D print a very long object like an 80 M rocket is going to be to do it sideways relativity says that the Stargate feeds multiple wires of aluminum alloy into a single print head and by using their own C customized software the machine can print more complex and significantly larger metal components with faster print speed and improved reliability of their old vertical machines with their upgraded Factory online relativity is confident that they can bring the first Teran R vehicle to the Launchpad in 2026 and they want to follow that up with a fast ramp up to 50 launches in the next year and then 100 launches per year or more essentially matching the Cadence of the current Falcon 9 which is the world's most used rocket by a very wide margin oh and we haven't even gotten to relativity's plan for building out their 3D printed infrastructure on the planet Mars we'll just have to save that for another day

Channel: The Space Race

Views: 92,445

Keywords: nasa, relativity, 3d printed rocket, terran r, terran 1, relativity space, tim ellis, nasa rocket

Id: zYl3gjP3UTE

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2024